I've been on #Mastodon a while. But one thing still seems weird to me: Having to ask permission to follow so many accounts, some of them public-facing organizations. It seems a bit much.
My view: if put myself on Mastodon, I"m here to be followed. If you don't like me, don't follow me. If you do something I don't like, I'll unfollow you. Do something really bad, I'll block you.
But let's not assume the worst at the start. Permission to follow me: Pre-approved!
@philbaker1 I think it's because fosstodon.org got a mute on Fediblock. I now have to manually approve every follower from fosstodon.org even though my account itself is completely open to follow.
@sesivany Ahh, that makes sense. I just wonder how may people coming here from Twitter react to the increased friction without ever knowing why it's there. How many know what Fediblock is? Heck, I don't even know, and I've been here for 4 years.
@philbaker1 I'm really getting tired of it. The most frustrating part is that it's not transparent. I lost a couple of friends who were on an instance which (as we suspect) got blocked completely because the admin had some edgy posts. BTW my instance has Mastodon.social on mute now. I have had to manually approve dozens of follow requests, their posts don't show up automatically for me. I'm really considering to run my own instance not to deal with these moderation wars.
I've hypothesized quite a few ways in which it might happen.
There might be one or two trolls, or abrasive personalities, and an admin might take the nuclear option to that.
Also, admins have a tendency of blocking out remote users (rather than taking less intrusive measures) over mere disagreements, or responses to one of their own users engaging in trolling type activities.
As always, these decisions are non-transparent, there is no discourse, and it is up to you to "figure it out".
Some users might talk crap and might rub someone the wrong way.
Petty beefs between admins.
This happened on the one I'm on. Another admin started a fight with my admin over how to best do fediverse governance. The instance blocks went flying.
There are other examples of admins getting in fights with other admins, sometimes because one talked crap about another, and blocking entire instances.
I saw rhetoric around Fosstodon not wanting to moderate posts in non-English languages and people calling to block it because they see it as colonialism.
As far as I'm concerned, blocking instances is supposed to be a last resort in an extreme scenario.
What we instead see is a home owner's association policing each other over petty things.
In a few cases, federating with a "bad instance", even if it's to ensure the fediverse doesn't unnecessarily get fragmented.
Concern troll instances which jump into sub-cultures associated with nudity and instate no nudity policies.
I've noticed a great schism between a free speech crowd and a more moderated crowd, and a tendency towards polarization in content moderation policy.
If an instance is blocked in some way, expect fun scenarios where you can see part of the conversation and not others. This isn't immediately obvious either.
It gets worse when you think of how complex visibility can be to different people in a conversation.
Traditionally, the solution to this would be to have something like five or eight accounts.
Sometimes, an admin will block an instance which contains adult content which doesn't have a NSFW label, instead of setting it up to automatically add that to all media (if it's that important to them), or to block media from rendering.
There are also diverging opinions about what even constitutes NSFW content.
Different philosophies in what kinds of content are permissible. In theory, you could slice this up a hundred which ways, everyone has different ideas of what speech is permissible.
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