dnick

Seems like they might not want to say, but the overall point is that it seems like they don’t have to. If that is bothersome to you, you may want to move to a different instance, warn people about the fact that this can be done without explanation or any number of things that you can do for you, but simply calling them out over and over doesn’t seem terribly productive.

Edit: What I mean to say it’s that you seem to be complaining about the fact that they can defederate without explaining themselves, but instead of saying that you seem to be passive-aggressively just posting an observation insinuating that that is the problem. Not every post is going to be a direct explanation of why they did a thing and picking one post and complaining that there aren’t other posts with the answer you want is poor conversational skills.

Maybe the disconnect is what is meant by open market. You might actually be complaining that people have too much choice and are free to start an instance, using their own resources and choose to disassociate from some others users. If someone sets up a roadside stand and lets their friends sell things there but refuses to let a friend of a friend sell his swastika stickers there, that isn’t censorship if the guy is allowed to open his open stand. It’s just not being overly helpful. If no one wants to go to swastika guy’s stand, and everyone makes fun of him, or even discourages other people from going there, that isn’t censorship either. It’s only censorship if he isn’t allowed to set up his own stand by someone in charge of that sort of thing.

What it sounds like you want isn’t a censorship-free platform, but a platform that is restricted from not choosing to give everyone the exact same voice. That may sound more fair to you, but when it costs person A money to facilitate person B’s access, and you don’t allow person A the choice to opt out of that (basically raising the bar for person A to participate), you’re actually restricting A instead of being fair to B.

In the case where person A is actually a public resource, that’s where it becomes censorship to block person B’s access, because then it’s a position of authority determining who gets to say what. But when person A is a regular guy, hog-tying him into helping person B blather about something hateful, or even just annoying, to person A is actually infringing on rights instead of promoting them.

Exactly, it’s like the argument is that letting people do what they want with their own resources and time somehow infringes on someone else’s rights. It’s almost exactly the entitlement they say they want to fight against.

If I buy a bullhorn, I’m not infringing on your rights by not letting you borrow it if you can literally go buy your own bullhorn. If you do buy your own bullhorn it’s not infringing on your rights if people tend to leave the area you’re blabbing in and gravitate towards someone else, or if they put up sound proof walls to hide behind. It’s not infringing on your rights if I don’t give you equal time on a stage I spent my own time and money setting up.

Exactly, and I think the disconnect here is that moving from the type of platform that is reddit or Twitter where those are practically bordering on being ‘public utilities’, they people don’t quite understand the concept that federation allows for everyone to exercise their own rights and preferences and that joining, or being alienated from, a group of freely associating people is different than being banned from a large centralized online platform. They don’t want the work of finding or creating their own group…or possibly more likely they just don’t understand the environment enough to realize that their complaint doesn’t have the same validity here as it did ‘over there’.

You seem to have a simply wrong understanding of freedom of speech. Just because it’s the internet, doesn’t make it a right for you to get your voice heard anywhere you want it. Just like people can walk away or plug their ears if you are shouting in a public park, they can choose not to join a group you are in online. If I set up a podcast, I’m not infringing on your rights if I don’t let you on. If I let 100 other people join whenever they want but don’t let you join, I’m not infringing on your rights, I’m exercising my own. Just because an instance becomes popular, that doesn’t magically take away the rights of the person running it to let people on or choose to, or not to, associate with some other group.

Federation is messy, and will have it’s share of bigots and power hungry users and owners, but your ‘freedom of speech’ means the government can’t limit your speech, not that everyone else has to enable it.

I do understand that it’s confusing because centralized platforms like Twitter and Reddit and Facebook have grown to the size and scope where they are nearly public utilities and have started approaching the level where freedom of speech may become a consideration(if they have a near monopoly and you are almost effectively silenced by a ban from those platforms) but federated instances are literally the opposite of that. Don’t like how an instance treats you? Join a different one or start your own. But consider each instance as a small club that can let you in or block you, that can join up with any other group that it wants… Not something that is obligated to vote on every decision, or obey the US ten commandments.

That’s not square one, since ‘my group not joining group B’ isn’t preventing anyone in world from listening to group B, it’s just not helping people to listen to group B.

It may seem like an annoying distinction, but it’s basically the entire point of federation. Admittedly it’s confusing when coming from centralized platforms where banning you or your group really did basically equate to internal censorship… But I’m the world of federation, the concept of forcing one group to directly connect with another group is the ‘violation of rights’…declining to directly connect my group to yours is not a violation of anyone’s rights.

He can do the same, but he’s not the one complaining about the furniture.

If you’re in a bar that you don’t like, it’s true that you can leave, or the people listening to you complain about the bar can leave, but it’s kind of obvious that you saying that is just your way of trying to make the bar annoying to everyone else so you can stay and make it a bar you like instead of going and finding a different one. That might be ‘a’ way to go about things, but it sure does take a persistently annoying person to make it happen. More likely you’ll just get kicked out of the bar because the bartender would rather keep the paying customers that are having fun around, rather than then bitchy ones who just won’t shut about about the decorations.

You almost certainly don’t want to read and talk to ‘everybody’…but leaving off the extreme exceptions, federated instance are more like a sewing group and a motorcycle group and a nazi group and a group of geeks talking about linux rather than a ‘platform’ reddit. The sewing group may like getting together with the nazi group and linux guys at times, but they don’t particularly care for motorcycles so joinging the sewing group and then insisting that it’s censorship if they don’t open up the line of communication to the motorcycle group that you think they should have is dumb.

If someone controlled the entire platform that all these groups are on and they blocked the motorcycle group for some reason, that is censorship, but the fact that you can just ‘join’ the motorcycle group directly, or join the nazi group or the linux geeks who both like talking to the motorcycle group demonstrates that the sewing group isn’t censoring the motorcycle group, they just aren’t interested in joining in the conversations, routing the traffic, listening to all the complaints about the motorcycle memes, etc.

Every group on platform, literally every singe one of them, can and will come up with their own rules. That’s the whole point of them being ‘federated’ instead of just ‘on the same platform’. If it’s popular to federate with any and all other groups, there will be groups that do that, join them and enjoy completely uncensored content. If some groups like it a little quieter, maybe a little less drama, maybe less porn and more academic articles, they will federate with just a few well curated other groups and people who enjoy that will join them, and it won’t infringe on your rights the teeniest, tiniest little bit. You joining one of those groups and insisting that it’s the height of communism because they ‘defederated’ with group X for a reason you didn’t feel raised to your level offense is absolutely meaningless. The fact that it happens on a ‘popular’ instance is precisely the same thing.

Honestly I think 90% of this same complain is the fact that people don’t understand the concept of decentralized platforms and feel tricked that they joined a ‘popular’ one and found out that it isn’t the one in control of everything, and that there isn’t some authority to appeal to, or one target to annoy with enough words in order to get their own way after being in the group for 3 days.

You’re not being denied access to censored material, you’re (mildly) suffering from a lack of access to some material from some locations. I could spin up an instance tomorrow that only federates with platforms that limit their discussion to expired gift cards, and that in no way reduces your access to platforms that (for some reason?) discuss other things, like ‘unexpired’ gift cards (why would anyone bother discussing those? who the hell knows?).

You seem to be confused by the popularity and open access of an instance to mean that it should or must be some democratic, freedom of speech led unmoderated landscape or it isn’t a legitimate platform and shouldn’t exist lest it ‘trick’ someone into thinking it is something it is not. You think because a forum ‘can’ federate with any other group, it ‘must’ federate with ‘all’ other groups, and that is simply not the case.

I’m really starting to like the term ‘defederate’…it’s so much more descriptive and applicable than ‘censorship’ or ‘cancelling’. Me intentionally choosing not associate with you isn’t the same as me actively trying prevent you from speaking. Me choosing a group that is choosing not to associate with you doesn’t infringe on your rights in the slightest. You whining about the fact that no one wants to listen to you is so far away from censorship that it’s almost humorous to listen to folks trying to shoe-horn it into the conversation.

By ‘you’, I obviously (I hope) mean the people whining about being ‘defederated’, not the commenter I’m replying to.