After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I’m not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don’t like, particularly instance blocking.
On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don’t like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I’m beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to “onboard journalists”, without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.
I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it’s advisable to block all instances that aren’t on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution – perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven’t read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?
Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:
Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.
In practice, it’s very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.
In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we’re arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we’re chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour – but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group – say, the US Republican Party.
Although it’s very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don’t want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.
I’m not going to change the world, but I’m in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.
What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don’t have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.
Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don’t publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won’t take that advice.