In reply to Chronocide: "@khurtwilliams@islandinthenet.com As someone who'…" – Mastodon.

Basically a wide swath of people that left mainstream social media due to being harassed and bullied, have cultivated an “alternate social media network” out of Mastodon. They don’t want the Fediverse to turn into Facebook basically, so a lot of the instances they’re on have chosen not to federate with Threads before it happens.

Nevermind the fact that anyone that disagreed with this stance but has their account on their server, now must move to find one that works. (This is the reason I use my blog as an instance; I can follow/block whatever I want.)

https://starrwulfe.xyz/b/2v1E

@tokyo_0 you Not sure if you’re being cynical towards me or not, but I’ve been here in the fediverse since 2017, starting with my own Hubzilla instance on a VPS, so I have a bit of experience. This whole “choose an instance” design needs to be updated since we’re no longer accommodating other gearheads like myself; this is the reason why “twitter refugees” and the like who just want to find a space to continue to microblog get flabbergasted with Mastodon and the like here in the #fediverse. It’s a pain point and not easily understood.

I have several accounts and have my own instances even, including this one which is actually running WordPress as an #ActivityPub actor. I moved my main Mastodon instance from mastodon.cloud to vivaldi.net due to the whole preemptive Threads.net block.
My complaint here is I was on an instance that I was happy with for 6 years until this. I shouldn’t be made to uproot my entire online presence without some sort of due diligence like that. I’m a very technical person, and I was already prepping to change anyway due to other factors before Threads was even a thing, but most people are not and I could imagine scenarios where a layperson trying to follow their friend suddenly can’t because they’re blocked. Moving instances is NOT easy. You have to set up a “forwarding” notice in the place you’re moving from, and also a “masquerading as” notice in the place you’re moving to for a while. Then depend on your followers to get the message and move accordingly…or wind up dropping you. Then at some point, go back to the old instance and shut everything down. It’s a big friction point that should be improved on (which is happening actually) and should only be used as a last resort by most.

In this case, why not leave it in the hands of the users and let them set their own blocking/muting/visibility settings? Bluesky actually has a distinct advantage here with subscription based stackable moderation tools and I wish such a paradigm could make it as an ActivityPub FEP. However, the devs working on Friendica, the Misskey forks, and some of the newer Fediverse servers have incorporated their own strong and easy to understand granular blocking settings too, so all isn’t lost.

However it’s really all up to the owner of the instance to implement and monitor this all, and no availability of better filtering tools will account for a tyrannical instance admin who doesn’t do their due diligence in talking to their users about a strategy that will help everyone on it.

That’s just it– In my case, there was 0 communication. Bans just pop up on the “moderated servers list” and any attempt to communicate to the admins goes to /dev/null and zilch. If they did nothing and just left things federate across, I have no problem muting, blocking, etc on my own. I prefer it that way. The internet is a public space and sometimes you drive through the ghetto to get to the good part of town. But don’t just wall off parts of the city without saying anything. And that kind of power being wielded in such a manner is tantamount to censorship. I vehemently oppose censorship in all its ugly forms.

@tokyo_0
There’s FEP-ef61: Portable Objects being looked at to evaluate just that actually.

I for one would like to figure out a way to combine the strengths of all protocols into the fedi myself…

@tokyo_0
From what I know about @mikedev, portable identity is his Holy Grail. Especially since there’s an FEP for it now, he’s actively working on it and posts about it from time to time. Maybe you might consider working with him on the project since it aligns with your goals as well?
How it was initially written as you outlined earlier, would seem to create a mini-DDOS situation with multiple instances trying to “win a posting race” if that’s how it was designed. There’s likely more to it than what my imagination is conjuring up I’m sure. I’ll follow Mike’s feed and monitor the development. Hopefully it’s something that will catch on and can be incorporated upstream in the next year once developed.