I don't want 10 user accounts in 10 places to access the stuff I want to access.
I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc.
Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?
The way the Fediverse works, as it is explained to newcomers, is that you can follow any topic on any server regardless of which server you are one. The expectation is that the graph is complete. When the graph is not complete, suddenly you can't follow your favorite topic because some users talking about a different topic did something that the admin on the other server isn't happy with. The whole server gets disconnected. Whichever server you choose to join, you always have the risk of getting defederated for things you have nothing to do with. Yes, you can change to a different server, but changing servers is not nearly as frictionless as it's sometimes made out to be.
In Usenet, to name another decentralized service, this is completely different. Servers can decide to carry or not carry a newsgroup, but they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups. (That's not to say that Usenet doesn't have problems of its own.)
Back in the dark ages when I was running a Usenet site, we would definitely drop servers if they were more hassle (spamming, providing blocked material, etc.) than we wanted to deal with.
Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track.
> Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?
Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider.
> Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.
A closer analogy here is that your city councilman doesn't want to go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, and so he orders all the roads to the churches and the bars demolished, and also the roads to all the houses of the people who go to the churches or Nazi bars.
"After all," he says, "they can still build their own network of roads if they want. We're just not going to allow anyone in our community to use our network of roads to get there."
If you don't kick Nazis out of your bar, they will infiltrate it, run everyone who isn't a Nazi out and then you're running a Nazi bar yourself.
