People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.
But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.
Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.
At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.
The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.
By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1
That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
On this Lemmy thing I guess the solution is to just maintain multiple accounts - each on a server connected to a particular cluster of servers.
Almost no one runs a personal instance. Most people have accounts on multi user instances. This is unlike reddit, where accounts are global and independent of subreddits. On reddit, mods from subreddit B can preemptively ban you after they learn that subreddit A doesn't like you. But they can't ban entire subreddit, say C, so that every user that's subscribing to C can no longer interact with anyone subscribed to B. This is the scenario that plagues Mastodon - not individual blocks, but defederating whole instances.
I've been avoiding Reddit recently, but when I used to use it – I never agreed with that kind of behaviour, and any subreddit which does it is one I don't want to be part of.
However, that said, that's community-level not instance-level, and so I'm not sure what that has to do with federation.
There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.
Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.
If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.
Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.
It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.
