I don't really get why defederation based on stuff stated very clearly in the CoC is bad. If an instance is made explicitly to be a place where people don't want to see content from group x, who would benefit / what point would there be to federate with instances that contain people of group x?
I can see the problem if the instance starts just defederating random instances with the excuse of "they're from group x", but still, if the people on that instance are aware of the instances that are blocked, they can make their own calls on whether they want to join the defederating instance in the first place. If they do, they probably don't care that the innocent instances are defederated.
@neon I think that it basically boils down to two different vision of what a social network should be.
The first vision is the village square model (Twitter) : everybody shares a common space, things can go viral, it promotes debate, and potentially allows some abuse.
The second is the association model : you mainly interact with a limited set of people sharing similar belief. It is a very agressive filter bubble, but there is less potential for abuse (or debate).
@neon basically you could have either of the three :
- Defederation is exceptional, Mastodon is a massive network, with a few "safe space" islands which basically are outside the main network (you have a kind of twitter)
-defederation is common, and you have a subset of mutually exclusive networks, with none achieving preeminence in which case the tool is basically dead in the water, as you don't have that echo chamber that twitter can be.
@neon Or an uncomfortable intermediary where mostly disconnected patches are connected by a few servers, that become gatekeepers to other networks. It will be interesting.
@neon Mastodon allows for both models, depending on your federation policy, and I expect it will be the subject of a major debate as/if it becomes mainstream.
To the proponents of the first vision, defederation for content might be viewed as censorship, while it might be viewed as protection for proponents of the second model.
This also has some implications on the future of the app I think.