> It was born as 'FaceSmash', a platform created for male students to rate the attractiveness of female students. Things have not improved from those early days: Meta's various platforms, notably Facebook, have been implicated in ethnic cleansing, failing to handle hate speech, allowing Troll Farms, and subverting democracy in the USA, the UK, and India. Recently, it has run ads for anti-LGBTQ organisations and hosted neo-Nazi shopfronts.

Knowing nothing, I was guessing that the Fediverse would be relatively anti-censorship on the free speech spectrum.

Apparently, just the opposite.

That's my core issue with the Fediverse as well. I wish people would focus on making it easy to subscribe to shared block lists of individual users instead of focusing on defederation that much.

A lot of it is way too focused on making their instances safe spaces for everyone by creating the illusion that the Internet isn't a representation of societal behavior. Instead of blocking misbehaving (like those who dogpile, doxxx, whatever) users, many instance admins often block/defederate entire instances if they don't comply with the same strict rules. Users using #fediblock to point out individual users and their posts on instances are often requesting full defederation if admins/mods don't comply with banning users.

I love the idea of the Fediverse but the matrix (not meant in an "we're all in the Matrix!!" way) of people who get to decide whom I can follow and interact with is quite chaotic.

One of my accounts is on a german instance that even defederated single user instances because the admins simply don't like the the user. It's madness.

I know abuse is a problem, especially for people who often get targetted for harassment. I don't want to play that down. But isn't there a better way to handle this? I wish the Fediverse would be in a state where this could be debated with more nuance instead of calling anyone who is critical of the rather strict policing going on.