I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.
The point is that "federating" with a remote instance means accepting posts from users on that instance that you have no control over. If "host" is a rogue instance that's sending spam all over the place, it makes sense that other parts of the network will defederate from it. It's still a global namespace, users are just limited in where they can post if they are on an untrusted instance.
The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable.
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?
On a service like Reddit a user can simply visit or join subreddits they are interested in, and ignore subreddits they are not interested, or which they find offensive.
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.)
> they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups
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.
Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?
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?
I don't, but I don't want to see it either or allow them to see my stuff since I'm extremely anti-nazi and anti-fascist and don't them to come trolling me. Nor do I want them using my resources to try and bring young impressionable people into their fold.
> Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts
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.
That wasn't what I was asking though – I was asking whether a user should care. Why should I care who else uses my email provider, if I never interact with them?
> You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example.
Gmail will only ban you for "especially egregious things". The Mastodon Server Covenant clause 1 calls for banning people for things which Gmail would not consider "especially egregious". A big difference.
> Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare
I don't consider who a CDN's other customers might be when deciding which CDN to use. I'm sure many CDNs provide services to websites advocating viewpoints which I view as foolish, even reprehensible–but I don't see what relevance that has to my own decision as to which CDN I should use for my own site.
> Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits
I think that kind of behaviour is toxic, and I would never knowingly participate in any subreddit that did that. But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.
> But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.
Instance == Community. The rest of your post I've already addressed and I'm not going to go over again. You calling out the Mastodon Server Covenant does not particularly make sense because it's not an authority, it's a listing of servers. Again you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works given that you keep using incorrect comparisons.
A whole instance is not necessarily a single community.
People keep on defending Mastodon by comparing it to email – an email provider is not necessarily a community.
If we are talking about a federated Reddit-clone (Mastodon is more a federated Twitter-clone) – the communities are the subreddits (or whatever the clone chooses to call them) not the instances.
An instance is a community, period. This is like trying to argue that subforums on a forum is not a single community. They may be smaller blocks within a larger community, but they still form a larger community as a whole and adhere to a generalized ruleset.
You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop. Simple as that. Ctrl-F this thread and every response that has to do with email starts with you. I've explicitly compared it to IRC and forums.
Your last point is incorrect. Beehaw is a reddit alternative. They defederated from other instances because other instances had free registeration, which was resulting in users from that instance trolling and doing low quality posts in their community (according to them). They can do this because the instance is the community.
This is not the previous discussion, nor am I one of the previous users from a previous discussion made over two months ago. I do not care what other people have argued about and am not making their argument.
>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?
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."
