Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

blog.joinmastodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#41

Post by sneak »

Kye wrote: post #35
sneak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human decency involves not telling other adults what they are allowed to peaceably publish or read. I find imposing censorship on others a denial of their basic rights to free expression, and is itself an indecent act.

>> "Human decency involves not telling other adults what they are allowed to peaceably publish or read." So you agree the Mastodon project should be able to decide not to publish certain instances in the list it maintains. Cool. Freedom is not meaningful without the freedom to not do something. If they're compelled to publish things they don't agree with, then they don't really have free speech.

Yes, I do. I also believe in my right to criticize them for appointing themselves censors.

This need to paternalistically protect other adults from online content "for their own good" is authoritarian and rude and I hope it goes out of fashion right soon.

It's extra bothersome when instance admins (unrelated to the mastodon project) decide for their users what they should be allowed to read.

Imagine if your email service decided you couldn't send or receive email to certain domains they decided were "bad people".

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#42

Post by swiley »

southerntofu wrote: post #18

Related discussion: there was recently some move within the community to try and topple the current maintainer. That calls was based on technical/UX disagreements (regarding the local timeline) and on the maintainer allegedly having connection to a surveillance project called Eunomia: https://seedy.xyz/posts/0005-open-letter/ I am not a member of the Mastodon community and i have no clue to the veracity of these stat…

>currently

I've been on and off Mastodon since 2016 and there is always tumblr-style drama about how Eugen is a dictator for not doing with everyone's instance.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#44

Post by q3k »

southerntofu wrote: post #32
user-the-name wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can not see a single thing on there that would raise any eyebrows.

> determine whether information they come across online is trustworthy or not Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? Is it a central authority, or a WoT? The former is a very dangerous tool of social control, the latter does not usually address concerns of misinformation, as the WoT forms information bubbles with their confirmation biases. > the project will allow users to vote on content trustworthiness.…

> Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not?

> How are these votes stored?

From what I can tell, this is literally a research project attempting to answer these questions. Look at the results tab, then under 'Demonstrators, pilots, prototypes' to see what they have come up with so far.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#45

Post by sneak »

swiley wrote: post #40
sneak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human decency involves not telling other adults what they are allowed to peaceably publish or read. I find imposing censorship on others a denial of their basic rights to free expression, and is itself an indecent act.

You'll note quoto.org is at the top of the technology oriented instance list. I know the admin to some degree (he followed me almost immediately after I joined) and while he won't tolerate you using his instance to harass people he's vocally tolerant of good faith arguments in favor of unpopular ideas and won't prevent you from following any account publishing legal content. While free speech is not a goal of Mastodo…

That's nice to hear. A lot of instance admins will defederate other instances based only on rumor or suspicion of wrongthink, preventing all of their users from following accounts on those instances even if they want to. This has happened to my single user instance simply based on my political beliefs (primarily the right to free peaceful expression, you'd think that would be less controversial), not any content actually posted.

It's a big problem in the fediverse, because one has to be a little bit of an activist in the first place to exit twitter, and these days popular activism and censorship overlap a lot.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#47

Post by proactivesvcs »

Glad to see this important step in securing the future of software that is more than just code.

Having been a member of the Fosstodon instance https://www.fosstodon.org/ for six months I expect that many HNers may find it an interesting and engaging instance. It's centred around free/open source software and similar services and is fully of friendly, witty and knowledgeable folk.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#48

Post by swiley »

sneak wrote: post #45
swiley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll note quoto.org is at the top of the technology oriented instance list. I know the admin to some degree (he followed me almost immediately after I joined) and while he won't tolerate you using his instance to harass people he's vocally tolerant of good faith arguments in favor of unpopular ideas and won't prevent you from following any account publishing legal content. While free speech is not a goal of Mastodo…

That's nice to hear. A lot of instance admins will defederate other instances based only on rumor or suspicion of wrongthink, preventing all of their users from following accounts on those instances even if they want to. This has happened to my single user instance simply based on my political beliefs (primarily the right to free peaceful expression, you'd think that would be less controversial), not any content actu…

I remember seeing a defederation list a while ago that was supposedly for "alt-right/nazi" instances.

It of course contained qoto and fosstodon due to their being pro free speech.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#49

Post by JadeNB »

Kaze404 wrote: post #33
nsizx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, actually. Once you restrict what others can say there's no freedom of speech anymore. It's like China saying you can't talk about the regime - I'm sure they consider that "basic human decency" as well.

Freedom of speech isn't freedom to be a bigot. You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to listen.

> Freedom of speech isn't freedom to be a bigot. You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to listen.

To be clear, it is freedom to be a bigot, or at least to say bigoted things, just not freedom to have anyone else listen to those things (or, as hopefully goes without saying, for any action based on those bigoted things that goes beyond words).

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#50

Post by wizzwizz4 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #38
user-the-name wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will find that a lot of people crying about free speech do not place much value on basic human decency.

You are correct - as a person who cares deeply about free speech, I certainly place less value on basic decency. To my mind, the correct response to violations of decency is giving people strong tools to screen and filter out content they don't like. The wrong response is centralized enforcement. Inasmuch as centralized enforcement would be better at enforcing "basic decency", I will confirm that I place its priority…

Then you'll like the Fediverse, then. (Though the tools aren't particularly good, yet… perhaps you could help?)
Post reply on HN