Mastodon hit 10M users

I can't speak for other people but I'm not gonna go after you or anything. It's not unreasonable or anything to see freedom as in liberty as contradictory in nature, people say the same thing about the paradox of tolerance or tragedy of the commons. It's one of those things things if you say viewing freedom from a systems perspective is invalid then its the natural conclusion.

I don't really see it as doublethink. There's plenty of examples were rules make people more free. Our whole system of laws is based on that idea.

I can drive on public roads and get where I want to quickly and safely because we all follow traffic laws. I have greater freedom to travel because there are rules.

I can mostly (well during the day at least, give it up for being a woman) walk around freely and completely defenseless because of the laws about assault, murder, and theft.

Right now we're on a forum where good discussion can be had because the mods will drop the banhammer if you start posting hate. If you know that posting anything about a controversial topic or just being a person who's identity is controversial at the moment will bring out a tidal wave of green accounts hurling insults against, you likely wouldn't post. Would you feel comfortable existing in the public sphere as a trans person if when you tweet you about any topic you got a hundred replies telling you to kill yourself already? Would you want to hang out in an IRC channel where any time you talk someone says, "shut up woman, get back to the kitchen?"

If you believe your right to swing your arm ends where my face begins then whether you think it's right to restrict hate speech or not I think there should at least be some recognition that my position is at least logically consistent because I see hate speech as an act that restricts others' speech.

i don't see the point in deleting my Twitter account, i just go long periods without using them depending on my mood

the very format is useless for anything other than flame wars and bait, culture wars and the occasional announcement - for all of that, going to a smaller network is pointless, it just reduces your reach and your scope; if it's worth the effort, you maintain accounts side by side

of course the most important thing to keep "meaningful conversations" is to have not the biggest but "the adequate" group of people participating, and for this... well, it's entirely specific on the topics and demographics you are interested in, the platform is almost irrelevant in the technical sense, even in the sense of its general policies to some extent as people move from platform to platform in such chaotic fashion

Who are these magical people who are fair and just, and how do you choose them? How come do they choose to do this completely free of charge? Do you pay for your Mastodon instance membership? If not, why is someone willing to go through the trouble of doing this for free for complete strangers? How the strangers choose the right moderators for them, even though they are not paying for any of this? I don't know, but something doesn't make any sense to me with Mastodon and similar decentralized services.

> If I’m being honest, that’s a bit dramatic. The internet has always been at least a little clique-y.

Maybe. And maybe it's my age showing. But there's one other thing - the modern social media solve for a different problem than the forums and boards of yore: they're all-encompassing, topic-agnostic. They're social, as in, one identity, for everything, with everyone.

Back in the day, topical, isolated cliques were all we had. All the different mailing groups, IRC servers, phpBB boards, etc. were entirely independent of each other. Sure, I may have used the same handle on a bunch of them, but reputation - good or bad, pristine or smeared - did not propagate through the boundaries. Then social media happened, and we got used to having centralized platforms, with a single identity, for all aspects of life. That's the world of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Mastodon is just decentralizing Twitter on a protocol level - it's carrying over the expectation of single identity, of a topic-agnostic, all-encompassing platform.

> Why’s that bad? Why are you responsible for expanding their minds and exposing the group-think sheep to new viewpoints? Live in your own rebel communities. Basically like the internet has operated for the last 30 years.

Because the Internet isn't a niche hobby anymore. It is life. There's no on-line vs. off-line anymore, they're both intertwined in almost everything we do daily. In other words, it's serious. Serious, as in, standing up to worst cases of dishonesty and hatred on some board may suddenly cost you your actual job, and your family a roof over their heads.

People have tried to create more sensible set of community rules on Mastodon. Last I checked, none of those attempts were successful - mostly because anyone who tries or is seen supporting the attempt, gets shot on sight^W^W^Waccused of being hateful racist bigot wanting to harbor literal nazis. There's an inherent asymmetry here; it's the same kind of play as "would someone think of the children", except the society doesn't have antibodies for the former just yet, like it has for the latter.

This is the proper way to deal with almost ANY social media, unless it is literally one-purpose like HN; you should have various accounts for your various persona and they shouldn't cross.