@sandro Some of it may be blocked by your instance admins. Instance blocking seems to be the trend now days.

@sandro The way I think about it is the fediverse is the best system so far to handle these different political views within the same network. It functions like a city or a region where different groups of people with different opinions can co-exist, talk to each other or ignore each other without breaking the general feeling of one network.

@sandro Currently the blocking system seems to be holding up. People send reports of anything suspicious to the admin and instance blocks can happen from there.

Sometimes blocks are controversial, but any controversy blows over after a few days.

Political attacks are more of a problem on smaller or self-hosted instances where the curation effort isn't pooled. With fewer sentries on watch spotting political attacks becomes harder.

@sandro I'm very much using this alt account from my main personal mastodon account purely to help organize admins, and app owners to band together under the umbrella organzing tag of #IsolateGab to do just that. Happy to answer questions I can publicly, or others via DM.

@sandro You're going to see several talks on this topic in just two weeks in Prague at RWoT and at AP Conf.

Talk to @cwebber and myself about our work.

Both @cwebber and I seem to be working on our talks today.

@sandro Depends on the ideology and vision of the instance admin, the developers of different front ends, and the users themselves since they then have to shop for different instances that offer what they want. There is no perfect answer. The approach that the fedi should be a free for all would lead to lots of abuse, or on the other end of the spectrum, you get the current state of Mastodon, which calls for unity in shunning particular instances to the point of abusing other administrators that don't fall in line with whoever's the loudest in proclaiming their doctrine. I don't think the answer's somewhere in the middle, because no matter what abuse is going to happen, whether it's internal or external in nature.

I'm part of an instance that refuses to block other instances that aren't advertising spam. I like it that way because it lets me interact with the people I want rather than having an admin tell me what's best for me. But there are other people that want a more curated environment, I guess, and users on instances like mine are in the vast minority. It's frustrating, not only not knowing if who you're talking to can even see what you're saying, but also knowing that there are a lot of people discussing things on this platform, people you might be friends with, that have an administrative wall keeping you from interacting.

In the end do what's best for you, I guess. I've even seen some instances that are deliberately disconnected from everything else because they want it that way. To each their own.

@sandro -- tolerance. censorship is censorship. lets everyone speak. if nothing illegal is happening, no harm is done.

@sandro Banning together to isolate a few bad actors will eventually leave the ecosystem in an echo chamber.

Curation and tolerance is the path forward, not authoritarianism.