Submitted 3 days ago by mbirth@lemmy.ml to fediverse@lemmy.world
https://blog.mbirth.uk/2025/05/30/mastodon-social-and-shadowbanning.html
Sucks for you but, such is the fediverse working as intended. Moderators can’t be expected to have a deep conversation with every moderation decision.
I will agree that Mastodon is not as decentralized as it should be but I’m also not sure how it could be improved. Ideologically there would be a round robin style sign up for approved instances but I’m not sure if that’s technologically feasible.
Being limited isn’t that big a deal. My instance has them limited because of their lax moderation and an excess of reply guys. All it means is that I get a notification saying “Someone you might know sent you a notification” and I get to review and accept or deny the notification depending. Plus they have to request permission to follow me so I get to check them out before accepting.
I still have tons of mutuals on .social and I get new ones all the time. While each person making the choice about whether to accept notifications or follows from a particular user is going to make their own choices, I don’t think it’s particularly inconvenient.
For their lack of adequate moderation capacity / interest, .social has one topic they tend to over-react to. AfD sympathizing isn’t that one thing. Not to suggest they’re right here. I’d need the thread context and a better understanding of German to weigh in on that. Moderators are human and they’re going to make a bad call eventually. I’m not in a position to guess whether they made a bad call here. AfD aren’t just some normal political party, though.
IMHO, it’s one thing if you want to limit everything from there on your instance and on your own will, but a completely different thing for them to basically secretly ban you from their whole instance just because one single person on there felt offended and reported you. There surely must be something in between doing nothing and this sitewide shadowban.
welcome to mastodon
@mbirth This has got to be the most milk toast take ever. The government says they have concrete justification to interfere with a political party in a democracy by performing aggressive surveillance on them, but says their justification is a secret. Then somebody comes along and says "Huh, I don't blindly trust the government so I'm not going to support this decision unless I'm told why and can judge it for myself." In fact, if in a democracy a party tries to attack another party through non-electoral means without saying why, there are only two reasonable responses:
I've long been critical of this really aggressive defederation, it breaks the network and I believe is the capstone in the list of reasons why the fediverse sputtered out and lost a supermajority of it's users. I think it's still got a chance as the big three protocols grow more interconnected and as big platforms have started adopting said protocols, but if it's got a chance to do so I believe the community needs to get this sort of stuff sorted out beforehand.
/end rant
Maybe send the follow-up mail to the moderation team anyway, including full username. And maybe a explanation that you were just questioning the unavailabily of the report, not intending to endorse the wannabe nazi party. So they get what this is about.
How many days did you wait for an answer? Sometimes people are just very impatient and this week thursday to sunday might have been days off for some German people.
They claim “usually within 24 hours”. 2 days later I still have no reply. But yeah, I might try the follow-up email… although I don’t have much confidence that it’ll do anything. It’s more important that people get to know the risks of these huge monolithic instances.
30p87@feddit.org 3 days ago
Extremist right-wing party. With substantial parts legally being called Nazis.
It’s not. “Many people”, aka. AfD supporters and the AfD themselves.
(The original toot, translated from german)
Thing is, all contents were openly collected and sorted by 3rd parties already. The report is as relevant to anyone aware of any politics as the Principia Mathematica’s Section 54.43 is for thinking humans in order to prove that 1+1=2. The only usefulness lies in AfD supporters being unable to deny the obvious.
Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Isn’t being a nazi illegal in germany? How are there “legal” nazis in a major party?
30p87@feddit.org 3 days ago
Being a Nazi is not illegal. As no person themselve is illegal. Saying nazi stuff is illegal tho, so eg. Höcke (party leader) was sued for 13k€ for saying “alles für Deutschland”/“everything for germany”
mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
These are quite some mental gymnastics going from my toot:
(Correctly translated, btw.)
to:
Wow! Just wow! You should sign up as a moderator on mastodon.social. You’d fit right in.
InfiniteHench@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Isn’t this the group whose leaders publicly stated “Germany was safer under Hitler,” then both invited and hosted Elon “Sieg Heil 2x” Musk at a campaign rally?
30p87@feddit.org 3 days ago
I should’ve included more context:
They, openly for years, and now officially, are extrimists and their members systematically violent.
And I just noticed that, as so often with deepl, it first detected the german text as english, therefore translated (english)german to german, and malformed it, so in my working copy it read “meinen” instead of “mein”. Should have double checked that, but >01:30 CET demands its tribute.