the anti-decentralization comments and rhetoric in this thread are super weird given that they're posted on metafilter, a notable old-school web-centralization holdout http://www.metafilter.com/168948/More-like-Mastodont-amirite also discussing a post hosted on the author's own domain (more decentralization! gasp)
it's just so clear to me that decentralization is good and pure and not just for racists and pornographers that I find I can't defend the concept except with increasingly desperate, earnest gestures
it's true that I don't think a lot of my ~april exodus~ mastodon friends still post on here a lot. but I've made other friends. BETTER friends. DECENTRALIZED friends.
mastodon is just a gazillion times more pleasant to use than twitter and I like knowing that I have more control over my content, I'm not getting tracked for ads, and my presence and participation here isn't being used to justify fascism
also totally disagree with the stuff in that thread about federation being a tremendous cognitive burden. at this point I almost never think or care about how the people I follow might be on other instances? (though I also learned early on to think of the local/global timelines as fun bonus content for when you're really bored, not the Main Dish)
@aparrish The question to ask is "who's seeding this story about Mastodon being full of objectionable Japanese porn?" Could it possibly be media organisations with a lot of eggs in the Twitter/Facebook basket?
@iona I mean I don't want to jump to conspiracy theory but that post really does read like warmed over propaganda to me 😐 or at least it's more concerned about the author's preconceptions than it is about actual reports from users on how they use the platform
@aparrish @iona yeah, I think Ethan's academic and worst-case angle here is pretty unhelpful; I don't disagree with anything said in his original article (the MF thread looks...bad...) but I think he might be assuming, and then not saying much about, the positive aspects of federation and decentralization? :-/
@enkiv2 @iona @aparrish I think this is the only section talking about that: "In response to the growth of pawoo.net, a number of large, predominantly North American/European Mastodon servers stopped federating posts from the Japanese site, as they were uncomfortable with lolicon appearing as part of their feed. Scala reports that Rochko modified the database on mastodon.social to make it possible to “silence” pawoo.net, so that posts only appear if you explicitly choose to subscribe to users of that server."
@enkiv2 @iona @oneiro agreed, and maybe this is an understandable misconception, because how/why/when to limit federation is still an open question (and my understanding is that the technical framework for limiting federation was still in development when mastodon first started getting more mainstream attention?)
@oneiro @iona @aparrish
I skimmed both the thread and the article & didn't see anybody mention instance blocking...
I mean, instance blocks are used a lot, and isolating instances that are posting stuff that's not legal or acceptable in a particular jurisdiction is, like, the clearest-cut example of desirable use.