this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Unfortunately we may just be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. The developers (and moderators of this instance) are unapologetic authoritarians, and on their own instance they ban people for criticizing authoritarian governments. Take a look at this post from their own reddit account in regards to Tiananmen Square.
I want the fediverse to succeed. I love the idea of a less centrally-controlled approach to social media, because we've all seen the problems that can create. But I'm worried that the influence of authoritarian-leaning developers could be a serious problem.
Why would that be a serious problem? The code is open and it can be hosted by anyone. The moderators of a single instance are nearly meaningless to a federated system. That's the whole point.
To put it another way, what problems do you think the devs being tankies might cause?
On the main instance they've banned a few accounts for comments about human rights abuses in authoritarian-left governments. But it's true, that's instance specific. I know that on Mastodon the original instance, mastodon.social, has kind of set the tone for the other instances, so there could be an effect of that sort. Other than that? I'll just be honest and tell you that I'm not sure. It's hard to predict these kinds of things. But I agree with feditips that it could be a cause for concern.
I think that's the cool thing about it though is if we don't like the host of an instance, we move on to a better one. That will especially apply if they implement importing/exporting accounts like you can in Mastodon. Then you're REALLY not locked into any one server. I understand what you're saying, it's no small deal, but we can let them sit in their own echo chamber, and we go where we feel more comfortable.