Mastodon is Actually a Lot Worse Than Twitter When it Comes to Free Speech. Avoid It.
Mastodon is Oppressive
t has been three days since the ban (“suspension” they said) and it turns out I was wrong to believe that this was temporary. It’s actually a lot worse than this. They added insult to injury.
As it turned out, the Mastodon network had effectively shadowbanned me for months. This isn’t the fault of one person or one instance because — as it turns out — the network/federation maintains some sort of blacklists for arbitrarily silencing particular instances/people. So even if I self-hosted my toots, I would be visible/active but blacklisted. What’s the point of such a federation then? It’s pure marketing from Mastodon! It’s a lie. And other people (elsewhere) have pointed this out too. It’s worse than Twitter in that regard. The only difference is that the code is “open” and one can run it oneself (outside the entire network).
It “sounds like mastodon is run by crybullies,” one person told me (MinceR). “Though it’s getting worse it has not bottomed out yet,” another person told me. “Be that as it may, reflecting on Mastodon I have always worried about how it is implemented in practice. While it’s great that it is federated to some extent, the nodes are basically fiefdoms controlled by a local sysop who turfs people out if they don’t both agree 100%. Of course people can and do then start their own nodes, becoming sysops themselves, but then the other sysops go out of their way to block the new nodes that they are not in 100% agreement with. Thus balkanization of ideas and populations continues.”
As I then pointed out, moving from node to node also means that the address of the user changes, which leads to other issues. It’s like starting from scratch all over again.
They had me shadowbanned for several months (people told me, but I naively thought it was a bug), so it’s clear they just didn’t want me there, as if I was some kind of radical or something. Twitter never treated me this badly; neither did Identi.ca or Diaspora*. So I wanted to concisely write about it and warn other people to stay away from Mastodon.
The sysop in question does not reinstate my account. He does not even respond to my E-mails. He’s rather arrogant about it and talks to me as though I, a person who brought many new users to his instance, am just a nuisance. What a nerve. What an attitude.
I decided that my posts about it (or tone) would be less gently-worded when the irreversibility of the ban is confirmed. Being gentle with words would not be useful/effective at warning other people, including existing users in that network.
A friend of mine called it “nasty stuff,” noting that “authoritarianism is ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ even to people who don’t dare admit it…”
I don’t want to name any names, but the sysop in question has depression problems, which he admits in his own blog. He is an Apple fan and his latest post says: “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow with my psychiatrist to follow-up about progress on the new med, hopefully I’ll be up to a therapeutic dose within another week or so.”
So a bunch of oddballs run the instances and when they get angry at something (like the volume I post or maybe even my criticism of Apple) they just toss me out without prior warning.
I cannot even get back in just to export my contacts (I was banned without notice!). What good is a federation where the sysops can throw you out and deny access to something as basic as your contacts?
Avoid Mastodon. The underlying software may not be garbage, but the people who manage the Mastodon network are garbage. And they’ll shadowban or even ban people whose views are quite reasonable. Game over.