I guess I'll put out a few thoughts regarding what's going on with the federation, even though I didn't want to get fixated on it.

first of all I'm not worried for the future of the existing fediverse. it'll simply not go anywhere regardless of what the new instances do. we like it here, we don't want to change our policies just because some newcomers want that.

so it seems like we've got a bunch of new people thanks to media coverage and ads for .social, it's cool and all to introduce the federation to a wider audience. (hoping that people in charge of these newer instances will do their best to educate people on how it works.)

the thing is there's just a lot of people coming in that do not understand or respect the concept of a truly free and unregulated federation, they expect other instances to follow their guidelines instead of conforming to the wider fediverse. this of course sounds like pure insanity to us who believe in absolute freedom of speech.

the people who want their strict guidelines won't get what they want in the wider fediverse, which leads us into blocks. the general consensus in GS seems to be that users are responsible for maintaining their own blocks and mutes to get their experience the way they want it. this doesn't seem to be the case with the new people, they'd rather have these things at instance-level.

let them do it, let them block this side of the fediverse if they choose to, if that's what their users want. if that's not what their users want, they'll go elsewhere, perhaps they'll join us. I don't think we're losing out on anything if instances that can't handle us defederate from us. only thing I don't like is this half-assed opaque sandboxing, go all in with the block or accept the instances as a whole. if they don't want to see me, I don't want to see them, it's all about interaction which is a two-way-street.

lastly I do realize this side of the fediverse might become the minority if the things go the way they're going now. I'm ok with this. if the future 'mainstream fediverse' does not want free speech, it's on them, not us. I don't think you can re-educate people who think twitter is too nazi on this matter. I'm perfectly fine with us being the niche, there will still be the occasional new users that want the freedom and openness that we embrace.

tl;dr take it easy https://shitposter.club/attachment/488201