- No server operator needs to federate with you.
- No server operator needs to tolerate things they don’t want on their instance.
- No user of an instance needs to personally curate their own extensive never ending blocklist of users and channels they don’t want to see.
Quit your pseudo-intellectual whining and choose what instance(s) work for you. If you think regularly interacting with shit content somehow helps you stay out of an echo chamber then go ahead and make a second account on those garbage instances full of hateful people. Then you can read both the decent servers and the trash ones and be the fedora wearing ackshually right fair and balanced uber nerd you always wanted to be.
Edit: The huge number of upvotes on this post compared to the low numbers on the whiney imposers’ posts is proof of exactly where this community places its priorities.
Too far in either direction is bad. If everything completely separate was so great, then there would be no need for federation at all: but actually building a community and creating areas that feel alive is tough to do that way. People don’t want to individually manage connecting to random separate servers for each community, and if you didn’t connect to the right random server maybe you never even find the community you would have contributed to in positive ways.
Getting rid of hateful stuff is good, in my opinion even though some people will muddy the waters it’s really not that hard to determine what constitutes “hateful stuff”. But there’s also going overboard. “OMG, this server allows open user signups and some random dude signed up and created an unpleasant community. DEFEDERATE THE WHOLE SERVER IMMEDIATELY! IMMEDIATELY!!!”
Maybe a better solution is to have servers publish lists of new communities but not federate them to other servers right away. Maybe they need to reach a certain age and (possibly) be subject to some sort of approval process. That will give the administrator of the server a chance to recognize and deal with the problems before it starts to spread out across the federation. Of course, if someone just lets horrible stuff fester on their server and is unresponsive then by all means it should be defederated.
Right, but there is no central authority to decide the best rules, so we get to live through the process figuring itself out. Go ahead and promote what you consider a good solution, but anyone bitching that this or that platform is inhibiting their free speech by not conforming to the process they propose is just part of the noise, not someone to be taken seriously in the discussion.