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opens #Mastodon
Sees the back and forth over federating or not with #Meta / large networks.
I’m not going to argue the philosophy of whether federating with a large data ingesting corporation run network is good or bad. But clearly there’s a design flaw in all of this if a person is at the mercy of an #admin as to whether or not you get access to an entire #server. Even if the default setting is to not #federate, if there’s no override button for you personally, something is broken.
In a world where it was server defaults but individual over-rideable it’d be a lot harder to see stuff from #defederated networks by default. So even if someone reshares content, it wouldn’t appear in the timeline by default. You’d have to manually opt in to see stuff from the server or be following the author of the reshared content to see it on your timeline.
This way you aren’t at the mercy of an admin to see the content. But you also don’t risk the server being polluted with no way out
One concept that this idea misses though is that servers can also be communities on their own. So sometimes people want to be on an isolated community where some interaction with others is seen as a perk rather than a necessity. Philosophically it may make sense then to cut off access to any chosen server.
I said I didn’t want to argue for or against the philosophy so I only make this point to say that I’m considering just general purpose servers/usage when I think about this.
One last point. This is why I actively refer to the #Fediverse and #Mastodon as two separate concepts. IMO this whole back and forth is a symptom of a greater problem that the design of fediverse #Clients is centering towards a single solution that looks and works only like mastodon. The nuclear choice of defederate the whole server or not is a mastodon choice. Not an #ActivityPub one. Not a fediverse one.