I tried the federated social thing with Mastodon after Twitter started really ramping up their censorship of conservative views.
A social justice warrior complained to the admin of my instance that I was conservative and they banned me.
That was my first and last foray into the federated socials. You trade a big corporate censor for a mom and pop censor, but none of them appear to actually be "free" (as in speech)
I'm sorry someone promised you the Fediverse as if it is "free speech heaven". It isn't. Which is fine by me.
To be honest, I think your view of what "free speech" is, is a ridiculous extreme. Go use FreeNet. If I don't seem compelling, I've put together an essay to address this in more detail [0]
> As you are somebody who is responsible for stewarding the ActivityPub specification
I am not associated with the W3C in any way, and had absolutely no hand in creating ActivityPub. Chris Webber and many others deserve that credit. I don't attend the SocialCG meetings either (which are open to all).
The most I can say is I've implemented a library implementation in Go (there are other Go projects), and I voice my opinion in the community.
> I am seriously disappointed by this dismissive attitude.
Dismissive? My apologies, that's not what I am going for. I'm precisely showing how certain folks' expectations in the free speech community were unrealistic and showing a mature technology that precisely delivers what they want.
Consider what ActivityPub is not: it is not a way to physically get your free-speech in byte form forcefully delivered to others on the network. That's what multiple free-speech folks have repeatedly drawn the line at when I poked and prodded what their disappointment stems from. Instead, to get this technological capability, one needs to switch to blockchain or FreeNet protocols as this is what they do. The former actually requires consensus whereas the latter doesn't! ActivityPub as a technology does not guarantee any of this.
I think free speech is important (I wrote a whole damn blog post about it, and here I am writing more), and I think there are important conversations to be had around it. But complaining about ActivityPub not being a censorship-proof technology ("I got banned from one instance for being too conservative") is not a productive discussion to be had. There's better ones out there.
For what it's worth, there's a decent number of 'free-speech' instances out there. They tend to be populated by the sort of thick-skinned people who playfully call each other slurs, which you may or may not be into.
Though the point of the fediverse is that you can run your own and connect to others. You’re not at the mercy of a single instance, unless I’m misunderstanding what happened.
I had new users land fresh from abandoning Twitter.
- New user, day one: This is neat! Hi everyone!
- New user, day two: Wow, there sure are a lot of ${slurs} around here.
- Me: We don't say that here. Don't do it again please.
- New user: I thought this was a free speech zone! Conservatives just can't catch a break!
I'm absolutely not saying this is what happened in your specific case. I know instances that quite possibly would block someone just for voting Republican, and maybe that's what happened to you. And if so, I'm sorry you had that experience. I have several right-leaning users who are polite and respectful, and I 100% defend their right to express their own opinions. But, I've personally seen a lot of cases where people were asked to stop being jerks, not because of their opinions, but because they were were acting like jerks, who then went on a rant about censoring conservative speech before rage quitting.
I'm sorry to hear about that experience, that's not IMHO the way it should be. That leaves you the opportunity to take your knowledge and opinions elsewhere. This would not be possible if you got banned from Twitter.
You basically left a global community because two people didn't like you. Just move to a different instance or start your own. Who cares what people you don't know or don't like think?
A social justice warrior complained to the admin of my instance that I was conservative and they banned me.
That was my first and last foray into the federated socials. You trade a big corporate censor for a mom and pop censor, but none of them appear to actually be "free" (as in speech)