Mastodon/Fediverse is Not a Reliable Communication Protocol or Tool, It Heavily Uses Blocklists Just Like E-mail in Recent Years
THE world's Web-oriented, Net-savvy geeks - and I was one of them more than a decade ago - love to spread this illusion that communication can be properly facilitated or done in social control media/networks, which are effectively filters rather than chatting platforms. False advertising leads to false expectations and, in turn, disappointment, bruising trust. In sites that are run by Elon Musk, Saudi "royals", and sysadmins looking for a hobby, anyone who does not agree is Godwinned as a "nazi" (irrespective of sites for actual nazis).
I joined Mastodon/Fediverse as soon as it started and left some years ago (around the same time Freenode had similar issues and eventually collapsed) seeing it was worse than a waste of time and occasionally a source of overt abuse, set aside the mass censorship (it was worse than Twitter in that regard; I wrote a lot about this [1, 2]). Tux Machines left Mastodon/Fediverse last year and it hasn't been missed. What a burden it was.
A short while ago someone wrote in Gemini about blocklists in the Fediverse, having "found out that some blocklists for the Fediverse block my domain for the sole reason that it's a dynamic DNS service, which is just stupid."
Sort of like E-mail. Yes, you can send and receive E-mail, as long as both ends are controlled by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and GMX. Everything else is presumed "abusive" (as if Google, Microsoft and others aren't abusive; they spy on E-mail users and pass on messages to governments).
Anyway, to quote from Gemini:
When I first joined the Fediverse, I was on a witch-themed Mastodon server. It was nice, though the server software was often out of date. Later I joined SDF, fell in love with them, and migrated to their Mastodon server (god I love how you can migrate Fediverse data). Things were awesome.Later still I installed Misskey on my own server to check it out. At that point I decided to split up my accounts into a personal one on Misskey, and a non-personal one on the SDF Mastodon. The idea was that I could do my funny picture posting, lewd comments, etc. on Misskey, and then post updates and such about my projects on Mastodon. This was going fine, but then I found out that some blocklists for the Fediverse block my domain for the sole reason that it's a dynamic DNS service, which is just stupid. Also, I was missing having a local timeline with more people than just myself. So... I decided to just make my SDF Mastodon account my sole account once again.
Recently, Gemini had its own censorship 'scandal'. Antenna was accused of censoring Zionist views, even from Christians who merely supported the concept of a Jewish state. There was a great deal of debate about it because that censorship was personal and limited to one domain and one person (albeit with a broad audience and 'ripple effect') though nobody denied the censorship of a whole Gemini capsule was triggered by one political post.
It's generally a good idea to use RSS feeds to subscribe directly to things (not planets, as they do facilitate internal censorship) because aggregators for syndication, such as Antenna (in the above case), exercise editorial control based on "taste" rather than laws or rules.
Forget about the Fediverse. It's a massive bundle of censorship that's cascading upwards and downwards to appease the political worldview/ideology of dictators donning a server/VPS. The Fediverse isn't free; people look to gain from it, but differently (not subscription fees). █