actually the thing about mastodon that keeps hitting me is that it's a return to the governance model of the internet of the 90s, which is the "local dictator", with a single admin or a small mod team who are the sole owners and operators of a site. and like, oh right, anybody who's only used, say, twitter and facebook and youtube and tumblr and myspace and so forth and so on would have had absolutely no exposure to, because all major social media platforms online for the past ten years or so have been huge corporate monoliths (or wannabe huge corporate monoliths). getting mad at brad on livejournal was a very different thing than getting mad at jack on twitter or david karp on tumblr, because lj was brad's site in a way that was very different from jack being CEO of twitter
@xax I've seen people calling this approach "a step back" Or talk about it like it's a bad thing
Personally it's a hella good thing
@vahnj yeah, there were those posts like "it's impossible to ban nazis from mastodon b/c they could just set up their own instance", like, yes, an instance solely of nazis that almost nobody would want to federate with. but when you're used to site-wide global bans as the only way to maintain a community space...