If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/
Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.
What do you think about this case ?
thx. This case, though, goes beyond a simple case of annoyed users.
Kazim is a bestselling author from Germany, carrying a CNN Journalist Award. He says he got canceled because his posts were not appreciated by the mod. This case concerns the basic working and ethical principles in the fediverse, I would say.
What difference does it make that he is a bestselling author?
That a tiny minority might have heard the name before (“bestselling” really doesn’t mean as much as some people think).
Nope. Take it to [email protected]
Buddy…
No one has to let anyone else post on their instance…
If the mods didn’t want them on a community, or admins didn’t want them on their instance, that’s their choice.
Like, there’s ~10 million “mastodon” accounts, over half on Bluesky, and only like 10k on mastodon.world.
This isn’t a big deal
This is not an objective fact but an opinion (whether well-substantiated or not I cannot tell). I am not clicking on a Facebook link to learn more, so thank you for adding some additional context here.
There is also a [email protected] community that will certainly agree with you that anything done by a .world community moderator is by definition wrong.
As for myself I have no opinion on this currently, but only questions like banning one person does not make a place authoritarian/fascist but a pattern of such events would. All that this post says though is a complaint about the one person - again, whether justified or not I have no idea, as other commenters here are likewise saying, we simply do not currently have the facts to be able to judge properly.