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 ?
That’s disappointing to see people who could attract people to the fediverse leave it and with bad memories.
“Leave ‘big tech’ platforms, they’re abusing their influence. Come to fediverse where power tripping mods abuse their position instead!”
Yeah I mean, durr. We knew from reddit et al that this’d happen, and since here it’s not a central platform it’ll be more so. Everyone is their own little dictator, after all.
The issue is more that people talk others into going into the fediverse in particular to avoid moderation abuse on bigger platforms. You do, but you only avoid facebook moderation abuse if you leave facebook. So long as you go anywhere else, you’ll get moderation abused there, sooner or later. The mod abuse is just a natural element of it, unless we’d get a publicly (as in, the people, not a single individual or entity) owned system.
Shitty humans being shitty.
The difference is in the fediverse you’re not locked into one ecosystem. You can pick and choose what’s best for you. In many cases, you can even take your connections and data with you when you move.