They aren’t the admin of, say, Reddit or Twitter, where if you get banned you get cut off from everything and everyone. You have to be toxic enough that everyone whose opinions you care about all agree you’re a liability before you find yourself isolated.
I think I get this. To make a rough analogy to reddit:
If reddit admins ban CTH and all its derivatives, you can't establish a CTH anywhere else on reddit, meaning you can't have your CTH content and reddit content still accessible from the same website.
In the Fediverse, there's no admin to ban your community, but other instances can stop associating with you/ban you/block you. So if your community sucks enough it'll be isolated from the broader Fediverse content, but it takes a lot more widespread agreement that your community sucks for that to happen; i.e., a small group of admins can't fuck you over. It's like if you removed the admins from reddit and let individual subs decide to associate with each other or not.
Yep. And the fundamental change that brings is that admins and mods stop being hte "bosses" of communities and act more as curators for the Fediverse at large, maintaining a custom blocklist to suit hte tastes of their users, while simultaneously using their own reputation as a good judge of character to vouch for their users to other admins doing the same thing. No one has to put up with Spez because you just have to if you want to talk on Reddit, you just have to be good to people in the ways that they feel matter in order to reach them. We can just choose to not care about the instances in the Fediverse that take offense to us glorifying John Brown, but can still be held accountable by those whose opinions we actually value. We can glorify John Brown all we want and not care who blocks us for it, but we do care if someone blocks us because we start becoming too tolerant of, say, ableist slurs.
I think I get this. To make a rough analogy to reddit:
Is that at least kind of right?
Yep. And the fundamental change that brings is that admins and mods stop being hte "bosses" of communities and act more as curators for the Fediverse at large, maintaining a custom blocklist to suit hte tastes of their users, while simultaneously using their own reputation as a good judge of character to vouch for their users to other admins doing the same thing. No one has to put up with Spez because you just have to if you want to talk on Reddit, you just have to be good to people in the ways that they feel matter in order to reach them. We can just choose to not care about the instances in the Fediverse that take offense to us glorifying John Brown, but can still be held accountable by those whose opinions we actually value. We can glorify John Brown all we want and not care who blocks us for it, but we do care if someone blocks us because we start becoming too tolerant of, say, ableist slurs.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. Sounds like it has a ton of potential.