In the latest dramas of reddit I've gone ahead and manage to fall afoul of reddit in such a way that they've basically said "you're banned from our site permanently". They track me and successfully ban all new accounts unless I use a VM, which seems to get past it. (Ban evasion got me hit in case anyone wants to know, once or twice I posted comments in communities I was banned in on alts)

This has highlighted an issue to me that exists in the current way the online world is organised around centralising so many communities on these social media super-sites -- Banning people in this manner is unethical. Reddit has centralised thousands of online communities via killing off the old internet, previously thousands of communities existed on separate sites as distributed sporadic communities working as independent forums everywhere. If you got banned from one it wasn't a big deal. Now however that's all gone, thousands and thousands of communities are centralised within social media like Reddit. Hundreds of companies even use it as their primary official forums and some companies only offer support to users via their subreddit.

Exclusion from social media in this way is exclusion from a huge part of society.

That's not even counting how problematic it is to exclude people from lgbt support forums, from help forums, from suicide care, and so on, so many centralised on reddit. Nor is it considering the fact that the disabled in the modern day exist almost entirely in the online space.

Hopefully in time decentralised social media will takeover and become the dominant force online where people can no longer be tracked and excluded the way reddit is doing. In the meantime however while centralised social media is a thing, legislation is needed to prevent that social media from completely excluding people on an arbitrary sitewide basis. I will advocate for that from now on and I hope others do too.

I will throw a lot of my energy into helping Lemmy and other decentralised social media to succeed. There are other reasons of course, such as the political control it gives to the owners of these services. But this argument I feel offers a more human approach to the issue that may sit well with those that would not be receptive to the anti-corporate or political argument.