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 ?
If i may summarize:
The Fediverse is great for everyone who wants to engage with the medium they are using for real. People who don’t give a fuck are not willing to invest the minimum time to understand the underlying structure, which makes the Fediverse completely opaque to them.
I will now extrapolate:
This is also what makes the Fediverse great: we are a collection basin of people who want to look behind the mirror, who are not satisfied with easy answers and shallow slogans. We want to know how shit works and are not satisfied when we realize that we are getting a raw deal.
Therefore the Fediverse itself is a great platform for connecting people who are bound to have ideas and are open to critizism. Even if we never reach critical mass (which would only mean an eternal september for most of us), we still are the fraction of society that interacts with technology and people critically - we don’t accept black boxes, and we don’t accept things that go against logical analysis (for the most part - we are still humans, and we all are fallable).
I would not be surprised if in the next decade there would be at least (i’d say even more, but it’s the question of if we ever hear of it, because we tend to protect the fediverse in general to not become a target from outside forces) one political movement rooted in the fediverse that becomes at least a painful thorn in the side of an established government.
This network is not for everyone, but it is here for the people who actually wanna engage with technology, society, politics and the crosssections of those areas.