Recently the server staff received an e-mail telling them to moderate the Discord server and the server chat on what they deem to be “appropriate.”
Below is a message from owner of the server.
Free Speech Under Attack
Dear friends, I don’t often post announcements of this sort, but I feel it’s very important for you all to know what’s currently going on.
From the very start, over 15 years ago, one of the key founding principles of MinecraftOnline has been free speech. What started out as an uncontroversal, common sense policy, has proved to be a cornerstone of this increasingly unique community. As time has passed and Western society has wavered back and forth in its political leanings, free speech has repeatedly come under attack for political reasons. It has now become common to see arrests for posts on social media in countries such as Britain and Germany, in the name of political control, which have overtaken the numbers even of traditionally totalitarian countries such as China and Russia - a truly dystopian nightmare for freedom of expression and personal liberty.
Throughout this decade and a half of change, MinecraftOnline has held steadfast to its libertarian principles, and remained an oasis of freedom and openness in an increasingly closed and controlled internet. That is, until now.
Microsoft, through their subsidiary Mojang, have issued an ultimatum to MinecraftOnline. We have been told to do away with our free speech policy (which long pre-dates Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang), within 7 days, or face a a permanent block. If that happens, nobody will be able to play on MinecraftOnline again, and the 15-year history of this beloved server will come to a sudden and bitter end. The full email we have received today, signed facelessly only as “Mojang Enforcement”, is included below.
The email makes extremely vague claims about “harmful interactions” and “harmful comments”, and we are asking Microsoft to clarify what specific interactions and comments they consider harmful. In the meantime, please spread the word, share this info on social media. Defend free speech.
-SlowRiot
If you want to say what you want, go ahead. Nobody is required to host that speech or allow that speech to be hosted on their platform or software.
MS is attacking free speech here in the same way that a moderator attacks free speech blocking a Lemmy server. Nobody’s saying you can’t use a modded client to connect to their server if they self-host it, but they’re defederating on the main client because they want no association with it.
Minecraft servers are a unique case because they are hosted by the owners. Microsoft/Mojang does not host online servers; they just host the authentication server that the client pings to check the connecting account UUID (and pull the skin file). The whole way Mojang “bans” servers is by marking certain IPs to always be told the connecting account is invalid. Either way, server costs are paid by the owner. I recommend you look into Minecraft specifically because the model has its quirks.
Personally I agree with the MC servers here purely because of that fact. Also, Mojang/Microsoft should be seen as an enemy of the common people for many reasons - including their Copilot AI. If the Chat Reports feature (where purchased accounts are neutered because of automated chat reports) isn’t reason enough to dislike Microsoft, consider the following: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I’m familiar. The first server I hosted was an alpha hmod server for some friends, and I’ve played a lot since then.
What MS is doing doesn’t prevent anyone from connecting to a server. It only puts a wall in the way, saying essentially to both the host and the players that this server violates MS’s terms for hosting, but not preventing them from doing so. Server owners can bypass this restriction in a few minutes with a single restart (assuming they aren’t using a modded server that can apply the change at runtime).
This isn’t unique to Minecraft. Games have supported custom servers for as long as I’ve been alive, and more recently as software became more and more internet-connected, restrictions on those servers have also been enforced. Being self-hosted or a custom lobby on a game doesn’t change this - the server software is still owned by MS and licensed to the users.
If anything, that it is so easy to bypass this shows that it’s nothing more than signaling. I would be much more concerned if the solution weren’t simply to change online mode to false. Sure moderation is another story, but there are alternative solutions, like IP banning.
There are many, many reasons to dislike Microsoft. They have made many terrible decisions in the past, ethically speaking. This does not implicitly mean that every decision they make is bad or harmful. It only raises the question of intent behind decisions, and here the intent seems clear to me: they do not want their brand associated with the kind of speech allowed on that server.
This is more like if a Reddit mod came over here to Lemmy and tried to delete this comment.
Not exactly. This would be like Reddit blocking links to Lemmy on Reddit.
MS owns Minecraft and the client. They can’t stop them from running the server software, but they don’t need to connect to it from the client.