Last week, this strange mention appeared on my Mastodon feed. After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even though I've never even heard [...]
I’ve been on the Fediverse since 2016, and I still get a little mixed up by how things work.
Think about it this way. In real life, you choose who you associate with for many reasons. Do the same in the Fediverse.
Hard disagree:
the fediverse is inherently pseudonymous, you can’t tell for sure who your peers actually are (and that’s a good thing)
Even if you could, it’s not practical to background check every single individual on your instance
Even if you could, you might find some people with diverging opinions without knowing for sure if that is sufficient ground for your whole instance to be banned by others (and whom)
Even if not, you can’t predict future behaviour of people on your instance
Even if you could, it doesn’t matter because ultimately only your own doing (and not that of others) should determine who gets to interact with you
Hard disagree:
the fediverse is inherently pseudonymous, you can’t tell for sure who your peers actually are (and that’s a good thing)
Even if you could, it’s not practical to background check every single individual on your instance
Even if you could, you might find some people with diverging opinions without knowing for sure if that is sufficient ground for your whole instance to be banned by others (and whom)
Even if not, you can’t predict future behaviour of people on your instance
Even if you could, it doesn’t matter because ultimately only your own doing (and not that of others) should determine who gets to interact with you