Technology

making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

By reaching out, I would say. It's most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I've seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

@CasualTee I think both models (i.e. allowlist/blocklist) have their own perks and drawbacks and are all necessary for a healthy and enjoyable internet.

The reason why this is the way it is, I think, is that most of us are both in a minority and a majority at the same time. Take for example me: I am a cis white Romanian, just like the majority of the people in my country. I do however tend to hold some more progressive views, which puts me in a smaller group (e.g. I do think that LGBTQIA+ folks should be allowed to marry each other and adopt children). I do support Ukraine and hope it wins the war, which is what most people do, and I also believe climate change is real, and that it affects our daily lives (you might find that surprisingly maybe that I call myself having a majority view like this, but most people like me are old enough to remember the snowy winters pre-2015). Yet I am totally decided to spend as much of my life possible without owning a car, and trying to do all sorts of things to be more eco-friendly. I am also an atheist, which, it seems, is not so much of a majority view, as most of the people declare themselves Orthodox (and many more are believers in a different religion - Muslims, Greek/Roman Catholics, Judaists etc.) - and the list goes on and on.

I am sure many of you find yourselves in a similar position, and again, that's okay. You don't have to fight against the wind if you don't have a reason to.

What the Fediverse tried, however, was to take the control of social media from the hands of the few, and put it in the hands of the many - and it is partly succeeding - it's just a much better way of managing the online social interactions, free of any censorship that would go against our views (and Beehaw is no exception, congrats, team! 😁).

Now that people are fleeing to the Fediverse, we're just gathering our tribe - and this is a natural phenomenon. You'll never talk and interact with anybody on this planet during your life, not even in your country or even your city if it's large enough. But you might have friends that have friends that talk to certain people or others, and so on. You might also agree to communicate with any of these people at some point, or maybe the way they view things is just too different from yours that you might choose not to see these people ever again.

Even back on Facebook I found some people that I was (and still am to this day) dead sure that they outright blocked me, even without doing anything bad. And I also blocked others myself.

So yeah, the Fediverse is more representative of life as a whole. And that's a great thing.

Not on Lemmy nor on Mastodon, if I trust the recent communications around moderation and instance blocking.

GoToSocial, to my knowledge, does have an allowlist mode btw.

And Hubzilla uses a different protocol, that allows for Nomadic Identity. Not sure if this will have any type of impact on moderation, however.

@kalanggam