Comment by int_19h
1 day ago
Left-wing fediverse is a good illustration, too. The way things work on Mastodon, if you try to spin up a node, you quickly find out that many such nodes will ban you e.g. simply because you run Pleroma (because it's "made by fascists for fascists"), or even just because your block list doesn't have a sufficient similarity to theirs.
This isn't really anything new though. The same thing used to happen on IRC where the network would semi-frequently split because some relay was k-lined due to some internal politics.
This seems to be an inherent feature of any federated, but otherwise rule-less system.
It's not quite the same thing. It's one thing if the users of some node lose access to another node because it ends up on the first node's blocklist. But in Mastodon, the first node doesn't just block the offending node; it also blocks other nodes that don't block that one, by association, effectively trying to coerce the entire fediverse.