Comment by amatecha

Well, imagine for a moment that the unwelcome participants are the ones against murder. Everyone currently in the group thinks murdering people who disagree with you is a fine way to solve problems. Outsiders might share insights and opinions to discourage this way of thinking, so they're not allowed to join.

Firstly, there is still pretty centralized moderation done through the bureaucracy of mastodon operators and federation. Similar situation in bluesky. The whole advantage of these "networks" is that they allow you to opt-in to blocklists. A federation essentially becomes a massive aggregation of blocklists, because members that do not obey the blocking policies of others will become defederated. These aren't really opt-in consent-based social spaces here because the vast majority of the "consent" is still delegated by a third party.

These networks appeal to control freaks who subscribe to many massive blocklists so they don't have to confront challenging ideas. I oppose them on the grounds that being a control freak is bad for the individual and society in general.

Unfortunately, we are all unwelcome participants in society at large. This is the idea behind protests for example. Real life is not consent-based, so the more time you spend in these networks the more poorly acclimated to reality you will become and the more removed you will be from the public arena of ideas.

The ill-effects are that whatever (political?) faction that embraces these sort of networks will become mentally weak and will continue to lose debates, and eventually (political?) power.