@open risk

> Its more like real life. You build an instance, a community.

First of all, this is a very skewed view of what happens here. The vast, overwhelming majority of users are not and will never make their own instance. The vast, overwhelming amount of potential users are already embedded in social networks already - and many of them are predatory and proprietary. This thread is an example of where one was willing to join the broader community of communities, picked an instance... but then found that there was nothing going on on the fediverse to his liking, so he left to go back to the predatory, manipulative, unethical alternatives (like twitter) where "at least there are people".

And yet the whole time @Josh Bressers was producing a podcast, that in and of itself *was* a community and had an audience already. But instead of *that* community coming with him to join the fediverse...they never did. His website lists twitter contact, but not mastodon.online. Why? Because the keystone of that community did not find a place to put in roots, here. Why?

I would argue it's because it's in part due to the censorship that his instance exerts on other parts of the network.

@Eugen
You're right, you don't see the number of people who I've brought to the fediverse, over and over again, who then try to communicate with other people in their friend group, social circle or community (again - a big coup, getting multiple people who know eachother or have a reason to communicate to join the network!) only to be thwarted by censorship and blocklists, and then have them give up and go back to twitter/facebook/etc. Maybe if you hadn't banned half the network you'd see that sort of thing happening more often. I can't even reply to this thread from my main accounts, even,. And you're right - if you count all your dead accounts of people who've given up trying to communicate who knows maybe there's more on your side than the free side still. And it's not just about the ones you block - it's about the people in *their* life who your users cannot communicate with, due to your blocking them. It's about the news and information about the world that your users cannot read, and we cannot tell them. It's about the things your users learn, that we cannot mutually benefit from.

@Josh Bressers you yourself were saying you gave up. Why is it that you did? You, in fact, still were on twitter - "that's where the people are". But when you look across a room, that is empty, while connected by a locked door to another room full of people
...surely you must see that the lock may be the problem.

Incidentally speaking without accountability is one thing., collective punishment and censorship is another. Gargron's blocking whole communities from communicating with another community (possibly even others, who then follow his lead) is collective punishment of people who never had anything to do with whatever petty drama earned instances their blocks.