Back when I was active on Usenet it was considered pretty normal to have house rules for any newsgroup, you were also expected to refrain from posting long enough to notice and learn the unspoken customs (this was called "lurking").
Nowadays people see it as an orchestrated attack against free speech, shout references to 1984, and threaten to move elsewhere.
Yet the ones asking us all to behave politely are called "hypersensitive"?
@jkb the problem is that it is not a newsgroup where people participate depending on their interests, with a defined group of people.
Here if somebody I follow boosts a tweet with 3 people on 3 different instances and I answer, I cannot be expected to know the sometimes cryptic rules of their instances.
Instances are not closed groups, they interact, so this is a very different situation.
Either you go with common decency, or global censorship basically.
@Vaevix One could see instances as also being groups of people sharing a common interest, but you have a point.
On the instance I'm on the rules are pretty lax, content is unlikely to be removed but we're asked to be a little cautions with hard subject matter and use content warnings to hide them from people who may not want to see them. That's a good compromise I think
@Vaevix We'll see how this takes shape but I think most people agree with you (I know I do), enforcing rules on the fediverse is not feasible anyway.
@jkb Some are trying by blocking instances, which could balkanize the network and ultimately break it into smaller filter bubbles (possibly with "neutral" instances doing the link).
This is a real risk in my opinion.
@Vaevix If the consensus on a given instance is that a given other one is a cesspool of trolls it makes sense to block it altogether doesn't it? In more nuanced cases it can be harmful indeed but these nuanced cases don't warrant a whole instance block anyway.
There is a risk, but because we are all free to move from instance to instance that risk is limited IMHO.
@jkb If it is exceptional, that's not much of a problem. If it becomes frequent this is far more problematic.
@jkb I think it is perfectly valid to have rules for your own instance, so that people who browse their local TL know what to expect. On that point, you can be very specific if you want, people will choose their instance accordingly.
However, I'm strongly against trying to enforce the rules of your own instance on other instances / the fedverse. That's really the point of contention there.
Your instance, your rules, the fedverse : you know the rules are varied.