If I understand it right, the moderator of the mastodon.world instance has blocked several posts by Hasnain Kazim, as Kazim reported yesterday on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/661473263/posts/10163657720033264/
Kazim is a quite famous and successful book author in Germany and something between left, conservative and liberal. He was journalist for the most important German weekly news magazine Spiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasnain_Kazim?wprov=sfla1
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated. To me from the external perspective it seems that the moderator is abusing his power. He is damaging free and respectful discussion. Furthermore, when a famous person like Kazim reports those experiences to his broad audience, who do not understand the functioning of the fediverse, the moderator also damages Mastodon in general significantly, it seems to me.
What do you think about this case ?
Its fedi being fedi. If you are outspoken public figure you should simply run your own or be perfectly aligned with the admin. This dynamic is probably why Bluesky managed to capture so much people.
This post says who he is and that he got banned from mastodon.world, but it does not say what he posted there before getting banned.
The .world network is not known, in general for having unconventional rules or heavy-handed moderation. Without more information, I have to assume he posted something that would get him banned a lot of other places too.
Yeah I’d be curious about context, too.
It’s in the bottom right of the screenshot that shows his complaint:
Der „Moderator" hier hat allen Ernstes diesen Post von mir gelöscht:
Ich habe gerade Leserkommentare mehrerer internationaler Medien durchforstet. Die große Mehrheit der arabischsprachigen Kommentatoren feiert den Täter von Berlin, die große Mehrheit feiert seine Tat. Und das ist ein sehr großes Problem.
Deepl translation:
The “moderator” here actually deleted this post of mine:
I just went through reader comments on several international media outlets. The vast majority of Arabic-speaking commenters are celebrating the Berlin attacker; the vast majority are celebrating his act. And that is a very big problem.
That’s his version of events that he’s showing to his audience. People who get banned from things often share a harmless-looking excerpt when that’s not really what got them banned.
It would be good to have the whole context before reaching a conclusion.
He has made the same original post on Bluesky as well. So you can probably see the other posts he has made.
I don’t see anything in the Bluesky posts I would expect to get moderated on a .world server. Odd.
He posts mainly on Facebook, and copies some posts to bluesky and (up to now) to Mastodon, to support big tech alternatives. Also on FB you will not find anything that you “would expect to get moderated on a .world server”. He is very balanced and respectful (but also very clear) in his posts on complicated topics, as I must grant him, even if I do not always agree with him. It is a significant loss for the fediverse to lose a German top author. Fediverse needs those accounts to attract normal users.
That’s his version of events that he’s showing to his audience.
Everything he says is his version of events, everything you say is your version of events, everything I say is my version of events. So… you never, ever need to say that. WE KNOW
Ist halt ne wirklich dumme Verkürzung der Tatsachen, und wenn man sich so die Mehrheit der Kommentare in deutschsprachigen Onlinezeitungen anschaut dann könnte man auch denken die AfD hat 90% Zustimmung.
Ich vermute mal der mastodon.world Moderator hatte keine Ahnung wer dieser Typ ist (ich hatte auch noch nie von dem gehöhrt), aber hat dauernd (vermutlich nicht ganz unbegründete) Beschwerden wegen Islamophobie bekommen.
Edit: ups, sorry, I mistook this for a German speaking com.
It’s just a really stupid oversimplification of the facts, and if you look at the majority of the comments in German-language online newspapers, you might even think the AfD has a 90% approval rating.
I’m guessing the mastodon.world moderator had no idea who this guy is (I never heard of him either), but kept receiving complaints (presumably not entirely unfounded) about Islamophobia.
Yes, at this point comments online don’t mean all that much. Could be someone with an LLM or a small segment of very loud people with a lot of spare time.
The individual comment itself doesn’t seem particularly bannable. But a pattern of islamophobia could be. Which may be the larger issue.
Ja bin ich dabei, ich kenn den Spiegel seit >30 Jahren inzwischen und hab noch nie von dem Typen gehört.
Thanks. The selection of texts makes it clear that he has slowly moved from being a serious journalist to a pundit that publishes mostly opinion pieces that cater to conservative and latently racist audience and are likely also attempts at rage baiting left-liberals. Basically an opportunist exploiting the “also show the other side” bias of liberal media like the Spiegel and I would not be overly surprised if his next move is to support the far-right (the AfD is very open to opportunists with migration history or LG(BT), like Alice Weidel).
Ah, that’d in part explain why mastodon would readily kick him off, yes.
The rage baiting left-liberals? Yeah, I suppose 😏
I think “allen Ernstes” is more accurately translated “in all seriousness”, not “actually”; so: “the moderator here, in all seriousness, deleted…”.
If someone gets banned from an instance, they are free to move their account to a new instance and still keep their followers.
Someone doesn’t just get to break instance rules just because they are a successful author. Attitudes need to change, if you approach the fediverse like corporate social media, you are doing it wrong.
What’s his excuse going to be once he gets muted on bluesky?
Also, what does “banning” even mean? Lemmings I find love to abuse terminology so that a one-hour time-out period gets referred to as a “ban” (tbf this was inherited from Reddit, no matter how much we’d like to leave the old ways behind, they do tend to cling stubbornly).
But I don’t know how Mastodon uses those words - is he even truly “banned” or merely “banned” for like an hour while the moderator spent that time researching the situation?
The word ban does not imply any duration on its own.
Irl if you “ban” something, like cigarettes, then it does not necessarily imply forever but it does sorta imply until the law is changed i.e. until further notice.
So then if you ban a person for a period of one week, the timeline needs to be delivered alongside the word - “banned for a week”.
Which the OP did not do, and moreover (I am not sure if the post was edited or was always this way), seems to go out of its way to imply a permanent banning? Though the phrasing used was “cancels” rather than bans.
Well, perhaps it’s a language issue, but this OP is also quite sensationalistic, so my fault I suppose for engaging with what is clearly an emotional rant rather than a piece of any substance (again, regardless of whether the original subject is true or not, I am saying that this post does a poor job describing what occurred).
famous German author
You could ask 100k Germans and maybe 1 person knows who he is.
Drop the famous.
Who is more famous in Germany; Micaela Schäfer or Dorothee Elmiger? I would say the winner of the German book prize 2025. You would probably pick the ‘model’,because more people know her. Fame is not objective. Well, it is not relly important here anyway.
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding still of how the Fediverse works.
Any instance, mastodon.world for instance, is NOT Mastodon itself. Mastodon is JUST the software that was chosen. Each instance is allowed their own rules. Each community is allowed their own rules within the instance. If you get banned, think of it more that someone has asked you to leave their home and doesn’t want you there.
We have to get away from these ideas of that every instance of Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever completely reflects the entire Fediverse.
This comes with a big caveat. I think the world still sees us this way. And I think we HAVE to do a better job of, “This is a platform and if you’re banned you’re gone.” Instead we should help folks understand, if you’re kicked off an instance, there are a dozen others. There is a community for everyone. Hell, run your own or ask and folks can run one for you.
I will 100% disagree with a LOT of folks on a LOT of issues and I’d never want to host socials for the majority of folks. BUT I will absolutely defend your right to exist on the Fediverse and even help you, to a point, set up your own instance. But everyone needs to be mindful, that those places can and will still ban you. But you can at least get your message out to your community.
I don’t know what was said as I don’t speak German. I also don’t know why he was banned. But that is .world’s right to eject anyone from their community they don’t want. If the person decides to leave and not come back at all, that really sucks. But they also have the right to start their own community and continue interacting.
I’ve banned someone from TubeFree.org. I’ve blocked folks. I’ve refused to allow someone to create an account on TubeFree.org. Am I censoring someone? Maybe, but I’m attempting to build a specific community.
I’d absolutely LOVE to see any of these big instances have communities start their own instance. We shouldn’t have monoliths in the fediverse. The more diverse the network, the better. Honestly I’m trying to help communities run their own for their own community. I’ve even been talking with folks and attempting to work with folks on a spin up your own image to run from a business or home that is plug and play.
We NEED people to run their own, control their data, manage this themselves. We’re not there yet, but I honestly think someday we will be and everyone will just have a presence on the Fediverse. A community blocks you? You won’t even notice because YOU control YOUR digital identity.
Any instance, mastodon.world for instance, is NOT Mastodon itself.
It’s this very thing that especially those who only came to Mastodon for reach often don’t understand.
All Fediverse newbies, except for those who escape from Reddit to Lemmy those very few who escape from Instagram to Pixelfed, are being railroaded to Mastodon without being told a thing about the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. That’s because those who on-board them either think that Mastodon is hard to understand already, what with being decentralised and having “instances” and stuff, and the Fediverse, as a network of tons of wholly different stuff, is incomprehensible level: eldritch. Or they don’t know about the Fediverse outside Mastodon itself.
In fact, most Mastodon newbies seem to not even be told about Mastodon being a network of lots of independent websites. They may think that Mastodon is a network in the same sense as Facebook being a network.
So for those who joined via the Web interface, Mastodon tends to be a website. Namely the server that they’ve joined.
For them, mastodon.social = Mastodon = the Fediverse. Or mastodon.world = Mastodon = the Fediverse.
For those who joined by loading and using the official app without taking a glance at any Mastodon server’s website even only once, Mastodon is a phone app, just like Telegram is a phone app, and Facebook is a phone app. They don’t know fuck all about what’s happening behind the app, and they don’t care as long as it works.
For them, the Mastodon app on their phone = Mastodon = the Fediverse.
Private, spare-time Mastodon users will eventually learn that Mastodon is, in fact, not one website or simply an app, but made up of many such websites called “servers” or “instances”.
The next step will be for them to learn that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon. That all these Mastodon “servers” are fully connected to other wholly different websites a.k.a. “servers” (or whatever the respective Fediverse server application calls its servers). For example, this happens when they receive an answer to one of their toots that’s way over 500 characters long (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can’t do it), and that contains stuff like text formatting (which they deem technologically impossible in the Fediverse because Mastodon can’t do it).
Even private, spare-time Mastodon users may be stuck in such a Mastodon-only bubble that they take two years or more to learn the latter.
Now, professionals, that’s a wholly different matter. They don’t have time to engage with the community. They can barely catch up with the comments on their posts. If they read them at all, that is. They don’t read what the community has to say outside these comments either because they don’t follow anyone who’s really engaged in the community.
Thus, they never come across a message that even only gives them a hint on what the Fediverse actually is. Nothing that they actually pay attention to on Mastodon tells them that Mastodon is not just one website or a phone app that neatly hides what’s happening behind itself.
They can have joined in early November, 2022, days after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and still think that Mastodon is one website. And either they’ve never heard the term “Fediverse”, or they think that “Fediverse” is another name for Mastodon, i.e. that one website that they think is Mastodon.
Kazim probably was too professional and too busy to see what the community was posting about. So he kept on “knowing” that mastodon.world = the Mastodon website = the Fediverse.
That’s because
$
You typed all that and didn’t realize Jack Dorsey owning Bluesky has something to do with everyone being funnelled to Bluesky?
It’s over half the masodon accounts…
💯 exactly. Question remains: what is the consequence of this detailed (and in my eyes correct) analysis? Well, maybe this very generalized discussion goes too far beyond the concrete case. But those questions have been on my mind too for a few months; Is the fediverse good but too complicated for this world?
But those questions have been on my mind too for a few months; Is the fediverse good but too complicated for this world?
Probably.
Let’s face it: Hardly anyone has an actual computer anymore. People do everything with phones nowadays. For them, everything is an app. They don’t know what’s happening behind the app, like, whether that app is just a remote control for a website. They don’t want to know. And they don’t care. It works. That’s all.
This may be why Google is putting all bets on Gemini. Nobody Googles anymore when nobody uses the Web anymore because everybody uses dedicated apps for everything.
These people are often easy to spot on Mastodon because they hold on to Mastodon’s official app for their dear lives. It’s the most lack-lustre Mastodon app of all. But they don’t know because they’ve never tried anything else. Above all, however, they couldn’t use Mastodon with an app that isn’t named “Mastodon”.
Then there are the more old-school people who do still use the Web. Most of them still actually have a desktop or laptop computer.
But they are caught in a principle that has ruled over the Web from 1994 to today: One service, one up-front website. And that website is usually www.<Insert the name of the service here>.com or www.<Insert the name of the service here>.org or maybe www.<Insert the name of the service here>.net.
And if it’s a “network”, it’s one network, one service, one up-front website.
The concept of one network, one service, many websites that are also connected to each other and communicate with each other is incomprehensible to them. You keep seeing this with Lemmy newbies. Although e-mail is literally this. But then again, for what appears to be the vast majority of people out there, e-mail = Google Mail.
The concept of one network, multiple services is just as incomprehensible. Following a YouTube channel or a Facebook user or a subreddit from Twitter? Impossibru!
Consequentially, the concept of one network, many different services, each in turn with many websites, all of which are connected to each other and communicate with each other is nothing short of eldritch to them.
“You mean… like… there’s… like… 9,000 Twitters? And you can be on one Twitter website and follow someone on another Twitter website? How’s that even possible?! And… like… there’s 400 Facebooks? And you can be on one Facebook website and befriend someone on another Facebook website? And… you can follow… Facebook users? From, like, Twitter?!?” Minds equal blown. Like, heads a sploding.
This is why estimated 50% of all Mastodon users are geeks, and so are estimated 99% of all non-Mastodon, non-commercial-silos Fediverse users.
Seriously: Mastodon on-boarding is already for dumb-dumbs in practice. Load the app. Name. Password. Go. Toot away. You may or may not know that you’re on a website named “mastodon.social” now (the official app defaults to mastodon.social). You may or may not know that it’s only one of over 9,000 Mastodon “servers”. Doesn’t matter for getting on board.
Still, there are many many calls for making Fediverse on-boarding even easier, even more “for dumb-dumbs”. Either whoever calls for this hasn’t seen the official Mastodon phone app from up close and the way it railroads everyone to mastodon.social. Either they think that it’s still a hard requirement to manually, consciously choose a server. Or they still find the way the Mastodon app handles it too complicated, too confusing, too scary.
Seriously, if the Fediverse needs to be simplified even further and made more comfortable for those who are scared of any technology beyond a toaster, those who need ChatGPT to work a washing-machine, it has to become like in my Chirper proposal: presenting itself as a centralised silo to the point of sanitising or culling any and all content that hints at the technology behind it.
Then all newbies will be Kazims as far as Fediverse knowledge goes because the software won’t let them look behind itself. But it’ll be as easy-peasy as joining and using WhatsApp.
Yes but the banned person running their own instance will likely also be defederated…
That’s disappointing to see people who could attract people to the fediverse leave it and with bad memories.
“Leave ‘big tech’ platforms, they’re abusing their influence. Come to fediverse where power tripping mods abuse their position instead!”
Yeah I mean, durr. We knew from reddit et al that this’d happen, and since here it’s not a central platform it’ll be more so. Everyone is their own little dictator, after all.
The issue is more that people talk others into going into the fediverse in particular to avoid moderation abuse on bigger platforms. You do, but you only avoid facebook moderation abuse if you leave facebook. So long as you go anywhere else, you’ll get moderation abused there, sooner or later. The mod abuse is just a natural element of it, unless we’d get a publicly (as in, the people, not a single individual or entity) owned system.
Shitty humans being shitty.
The difference is in the fediverse you’re not locked into one ecosystem. You can pick and choose what’s best for you. In many cases, you can even take your connections and data with you when you move.
Relevant: pinned post.
thx. This case, though, goes beyond a simple case of annoyed users.
Kazim is a bestselling author from Germany, carrying a CNN Journalist Award. He says he got canceled because his posts were not appreciated by the mod. This case concerns the basic working and ethical principles in the fediverse, I would say.
What difference does it make that he is a bestselling author?
That a tiny minority might have heard the name before (“bestselling” really doesn’t mean as much as some people think).
Nope. Take it to !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Buddy…
No one has to let anyone else post on their instance…
If the mods didn’t want them on a community, or admins didn’t want them on their instance, that’s their choice.
Like, there’s ~10 million “mastodon” accounts, over half on Bluesky, and only like 10k on mastodon.world.
This isn’t a big deal
Canceling his posts is stupid and certainly completely exaggerated.
This is not an objective fact but an opinion (whether well-substantiated or not I cannot tell). I am not clicking on a Facebook link to learn more, so thank you for adding some additional context here.
There is also a !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com community that will certainly agree with you that anything done by a .world community moderator is by definition wrong.
As for myself I have no opinion on this currently, but only questions like banning one person does not make a place authoritarian/fascist but a pattern of such events would. All that this post says though is a complaint about the one person - again, whether justified or not I have no idea, as other commenters here are likewise saying, we simply do not currently have the facts to be able to judge properly.
Mastodon has some really nutty moderators with bad faith attitudes, so this doesnt surprise me.
And yeah, declaring ‘kill white people’ as not being a racist statement and grounds for false reporting is a bad faith take in my book.
Interesting article about him here — https://www.dangerousspeech.org/counter-speech-case-studies/hasnain-kazim
He’s doing Mastodon a favour. He can always return to anywhere on the fediverse. Complaining that one moderator on one Mastodon instance was mean isn’t news, but maybe it is if it’s a journalist. Good for him.
That was the only article I could find about him too.
It gave plenty of examples of him trolling bigots, almost nothing about him being a journalist except something he did for a student paper as a teenager
It seems very likely that he was fucking around and got banned for trolling.
Anything can be a bannable offense when someone is enough of a little internet fascist. Probably won’t kill the fedv off entirely but is damn sure not a selling point for anyone not already here.
“Hey, you know the people who get all officious and pissy about the tiniest atom of your every utterance? No, not the altright, the ot- yeah. How would you like to go discuss shit on a forum where half the major instances act like that? No, not Reddit, you wouldn’t have heard of it as it’s pretty niche for some reason. No? Yeah, didn’t think so.”
is there public mastodon modlog?
