But regular people care about being threatened and hateful conduct. On twitter countless reports go unanswered, and it's pretty clear at this point that there is no intent to make the situation better. On Masto when you report someone or a post for being abusive you've got an actual human (your instance admin) who will look at it and actually do something about it (like blocking that user for the entire instance).
If the instance admin becomes abusive, or treats the server like his own petty little fiefdom, what can be done about it? Why should I trust an instance admin?
If I start acting like a jerk, them my users will start leaving. Pretty soon I don't have anyone left except people who like being treated like that. In my experience that will probably mean they're jerks too.
And thus pretty soon my instance is "that instance run by that jerk who lets her users be jerks". At that point, admins on other instances stop federating with my instance. Eventually the only other instances who are willing to talk to mine are also run by and full of jerks, and I am amidst a hell of my own creation.
So that is, as I see it, the external forces acting on me to try and be a chill admin who's nice to her users. It's a lot easier for them to leave my server and stay in contact with people elsewhere than it is to leave Twitter.
One of the ways in which admins often treat instances like their own petty fiefdom is cutting off communication with other instances that don't toe the line. So sure, you can move instances - just don't rely on being able to contact your friends anymore if you do. (Some instances even have a whitelist of instances that are allowed to follow and interact with their users, with everyone else blocked.)
In good old times we had IRC, where you could go to channel op and report an abusive message. Or to bot master, or to server admin. Depending on personality of that guy (usually they were guys, not girls), it could end with a ban for the offender or personal attack on you. The problem with actual human is that actually you cannot trust him to govern without being accountable, even if you know him and even if currently you are friends. When I checked several large Mastodon instances (>1000 users), I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy, which means that their admins are not accountable and you have no more rights than a slave of a pharaoh. Mastodon instance may protect you, but is not required to do so and there's no guarantee that it will not support your offender or it will not suddenly abuse you.
> I was not able to find any signs of a formal and legally binding policy
Every single centralized service (Hacker News included) reserves the right to ban anyone for any reason. Twitter may have a policy, but in practice it's no different than anyone else's Code of Conduct. It's certainly not legally binding.
Regular users don't care about whether someone could theoretically become abusive in the future - maybe they should care, but they don't. They just look at the track record and decide if they trust that person right now.
And right now, Mastadon instances are better at moderation than Twitter. You're worried about an instance admin theoretically not protecting you in the future; Twitter already, today, doesn't protect you.
That's exactly the point: regular users don't care, so they won't consider Mastodon based on whether it can be trusted or not. For those who care Mastodon pretends to provide a trustworthy service, but in fact it's no better than Twitter or anything else. Even if current situation with moderation is better, it's the same as to advertise participating in some deadly stunt on the ground that "noone died yet". Where are the guarantees that an instance admin that is "out of patience" (you can find such example somewhere in comments here) would not decide to ban you from her instance in a bad mood?
But in practice small instances are better at this than large platforms, and in practice flexible moderation policies are pretty observably better at curbing abuse than ridged ones are. The point isn't that Mastadon is perfect, it's that it's better. In business, better is good enough.
A lot of people are OK with a middle ground where moderators remain, but are closely associated with their communities to reduce communication problems and increase their stake in doing a good job. Is it really crazy to believe that someone might want to trust other people, but also want to have more selection over who they trust?
You're here, so I would hazard a guess that you're OK with that middle ground too. HN admins could theoretically turn this site into 4Chan or Reddit if they wanted to. But we both trust them not to, and the fact that they theoretically have the power is not enough to make either of us throw up our hands and say, "well there's no difference, and nobody will care, and there's no reason for anybody post on HN instead of Reddit."
There are a lot of people here posting on a dedicated tech-community Reddit clone about why fringe Twitter is a bad idea.
significantly less toxicity and content they don't want to see in the first place. Twitter is like standing in the centre of a crowded mall on a hot summer day. Mastodon is a small friendly pub.
I guess what it offers them is social media that actually maintains your peace of mind to a degree.
Open anarchic communities are not toxic only while they are young and fresh. Eventually they will grow and either establish a set of formal and legally binding ceremonies with unsatisfactory result (actually I don't know any really good decentralized example here - Wikipedia is the closest one) or become toxic and die (IRC).
the point of mastodon communities is that they are not anarchic. The fact that they're human scaled and moderated is what allows them to impose sets of rules that actually make spending a few hours there palatable. (The same advantage that say, the smaller hackernews community has over a 500k population subreddit)
That's the advantage they have over twitter, they're able to set community rules that fit to the respective communities. It's twitter that suffers from the anarchy.
When twitter users are setting up filters and mass blocks to remove all the nazis and trolls and conspiracy theorists from their feed, they're essentially just trying to painfully recreate what you get in a mastodon sized community by design.
Can you give an example of mastodon community with clearly defined and legally binding policy, that protects rights of regular users? I could not find any (doesn't mean that they don't or cannot exist, of course) and highly doubt that any admin there has motivation or resources to develop it and properly implement. Pure declarations like "we are good fellas and don't allow abuse" mean nothing - they are not enforceable and regular user cannot sue instance admin for violations.
As a Mastodon instance admin, you just made an argument for me to never have a clearly-defined and legally-binding policy. Thanks.
The main thrust of my user agreement is "hi I am queer lady who is out of patience with people being jerks and wants a nice place to talk, if you piss me off you can go find a new instance or start your own". It's not much more formal than that, either.
Coffeehouse is heavily regulated. There's consumer rights protection, all sorts of safety inspections etc. The only thing that requires your trust in a coffeehouse is the quality of their coffee and the only damage you'll get with the breach of that trust is the price of a cup. Being banned from a social network harms you more than that.
What does Mastodon offer that regular people care about?