On Mastodon and Nazis

maloki
5 min readJul 12, 2019
mastodon mascot

For the past 2 years Mastodon has been promoted as a place without Nazis. Anyone familiar with social media technology knows that it’s not necessarily possible to entirely make such a promise, especially with a network which allows users to set up their own village to invite their friends.

The Fediverse is the interconnected villages of decentralized alternatives of popular social networks such as YouTube (PeerTube), Twitter (Mastodon), Facebook (Hubzilla), SoundCloud (FunkWhale), Instagram (Pixelfed), to mention a few.
It isn’t immune to Nazis, but offers the tools to everyday users, and local leaders (administrators and moderators) to protect their village from them. On Twitter you can report, and block, but then you have to sit around and wait for that content to maybe get removed or maybe not. On Mastodon you get the chance to join a village, where you know that the admin has made a promise to you that Nazis, racist, or homophobes etc. aren’t welcome there. If your admin doesn’t fulfill this promise you have the power to move to a different village. With Twitter you simply can’t do that.

Nazis on the Fediverse: Gab

On the 4th of July, a big group of Nazi’s migrated into their own little village: Gab.com. They used Mastodon’s software to run the village. Gab has been a home to Nazis for a very long time, and…

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maloki

I write passionately about things like ADHD, Mental Health, Mastodon, and Games. You can support me by donating to my GoFundMe https://gofund.me/39b69b10