I always take it as a challenge. Like “hey, if you can get past the information goalie, you can find out what the shooter put in his stupid manifesto we published for millions to read!” Or “hey, if you can solve the E-Sphinx’s Riddle, you get to read this research on whether or not we’ll have a climate in the next ten years!” Helps take the edge off sometimes.

Wow, really?? What am I doing slumming it on my phone with Reader Mode then, hahaha

California is like the third largest economy in the world alone, dude. Lol their biggest export is not “making things more expensive”…

Your point is moot because it doesn’t demonstrate censorship, because you can easily make an account that isn’t blocked.

so I could no longer access these instances

Incorrect; you could still access those instances, seeing and reading posts; you weren’t able to post or comment to them yourself, and crucially are able to do so if you make a new instance that was federated with it.

my ability to access content got censored without my say

Okay, so you just don’t know what “getting censored” means. This isn’t how this word is used. You don’t say “my ability to read books at the library was censored”, you say “they censored library books so I have less ability to read them”.

When you block an instance, you are censoring users from accessing it

No. That’s not what censoring means, for one thing, and for another, you can still access the instance, just not participate in it.

The core of the issue is the definition of fucking censorship! It’s been a semantic issue the whole time!

Dude… “post” and “access” aren’t the same word, and you’re getting unnecessarily energetic about this just because I disagree you’re being CENSORED

If you can view it, you can access it, dude. And the point is that you’re eminently free to participate in other instances that don’t restrict you, and that there are people using the site who aren’t you who might want posting restricted from some communities.

No offense but I don’t especially care that you don’t like how it works, because my point is just that it’s not censorship. Demonstrably you don’t need to make a new account to access other instances, you can still see and engage with those instances by deliberately interacting with them.

Why would you federate yourself in an instance that you disagree with the moderation on??

Lol as the fediverse gets large this problem will shrink, not grow, because more groups with different moderators and different moderation styles but the same communities will crop up.

Well, no? Because you can still make a new instance to engage with that content? And because you can still see it if you deliberately look for it? Like I literally said?

…Because how is it censorship?

You can literally access all content available on every instance from any account.

Making an account is free and takes two minutes, I literally just did it.

You can comment on any content you’re federated with from any account.

You aren’t being suppressed from speaking at all.

At least they have the courtesy of being disguised. Lol maybe you remember how on the nose the trump-stump posting was.

“LOCK HER UP” (6,765 upvotes)

I mean, yeah, but my point is more that they were uniquely shitty for actively fostering the echo chamber and regularly intentionally breaking containment onto All.

I distinctly remember in 2016 how many pro-trump posts would pop onto the top of All with thousands of T_D upvotes, because the mods would pin posts they’d want to rally behind to the top of the subreddit. It really wasn’t largely the same content.

Almost like tankie subreddits weren’t gaming the Reddit vote system to push literal propaganda to the front page for years or something

No, needing to make a new account is not censorship, get over yourself.

I’ll say I spent more time and had more fun jailbreaking my old Nintendo consoles than I did playing the countless hours of games I put on them.

There’s something really magical about having to fold a paper clip and put it into the joycon rails to MAYBE get your Switch to boot into Recovery Mode.