Social-media sites are organically self-organizing things. If you piss people off too much, or the site otherwise implodes (tumblr), people will reorganize without you somewhere else.

The ironic thing is the place where all the tumblr people reorganized was twitter. Twitter melting down will be like 9/11 a third time for the horny community, lol. Reddit looking pretty temperamental too (also hugely botted/inorganic).

Anyway, in the debate over Cloudflare dropping kiwifarms, and in Twitter's pre-Musk censorship of some kinds of hate speech/violent rhetoric/vaccine denialism/misinformation/etc, there was always a "but what if you get a turbo badmin who starts blocking stuff that everybody likes, what do you think about censorship then!?!?" argument, and this is the reason that's always been a stupid argument. Just like tumblr, we are now watching what happens when a turbo badmin takes power and starts banning all the weapons he doesn't like and kicking anyone who kills him. And social media is largely routing around him and reforming elsewhere.

Systems like Mastodon and Discord work well, for entirely different reasons than broadcast-style media like Twitter. Twitter is an audience of billions, you don't have any interpersonal connection with most people, and there have to be some rules about what the platform gets used for. Discord is 50 people you know from some aspect of your life, and if people violate the social norms of the group, they get ostracized or exiled. I have some groups that are casually professional, and some that are edgy, some that are groups of friends I've known a long time, and some that are just interest-specific. Some places have the horny channel and that's fine. Other places that'd get you the spray emoji at best.

If a server mod starts to be a real dick, such that it's sustainable to start a new community... people will start a new community. The "what if we get a power-tripping owner/moderator who nobody likes who starts censoring something you like!?" scenario literally cannot occur in social media (short of net-wide censorship ala china) because it just gets routed around just like tumblr or twitter or even facebook (nobody under 50 is on there anymore) etc. Social media ultimately derives its value from its users, and if the social compact drifts too far from the community values (whatever that community is), then users will leave and rebuild without you. It's not a zero threshold, but there is a point where they'll do it.

Mastodon is, ultimately, just self-hosted discord communities, with the facebook/twitter-style Personal Feed facade built on top. And O(1) moderation works really well at those scales. Still some performance/network benefits to be gained from "centralized" instances, but as long as you can have multiple accounts there's no reason you can't have multiple "identities" for different aspects of your life. The highbrow hacker pods and the horny furry/anime pods don't have to interact.

But in terms of censorship: nazis get kicked, that's good, nobody should have to host nazis on their personal instance that they pay money for. If they can't find any reputable server to take them, and they start their own pod... other pods can just block them. That's fine too, you're not guaranteed an audience. Nobody has to provide you with services, including peering/interchange. So don't get it twisted, this is already a problem that's been addressed (for spam if nothing else). Just because you have a decentralized platform - doesn't mean everyone is going to give you a platform.

The question with "edge content"/"probing-the-exact-boundaries-of-platform-bans" shit like nazi shit and kiwifarms has always been "I know it when I see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy". But everyone generally knows it goes against the social norms of basically everyone. And now that can be organically reflected in these sorts of peering decisions, everyone does know it when they see it, and they won't peer with it.

Musk buying twitter didn't buy him the public's consent to invite nazis back onto the platform, and social media is always shifting, like water. When someone violates those norms, it routes around them. And with Mastodon it's just built in. It’s not anti-censorship at all - it’s just that what’s being enforced is finer-grain community norms, as decided by lots of individual communities.