The starting point of this discussion was spankalee's statement that "Making your Mastodon account provider also be a community is a fatal flaw of Mastodon". I pointed out that this was largely not the case.

The Fediverse presently has something north of 14 million registered accounts: <https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11110302515627643...>

I'd responded with what factors are distinguished between specific instances, noting specifically which of those affect broader community interactions and which don't. That's based on my own participation on Mastodon since 2016-7, across a number of different instances.

For the rest, I'm describing both in narrative and using actual instance and sampled data what the impacts of moderation are. You don't seem to like either my use of data, or how I narrate it, but I can in fact assure you that both correspond strongly to my experience over the past seven years. In particular. I'll note that the moderation rationales I'm reporting come directly from toot.cat, and that though I'm friends with the admin I'm not a moderator there myself. You're the one who's editorialised those rationales.

The impact of blocks is best measured by how many active Fediverse profiles are affected by them. That's something which instance block counts addresses poorly. My sampled check helps validate my own gut impression, again, that most blocks are against small, and often inactive instances. You're ... completely ignoring this fact in your umbrage.

I'd also make the argument that harassing people for their backgrounds, beliefs, and lifestyles which are in no way harmful to others is highly disruptive. You may choose to deny this, but that's not well supported by extensive experience and research.

A key function and attraction of the platform is that individual instances can make their own individual federation options. And yet, even with extensive moderation the total impacts seem fairly minor. I'll concede that current mechanisms make this less fully transparent than it might be, but the information is available, and in general issues around instance-level moderation is an ongoing area of Mastodon and Fediverse development. But if you're so opposed to such a fundamental aspect of the Fediverse, you'll probably not find the overall concept particularly attractive.

I'm interested in question of the magnitude of blocking in terms of affected profiles, by the way, and am looking for better ways to get a broader read of how widely blocks are used on different instances, and how many active Fediverse members are restricted by such blocks. Right now, that involves my manually looking up individual instances in a GUI browser session, though I believe there may be APIs which can help with that.

Just for grins, I'm looking at infosec.exchange, itself moderated ("Limited") by toot.cat (on the basis i.e. hosts law enforcement and intel agency accounts). Jerry Bell doesn't strike me as especially socially sensitive.

Infosec.exchange moderates 145 instances, 137 are Suspended, 8 are Limited.

Reasons (complete list):

114 Reason not available
3 Hate speech
3 Unmoderated racism
2 Part of free/hate speech network
2 Violent extremism
1 Admin uses hate speech
1 Almost exclusively an instance for posting porn.
1 An instance dedicated to bots that autopost animated/anime porn. Pretty massive draw on resources at best. Going to get someone fired for what’s in the timeline at worst.
1 At owner instance request
1 Blocked to resolve confusing bleed over due to Glaceon blocking infosec.exchange
1 Bypasses blocks and makes all toots public without consent
1 Generally awful free speech instance supporting racial and homophobic hate
1 Highly offensive and violent hate speech instance
1 Highly offensive content
1 Hosts far right content, offensive racial memes, hate speech, and clearly attempting to out MAGA truthsocial.com
1 Mutual silence in place
1 Racism promoted by admin
1 Should be obvious
1 Significant source of hate speech, racial slurs, and targeted harassment.
1 Supports/tolerates hate speech.
1 The instance appears to be up to no good. Block in place due to shenanigans from a user on that instance, will reassess.
1 Twitter scraper creating account mirrors
1 Under review
1 Unmoderated homophobia
1 Unmoderated racism and hate speech
1 Unmoderated spam and other nonsense

Again, this on an instance which is not particularly following the Left's social Zeitgeist.

One of the "Limited" moderations is on toot.cat, as a mutual silencing.

I've not compared the T.C. and I.E. lists for shared blocks, though I see a few.

One of the largest Mastodon instances is mastodon.social (operated by Mastodon's author, Eugen Rochko). Moderated: 235, Suspended: 220, Limited: 15, rationales:

68 Third-party bots
64 Hate speech
43 Inappropriate content
23 Harassment
18 Spam
4 Misinformation
4 Transphobia
3 MAPs
2 Reason not available
1 Bot that announces blocks
1 Botnet
1 Conspiracy theories
1 Mirroring other Mastodon accounts without permission
1 Misinformation and conspiracy theories
1 Preparing for announced shutdown

For those three instances, unique / shared blocks are:

582 1 (blocked by only one instance)
77 2 (blocked by two)
40 3 (blocked by all three)

Finally, I also recommend moderator dang's HN guidance: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366825>