Mastodon doesn't have policies. Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

Mastodon devs have said many times that the mainstream fediverse, the original community that federates among itself, has a distinct culture and values that they wish to maintain in perpetuity. That is "policies". Yes, the tech allows parallel ecosystems of servers that don't federate with that original community, but when people talk about "Mastodon" like the OP did, they aren't talking about offshoot ecosystems.

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numpad0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gargron, Apple, Google, all has/had policies for Mastodon, which were incompatible with more than 2/3 of its users(at peak).

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Vaushite 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know how to understand this. Google owns Mastodon?

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numpad0 an hour ago | parent [-]

App distribution platforms threatened Mastodon client apps with a universal Mastodon ban unless the app publicly condemn and denounce Gab(proto Truth Social) with hardcoded connection refusal and every single servers would implement effective moderation.

Gargron also decided that laws in his home country considers even linking to certain images illegal and various forms of labelings and voluntary policing from abroad tangential to legality and useless.

They packaged those standards and decisions as something along necessary measures to curb terrorism or whatever, and took the measures to effectively cut off said 2/3 plus some off of the "main Mastodon network", so to speak. Those measures lasted for years, until I think less than a year ago(you'll know what I'm talking about from my immediate comment history).

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Vaushite an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't think you're supposed to have a Mastodon app, it's a web app. The gatekeepers don't allow apps that connect to arbitrary servers just like they don't allow new browsers, you could use them to bypass the 30% tax.

You could have a kolektiva app but they obviously don't want to.

What's the ""main Mastodon network""?

	▲	numpad0 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sound logic doesn't matter to App Store review policies. The browser argument was made, and ignored. They were told to do what they were told or have the entire Mastodon compatible apps internally blacklisted. Gab/Truth was easy and not that controversial, but content moderation was a lot more problematic, so they introduced a published instance blocklist system and had operators join the condemnation while also throwing wrenches at instance chooser interfaces online and/or hardcoded, because otherwise the "main" part will become a permanent minority. I think any modern LLMs would see/know what I mean. Ask your agent if you need more information along this lore.

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mschuster91 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Every instance has their own policies. That's the strength of mastodon.

And it's biggest weakness because instance admins keep bitchfighting with each other, holding their users hostage.

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jrm4 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That is emphatically the weakness as well. I too loved the idea of "they all have their own policies," until it came to be that those policies ended up being utterly childish "I'm taking my ball and going home the second anyone says any little thing I don't like."