I hate seeing posts like this with blatant misinformation garnering thousands upon thousands of notes so, here’s how Mastodon actually works for those that aren’t familiar with it (and also why you should recognize people calling it “a meeting hub for pedophiles” and “completely unsupervised” as just blatantly incorrect / fearmongering)
Mastodon is different from any popular social media you are probably accustomed to- tumblr, twitter, instagram, reddit, etc. It’s different in that mastodon is free software that can be set up and run by anyone. Mastodon is based on an open standard (called Activitypub) designed to be able to freely share Content in between “federated” servers.
If those words flew over your head, I’ll give an example. Basically, just imagine mastodon like e-mail. There are thousands of websites out there that you could sign up for to get an email address, such as gmail, yahoo, outlook, protonmail, etc. You could even set up your own email server if you have the technical know-how to do so.
Yet, despite the fact that all of these individual websites are owned and operated by different companies/groups, all with varying rules and methods of operation, no matter what email service you sign up for anywhere on the internet, any email address can send emails to anyone else on the internet, regardless of where they’re signed up for.
Mastodon works the same way! So, mastodon is not a single website, but a “federated network” of many different “instances” that all have their own staff, moderation policies, etc. Anyone can start up an instance at any time for whatever they want.
There’s no single person or group that controls the mastodon network as a whole, and therefor no single point of failure for it. There are simply many instances with many different rulesets and communities, and if you find out an instance you’re on allows for nasty stuff to be posted or shared, you can just jump ship to another instance. There are tools they give you to do this easier, as well.
https://joinmastodon.org/ explains a lot about how mastodon works if you’re not satisfied with my explanation.
Most popular mastodon instances have very strict rules against pedophilia, as well as even fascism/nazism or hate speech, much stricter than you would ever find on twitter or tumblr. There are in fact instances that allow such vile content, but most popular instances block the other instances that do allow nazism/cp outright. If the instance you are looking into is lax on pedophilia then just join another instance.
As you can see in the screenshot in the previous reblog, someone explains that the instance mentioned by the op is blocked outright by mastodon.social, the “flagship” mastodon instance. So even the most populous general-use mastodon instance blocks that kind of garbage.
NO, mastodon is not perfect. It has many flaws and problems with its core infrastructure that make it hostile to creative types hoping to get discovered on mastodon, and a lot of the lead developers make some (imo) pretty stupid decisions at times, sometimes dragging the whole community back. But, I dunno about you, but I’m not asking for perfection. Just something that works and is based on values which give more power and discretion to the end user.
TL;DR, op is spreading misinformation / fearmongering, for every mastodon server that condones pedophilia there’s 100 that blacklist that server outright and have strict rules against disgusting filth like that, including the ““main”“ mastodon server.
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