Mastodon.social once was the glorious flagship instance for Mastodon. However, nowadays, it seems to be deep in control of German censorship.
I’m running my own GotoSocial instance for a while now. A few weeks ago, I found this in my admin panel:
Someone on mastodon.social reported me for supposedly supporting the German right-wing party. And their moderation team seemingly found it funny to act on it. Even though nowhere in their rules it says anything about this even being any offence.
Sadly, I don’t see the toot in question, however, the only interaction on that day I had with someone on mastodon.social was this reply of mine:
That’s all. I merely questioned blindly believing the German Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling (which is bound by instructions of the ruling government, by the way) of the right-wing party being “assuredly extremist” based on some secret report that nobody is allowed to see. (And which later turned out to be completely unsubstantial as many people suspected.) Nothing else. That seemingly was enough for mastodon.social‘s moderation team to shadowban (or what the manual calls “limiting”, formerly known as “silencing”) my account. But effectively this is a shadow ban – as people pointed out to them in 2018.
And this shadowban basically prevents me from interacting with anyone on mastodon.social that isn’t already following me. And if I wasn’t an admin on my own instance, I wouldn’t even get that notification in the screenshot above. The only symptoms you can notice if you know what to look for: Nobody from mastodon.social (that isn’t following you) reacts to your toots anymore. Even replies to people on there are not seen by anyone on that instance apart from your existing followers.
The second symptom is: You can’t even follow people on there anymore. Well, according to their documentation, you can – the people in question would just have to manually approve your followership. However, I can only guess that they might be suspicious and ignore that – as it’s not normal behaviour unless they’ve explicitly turned it on for every new follower. This is the status of two accounts on there that I’ve tried to follow a few days ago:
You’re basically prevented from contacting and/or following any non-follower – just because one single person reported you and their moderation team couldn’t be bothered to check whether that report was justified or not.
And the best part: There’s no way of contacting anyone to shed some light on it or get the ban lifted. If you contact their moderation team, you’ll get an auto-reply that clearly states that they’ll only help if you’re a user on their server. If you’re not, tough luck.
I’ve also contacted their staff email address, but was completely ignored there, too.
I’m cut off from (most of) mastodon.social because of an irritated user and a moderator not doing their job properly.
Sorry to hear that; I don’t know too much on German politics, but I feel like your stance of being suspicious of people using the government to attack political rivals without giving a reason is the only logical response to something like that in any democracy. I’ll hazard a guess and say that the aggressive defederation and community wars are a big part of why the fediverse has been struggling lately.