mastodon.social-misc

This is already the case for Mastodon instances. There's a list of servers that are not federated into many servers [1] because of hateful or plain illegal content. I think Matrix is more akin to email than it is to Twitter and Facebook like Mastodon is, though. If you wish to contact someone on another server then that's an active decision by you. If someone wants to force themselves into your server, the most they can do is spam chat invites. There's no illegal content or filtering policy on the server that can prevent that from happening in most cases. The fact that Matrix is e2ee helps; server moderators cannot see what you're discussing, let alone censor you. The core problem is that one of the ways we as a species prevent bad behaviour from spreading is ostracising groups of people who exhibit such behaviour. I strongly believe that

There's a feed for the server you're on. So if you pick a "bad" server (aka the culture there is different from what you like), that becomes useless, more or less. Of course you can always just follow whoever and only pay attention to your following feed. Also, some nodes maintain blocklists of other nodes. [0] So while you can still follow those people and see them in your following feed, posts from users on that node will -not- appear in the public feed (posts from nodes in the federated network). https://instances.social/ exists to help you find a node but I'm not sure how up to date or accurate it is. [0]: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc

I understand why companies directed specifically at people not using the "normal" services end up as bastion of idiots, but with mastodon I think most of the flagship instances take a stance in this and block such things, see for example the official mastodon.social blacklist: https://github.com/Gargron/mastodon.social-misc. And so do most servers aspiring to be a community-led alternative to centralized social media...