I feel it's mostly not stupid power trips, but some more benign psychological effect: you left Twitter, set up your own Mastodon instance and told everyone how cool it is that the power to police your community (your safe space) isn't in Elon's hands, but in "ours".
Now some trivial fight happens on your server, or a misunderstanding. You could sit back and observe the situation for a bit, but damn, you went this whole Mastodon route, so you can finally act! The pressure to act is immense, even it it may be self-imposed.
Now add all the other people who feel similar pressures and are therefore quick to call you complicit. The post is there, what else do you need? Of course you must ban, de-federate, whatever. Now! That was the whole point of it. Even if nobody actually demands it, you can imagine it quite well. Better act before someone calls you out.
How did people in IRC handle it back in the time? By having a mostly homogenous group of users?
No. IRC was also a sort of global namespace. There's no such thing (that I can see) in the fediverse. Handles are closer to RSS links than they are to Twitter accounts, and the tooling just blurs the difference.
I feel it's mostly not stupid power trips, but some more benign psychological effect: you left Twitter, set up your own Mastodon instance and told everyone how cool it is that the power to police your community (your safe space) isn't in Elon's hands, but in "ours".
Now some trivial fight happens on your server, or a misunderstanding. You could sit back and observe the situation for a bit, but damn, you went this whole Mastodon route, so you can finally act! The pressure to act is immense, even it it may be self-imposed.
Now add all the other people who feel similar pressures and are therefore quick to call you complicit. The post is there, what else do you need? Of course you must ban, de-federate, whatever. Now! That was the whole point of it. Even if nobody actually demands it, you can imagine it quite well. Better act before someone calls you out.
How did people in IRC handle it back in the time? By having a mostly homogenous group of users?