My limited understanding is that there’s an association between the shark’s colors and the trans flag, and that this predates that instance in the trans world.

Honestly, I don’t even care if people want to run a censored instance – like, some people legitimately do not want to see some content – but I do think that they should be clear that they are doing so, which it sounds like they were not in this case.

Also does make one wonder whether other material might be missing on other topics from other communities.

ponders

As a general solution to making instance censorship visible, I suppose that it’d be technically-possible to write a bot that could spider Threadiverse instances and look for discrepancies between views of a community, provide a summary of instance censorship activity. If an admin wanted to silently censor content and wanted to go to enough work to make the censorship silent, they could try to identify the bot and only show posts to it, but I imagine that it’d be more work, especially if it acted anonymously and from a VPN.

As a bonus, that could also flag post propagation problems of the sort I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, kind of be a “Threadiverse health monitor”.