I would also add that isn’t empty talk like “Well he said it once, non biggie”. That statement by POTUS itself drove the national policy other countries. When POTUS says “other nations you are with us or are our enemies”, that matters.
That is a signal the reverberates around with “do we dare to anger USA on this one”. The Afghan war partisipants list is long and contains some not so obvious participants often doing rather small token participations. Which I think is exactly “Well we have to show we are with USA”.
For example here in Finland in the after action report of Finnish participation in Afghanistan tells the reason wasn’t building peace, it wasn’t even combat experience. It was “coalition and alliance building” aka showing USA “we are with them”.
In the after action study one of the interviewed decision makers literally directly quoted:
Yhdysvallat sanoi 9/11 jälkeen: olette joko meidän kanssa tai meitä vastaan.”
United States said after 9/11: You are either with us or against us.
Right above explaining how it was 20 year long very unpopular operation caused losses and achieved nothing in Afghanistan, but hey the Finnish NATO application will go through with flying colors.
The whole time the media blitz was about “Helping and building peace in Afghanistan”. When in reality we went in because USA publicly extorted pretty all of west to show colors.
This isn’t only in Finland in other European after action reports have shown similar “We went in, because Bush publicly demanded show of loyalty”.
Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.
At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.
Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.
Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.
So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.
Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.