CynAq

Smoothie

there’s always that one bootlicker

I’d say it’s exactly as productive as saying “It’s no big deal if Meta joins the fediverse, It’ll be fiiiiiine”.

We should watch everything very carefully.

Read this. You’ll understand the issue a little better.

I just preemptively blocked the community for my account. I’d recommend everyone do the same until, and if they prove to be a problem.
I think instead of calling for pre-blocks or defederation of entire instances, we have to be vigilant and keep a close eye on the discussions going on around us.

I’m saying this not because I’m an “enlightened centrist” living in a delusion of tolerance or a fascist in disguise. I am as left leaning, antifascist, and antiauthoritarian as they get. I’m just saying this as I know from experience that there’s no real way to eliminate people with bigoted views from our communities other than on an individual basis.

Ban an entire instance, you’ll still have to block the individuals if they come one by one to stir shit up on your turf. Just skip the first part and go for the individual communities and users. They will simply find each other and form groups, as instances or otherwise anyway.

I know it’s not ideal, but there’s no real way to prevent these fascist groups from forming anywhere there’s a large enough number of people. We can only block our own interaction with them and form counter groups, and actively fight against their bigotry.

I believe this is the sad truth we all have to live with, at least for the time being, because I can’t see defederation as an effective tool.

What I don’t understand with the “wait and see” people is the presupposition that it means to federate day 1 and see if they fuck things up to decide if defederation is needed. Their reasoning often includes “two clicks” as if the amount of effort defederation takes was the concern people had.

“Let’s wait and see how they behave first, and then decide if we can federate safely” is just as much a “wait and see” stance, and it should take two clicks as well.

Why do we have to get exposed first and react later when we can observe first and then decide if we want it or not?

I think (and hope) so too. Some pro leniency stances from mastodon bigwigs got me a little worried, that’s all.

They will drown us out even if they don’t want in that case. Them just using the service normally will flood all our feeds with posts from their service based on the sheer number of them.

That’s why I always end my emails with “regards”.

We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.

We also need a way to decouple everyone’s personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.

Storage ain’t cheap and it definitely ain’t infinite.

This is a way harder problem than “the internet” being a bit more mindful can solve easily.

Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.

Absolutely right. What makes or breaks any social media platform is the ease of forming large communities (which goes hand in hand with the number of total active users) first and the user experience second.

“Fediverse” seems to suffer greatly from a UX point of view, mostly due to decentralization, which creates this isolation effect for newcomers.

Take mastodon vs twitter for example. For someone used to signing up for twitter and instantly gaining access to virtually everything the platform has to offer, mastodon has a big threshold to jump over before you can have a twitter-like experience. At least it feels like it until you get used to the experience. That’s still the biggest barrier in front of large scale adoption of decentralized social media platforms.

It would be good to have a list of subs going private. It might incentivize other subs to join in protest.