That said, the recent spam attacks show the need for more advanced tools for server admins and mods to share information. The call for such tools became a point of contention during the first twitter migration last year and the fediverse and mastodon missed out on the support of black users, trans users, and members of other groups targeted by bad actors due to was was perceived to be unresponsiveness and "free speech absolutism" by some of the big players.
There was a sense that we were being told "this place is a paradise we don't need any tools to fight spam and hate"
I wonder what could have happened if there was simply... better listening. A better response to those concerns. It did not help that some "influencers" have always been invested in staying on twitter/X and even as they complain about what a terrible place it is they have no desire to build anything better. Because they have social power there and change might mean losing it. 2/
So maybe it was an uphill battle and all the listening in the world couldn't have changed the outcome. Which is that the fediverse has become a substantial community for academics, and some arts people but NOT the new home of Black Twitter or left commentators. (among other groups)
I think that the fediverse is the top community for leftists, although not "left commentators" if that means influencers: the natural home for influencers of all kinds is Bluesky.
People suggesting block list sharing do have to take the history of the Bad Space project into account: a bad-faith project that attempted to block kolektiva.social and pretty much every other large leftist server, as well as a long list of servers favored by trans people. Bad Space supporters said that any pushback to the idea that one's server was going to be listed on a global block list must be due to anti-Blackness.
@RichPuchalsky@futurebird I have not encountered any block list projects without the “just trust me bro you gotta block all these” flaw. I’m proposing that these list grow organically out of each server choosing to share or not share who they block (along with what was blocked and any notes but anonymized) this information could be made not annon for servers that choose to share lists.
This is very different from the giant spreadsheet someone once said we had to block.
I would like to see tools for sharing blocks. Something very "opt in" and wiki-like where information could accumulate.
For example when viewing a flagged post could we see how many participating servers have blocked it too? Could we have a way for servers to be "friends" and blocks from friends would be highlighted?
A lot of work is being duplicated If the attacks get really bad people will get frustrated.
"This user's server is blocked by 13 servers you follow. Join them?" 4/
A one way system of absolute punishment doesn't have much space for either justice or forgiveness. There's going to be plenty of people who are on a journey to civility who will need walking back from the wilderness.
If reports can be forwarded to the original server, then why not forwarded to an actual arbiter? A system of collecting evidence and providing more nuanced and reversible blocking for edge cases.
I mean, you will never get the whole Fediverse agree on the same arbiter (nor should it).
Which means that each instance has to choose which arbiter they agree upon, and if the instance that wants to use the blocklist and the instance that wants to be removed from the blocklist do not agree on who should be the arbiter, you keep the current fragmentation.
Still better than nothing, I guess.
@futurebird hmmm now I'm considering making something like this. I'll see if there are admin panels with plugin capability, otherwise a separate tool
And taking @doctormo's criticism into account as well, because I think that's solvable while still making/using the tool
@futurebird I've long had this idea for like...reputational moderation. Something where if someone has a good rep and is trusted, their decision on moderation activities like blocks is more trusted. I wonder if you could build this as a kind of social graph, where folks could publish their blocks and the reasons, and you could indicate you agreed, and then if enough people you trusted had blocked someone, you would autoblock them...
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