During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.
Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.
I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.
Btw, I've gotten really harsh criticism for just saying "Be kind"... that won't stop me from saying it. We can always be kind and I can say "be kind" out of kindness. Encouraging to kindness is not rudeness and I can't wrap my head around it why would it be anything else than focusing on the positive side of things.
There are always people who focus on negativity, pessimism and hate. Whatever hits me, I choose to smile. #Positivity#Kindness#Attitude
@janne There was a better term for it I can't recall correctly, but it is something to do with the notion that you can't tell others what to do or it's considered as condescending, making you look a better person etc... I wish I'd remember that conversation better so I could look for it.
The argument also focuses on entitlement. Like if you are not part of the harassed minority, you can't say "be kind" as it's understood as "don't be angry about the things you have suffered from" etc.
@grumpasaurus@rolle Tone policing when you are justified in being angry is a common abuse tactic. There's also a term called "toxic positivity" when insistence on positive thinking is used as a way to dismiss peoples negative experiences or shut conversations down. Rudeness and anger are part of the spectrum of human expression and there are numerous contexts where they are more than appropriate and kindness is absolutely not.
@rolle
It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder.
~ Aldous Huxley [quoted by his wife Laura Archera in "This Timeless Moment"]
@rolle
You should have been in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020-22. "Be kind" was Jacinda Ardern's mantra to get us through the lockdowns, and we haven't forgotten it.
@rolle People who have never been sysops do not understand what an awful slog it is.
To have the technical skills to keep your shit running AND the people skills to deal with the inevitable assholes AND the patience to deal with the well-meaning but clueless people
Which is why for anything other than small tightly knit instances you really should have an admin/mod team with processes for drawing and training new people from the members.
I’ve thought the same thing. Everyone on single user nodes, either self hosted or managed hosting services, participating in or utilising a range of groups/communities, which are moderated and managed (again either self or service hosted), and, using and contributing to shared block lists.
@researchbuzz Yeah, I guess it kinda depends on the person. It's a responsibility, not necessarily a burden if you do it right. Yet I'm hesitant to grow my server very big usercount-wise for these reasons.
@researchbuzz I'm doing this solo for the time being and enjoying it. The experience helps, been doing this for couple of decades and over 10 years professionally.
@researchbuzz@rolle I've definitely felt it. Sometimes I've just wanted to be a user, particularly when I've been on vacation... or I unlock my phone in the morning and I have a user screaming at me in my email or mentions. It's easy for folks to forget there's a human on the other end.
That said, I'm still incredibly humbled and inspired by the trust our community has put into me, as a custodian of their experience on the fediverse.
@chad@researchbuzz@rolle My instance is still tiny but I made sure I had a co-moderator before I opened it, and found an emergency admin for holiday cover. Everybody needs a holiday, and you can only relax when you know the server is in good hands while you're away.
@rolle I asked an admin of a friendly instance that I know personally to be available for emergencies and gave him server access. I could not recruit anybody from my own instance (https://ailbhean.co-shaoghal.net/), because it's too small to find anybody.
@gunchleoc It's so few Mastodon admins here in Finland that it can be hard to find anyone personally, who owns an instance and would like to help... even the thought of it feels impossible. I could start a poll though. But I know nobody IRL. @researchbuzz@chad
BTW my co-admin does not speak Gaelic either. So, I have 1 co-moderator who speaks enough Gaelic to read posts and participate in the community, and 1 admin who does not speak Gaelic but who can deal with the server.
Now that I think of it, I kinda know one of them personally over the years from IRC. I just don't "know know" anyone like a colleaque or a friend. Perhaps that's not the point, I just need to trust one.
@rolle Exactly. Find somebody to trust. I have met my co-admin a few times, but we don't know each other that well. Just well enough to trust each other with a server.
@rolle agreed. Two of the admins who have burnt out after being harassed were from my professional community. They are good people who wanted to use our profession to host a positive community. What did they get? Death threats, swattings, their families and children were harassed and threatened, and the people who did or even enabled the harassing have faced no consequences.
@rolle A bit of expectation management can't hurt and might reduce the dependency on (not: necessity of) voluntary kindness.
Before joining an instance, I'd like to know what the admins and mods are standing for, and they'd probably like it if people signed up only after they've read the About page, at least.
House rules matter way more on the #fediverse than elsewhere. They should neither be copy-pasted, nor be considered optional, because neither side really cared.
I really don't get why people do that to each other, it's a volunteer service. Admins are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts & on their spare time.
We as the userbase should be kind to one another & thank the team that runs your instance.
If you want something or report an issue, do so politely, it will be fixed, you won't die if it's dead. Shit happens.
As for the full text search issue, if your instance doesn't have it, move to another one that does, don't threaten ppl.
@rolle Nobody deserves harassment or doxxing but the “open text search” guy fell squarely into the first category of admins being dickheads. The conflict that culminated in his departure from the fediverse was kicked off by his persistent harassment of another admin, as well as anyone he discovered talking about him unfavorably (which he tracked down using his non-consensual full text search tool).
Truly appalling behavior from an instance admin tbh.
@rolle Universeodon's instance admin is the most recent example of somebody stepping down. Do you see that as an "unfortunate outcome"? If so, do you think it's an example of an admin being a dickhead, or users being dickheads?
@jdp23 By unfortunate outcome I referred to this recent case of a Finnish admin who attacked his users after being sexist and ableist and then decided "Mastodon is dead to me" and informed to shut everything down without a warning as a revenge. There are similar cases of admins like this...
The latter one is different, it's about users targeting admins. I followed that carnage from the shadows. We have similar interests with supernovae, we have exchanged messages on GitHub, been a big help for me. In that particular case it's the users being dickheads.
@rolle that first case sounds really unfortunate. With Universeodon, though, we see it differently. Byron may have been helpful to you, but he was harassing others.
@rolle My recommendation to admins is that no matter what, don't make it a one person show, even if you have to create sockpuppet moderator accounts to give the appearance of a team enforcing the rules.
Bullies target individuals. They rarely go after groups. Having a team that you're part of not only gives your actions greater authority, but also provides you personal plausible deniability for unpopular decisions. Ideally, communication to your users should be done by the voice of the moderation team, not the admin account. Keep the community management as separate as possible from the technical workings of the site, and keep your interaction with users through the admin account to a minimum.
Context: ran a non-profit publishing website with a public forum for 12 years before burnout caught up. I would have only lasted one if it weren't for the excellence of our moderation team and their ability to help mitigate the toxicity and spam.
@Arotrios For now I'm alone. I'm a hermit. Will take it to future consideration to bring in someone else. But I'm not very social IRL and it's hard to find people who to trust 100%. We'll see what happens.
For the time being I have no stress about this and nothing is really bothering me. All peachy.
@rolle glad to hear it. You'll probably be fine if you've got less than 1k actively posting users. This would probably be a good time to start identifying those users you have that would make good community managers, so that if your instance does scale unexpectedly, you have some backup help in the works.
@Arotrios There are 116 active users right now. I am single handledly reviewing and accepting each user who want to register as I require a reason for signing up. One reason for this is indeed to prevent my instance having any unexpected influx of users, other is to "know" my users. Rest of the reasons here: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/110832413994848333
@rolle I am a sysadmin too, but there is a reason I choose to NOT run my own #mastodon instance vs join (and pay). I see too often where people think smaller instances equal better quality on here. There is the "hit by a bus" risk of solo host. Those don't have a great support staff so you rely on the "I am human" approach. In terms of "service", this is not a good enough reason in my opinion, for a solo instance. You want to run an instance? Cool. But adding users? You become a service.
@rolle I looked it over, but my points are still relevant. "Servers" are a service when there are users present and running an instance solo, is not a good practice for a service. I am not saying to not run servers/instances, I am just saying to not run them solo OR invest/join hosting other instances, in general.
@bennysp Servers are a service. But why should it change anything? I take comfort in the fact my company is financially backing this instance. We are a team of 11 people. They don't currently take part in any other way than to be there.
It's not the best practice, but it can work when you have a passionate and committed person as admin. I even know a single person hosting companies who have been fine for decades. In the overall picture it is not very wise, but it can work if the contingency plan is in place.
We have a two person system administration in our company and large corporates trust with us their servers. We do have a team working for us in the data center though, but only two people are the main responsible ones. It's been all fine for 10 years now.
@rolle Two people are better than one, so that is good, of course.
Sysadmins know all about how well single points of failure work in the long run and it is no different with the human resource aspect too. I am not talking about finances, scale or passion here. I am talking about when life happens and there is no human backup that has SOP and is ingrained in the setup/support actively.
@bennysp There are always options. Most of the things can be automated. Servers are usually running without a human. I don't take that gloomy approach. If I was to die, there is not much I can do about it.
The actual problem appears when somebody says something hurtful in a 'kind' way, somebody else gets triggered by that - and everybody piles on the person being hurt because they dared express their hurt in a less-than-ideal way. Meanwhile, the original jerk just whistles on, their bad behaviour unchallenged.
IMHO 'be kind' works as the default setting, but you should be very careful before calling anyone out on breaking that rule. Always look at the whole picture.
@PeltonenJanne Saying something hurtful is not kindness. Surely it's subjective what is hurtful, but kindness and hurting are kinda not part of the same scenario.
@rolle@CartyBoston Yes. That's why the apostrophes. My point is, if someone says something hurtful in a soft manner (in a 'kind' way) then that might get unnoticed by others where a strong reaction wouldn't.
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