Over the course of this multi-part series, I'll discuss Mastodon and the fediverse's long-standing problems with abuse and harassment; the strengths and weaknesses of current tools like instance blocking and blocklists; the approaches emerging tools like #TheBadSpace and #Fediseer take, along with potential problems; paths to improving the situation; and how the fediverse as a whole can seize the moment and build on the progress that's being made; . At the end I'll collect it all into a single post, with a revised introduction.
This first installment has three sections:
Today's fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default
Instance-level federation choices are a blunt but powerful safety tool
Instance-level federation decisions reflect norms, policies, and interpretations
Part 4 of "Golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next"
The Bad Space is only one of the projects exploring different ways of moving beyond the fediverse's current reliance on instance-level blocking and blocklists. It's especially interesting to compare and contrast The Bad Space with two somewhat-similar projects:
Fediseer is another instance catalog, including endorsements as well as negative judgments about instances.
FIRES (an acronym for Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server) is infrastructure for moderation advisories and recommendations.
(I originally shared this post here but forgot to included it in this thread. Oops! So I'm cut-and-pasting and sharing again. There's some interesting dialog in the comments in the original post.)
This is really good. I should add that we should embrace the pluralism of the fediverse. Some instances will likely not be able to ever freely federate with one another even if there is nothing wrong with either community.
An instance for spiders and an instance for people afraid of spiders won't readily get along. Similarly, a religious instance where nudity is frowned upon and a nudist instance will have different norms.
That negotiation of norms across instances is crucial for making the fediverse safe and we are all still very bad at it.
The issues of seeing defederation as a punishment and not an enforcement of boundaries is rooted deep in Tech and Society as a whole.
Tech doesn't do more than pay lip service to the idea of consent. I see the blocklists as a tool.
While we can individually block, it's tiring to do at scale, so folks choose their communities. carefully. When those communities choose to enforce those boundaries, the backlash shows me how that community consent is dismissed.
@raf@thenexusofprivacy I do find it disturbing how some of the recent issues has been dismissed as instance owners being power mad and wanting to control the Fediverse. Or as drama.
I tend to end up wondering where else those detractors ignore boundaries and consent or just don't understand those issues.
It might be a great opportunity to review how other fediverse software deals with these issues and manages to provide relatively safe online spaces that avoid all the blocking drama. It's not like we've been keeping it a secret.
@mikedev In the first section I mentioned that "Other software platforms like Akkoma, Stremas, and Bonfire have some much more powerful tools ... but over 80% of the active users in today's fediverse are on instances running Mastodon software." In the upcoming section on paths forward I mention Streams' commentPolicy and one of the recommendations is broader adoption of platforms that provide better tools for people to protect themselves.
A questions while I have you here, are there any BIPOC-led sites running Streams whose perspective I should get?
The thing is - I just never see anybody talking about online safety in our sector of the fediverse, because there's nothing really to talk about. We had some issues with toxicity in public groups and directory spam back in the Hubzilla days, but I added moderated groups to the streams repository and did away with a central directory and now even those problems seem to be behind us.
@mikedev I believe it -- limiting replies to connections by default certainly makes a huge difference, so does moderating public groups. But it's also hard to know how much safety in that sector benefits from being low-profile, relatively small, and (at least in my impression) not particularly racially diverse. That's why I'm interested in talking to BIPOC-led sites to get their perspectives.
@mikedev Thanks for starting that other thread, although the responses still leave it ambiguous. Anyhow I reworked things a bit and included your comment about how it's not a problem in your sector of the fediverse.
@thenexusofprivacy
I do have a bunch of critics:
> Not only that, some of the protections that Mastodon provides aren't turned on by default – or are only available in forks, not the official release. For example:
> - while Mastodon does offer the ability to ignore private messages from people who you aren't following – great for cutting down on harassment as well as spam – that's not the default. Instead, by default your inbox is open to nazis, spammers, and everybody else until you've found and updated the appropriate setting on one of the many settings screens.
That setting can be dangerous, there is no way if i send someone a DM, that i get a feedback if the specific user actually got the DM or not and therefore it exists the potential to create more conflicts than it needs to.
> by default blocking on Mastodon isn't particularly effective unless the instance admin has turned on a configuration option
Enabling authorized fetch does not protect as much as the article implies. Inside Fediverse you will always find a way around blocks to get information about a post. The result of having authorized fetch is that people will take screenshots and talk about it like they did without authorized fetch.
One cant supress that others talk about something, thats not possible. And this Article implies that authorized fetch is made for that.
The consequence of authorized fetch are Screenshots.
The consequence of screenshots is to disable to watch unauthenticated a public timeline of an instance.
The consequence of that will be Screenshots of Instances which federates with that specific instance.
The consequence of that will be that the locked down instance will try to enforce rules on how to handle their posts by the federated instances and using whitelists.
The consequence of that will be that a federated social network wont work if everyone just uses whitelists.
One simply cant silence others talking about oneself, one simply cant prevent public posts leaking to everyone.
> by default all follow requests are automatically approved, unless you've found and updated the appropriate setting on one of the many settings screens.
I give the article that tho, one could set this as default, but hey, one doesnt need to blame exclusively mastodon for that, admins can be partially blamed too.
> local-only posts
nice to have, nothing against it. Maybe one could speculate that it could hurt the network if its the default timeline tho.
> Mastodon supports "allow-list" federation,13 allowing admins to choose whether or not to agree federate with nazi instances; but Mastodon's documentation describes this as "contrary to Mastodon’s mission of decentralization", so by default, all federation requests are accepted.
that one has a proper explenation why its a bad idea within.
@Jain Sorry I missed this comment earlier. Thanks for the feedback.
agreed that Mastodon's current behavior of just silently ignoring DMs isn't great, I should have mentioned that -- next time I do an edit pass I'll put that in.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that authorized fetch is made to supress others talking about something. Authorized fetch makes blocking more effective. You're right that there are still holes, and I should probably be clearer about that. But, incremental progress is useful. And instances may well decide they need to lock down and only federate with other locked-down instances, different approaches to social networks work for different people.
agreed that admins could change the settings on follow requests -- although I believe it requires customizing code, so not an option for people using hosted installations (and a hassle for everybody else).
@thenexusofprivacy really devaluing the word "safe" to have a completely meaningless emotional definition instead of using words like "offensive", "needlessly vulgar", or other words that already exist in the English language. You describe what you've written, with a word that does not mean what you want. I understand not using safe space as a term due to its loaded-ness, but abbreviating that into "safe" is a bar horrible choice.
Also the titles of section 1 and 2 are factually incompatible with each other, stating "there's no safety built into the fedi", followed by a "there is safety built into the fedi". A blunder with words, which indicates some mental mishap. For anyone aquainted, it makes it harder to take your text seriously, if your introductory text alone is low effort and high emotion.
@apophis Thanks for sharing the link here. I agree that the pervasive surveillance of today's online world means that it's a lot less safe than it was back in the day (and the Fediverse has plenty of room for improvement on that front as well -- see Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy ) but that isn't really what I was focusing on here.
In terms of freedom to shitpost , one of the strengths of the fediverse is that different instances can have different policies, so it can indeed provide a home for that. But people (and instances) also have the freedom to deal with shitposts they see as hate speech, including blocking them. It wasn't an authoritarian power grab when most fediverse instances blocked Gab; it's not an authoritarian power grab when most fediverse instances block poa.st..
And @lebronjames75 re your comment here, hate speech has an impact on the psychological and physical health of its targets, so limiting it is very much a matter of safety. Your blunder describing this is a "completely meaningless emotional description" reveals that you don't value Black, Indigenous, or Muslim people's safety. Thank you for this illustration of why shitposter.club is so widely blocked!
@apophis good calibration, thanks. I should have been blunter: you and shitposter.club free to shitpost, others are free to block you as a result. It's not an "authoritarian power grab" when people don't want to hear what you have to say.
@Moon@thenexusofprivacy it is ironic they are aware of the harm they do and than decide to callout people and promote toxic garbage pools like # fediblock
@NaturaArtisMagistra Twitter is trying to return to the whore and porn side of things and am blocking all so not to tant my loop and the political side is barely seen on my loop at all other than what I try to make people think about doing right and legal...it actually seems to close after midnight...
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