> Much has been said about the toxicity and wanton disregard for safety displayed by the major social media and other corporate-run platforms.
> Community-run platforms exist, some becoming household names and gaining immense popularity, but upon closer inspection they, too, struggle with creating safe, equitable spaces. Can we do better?
@chinmayisk
Founder of The Bachchao Project, a community effort to support technical frameworks promoting equal rights for women and LGBTQIA communities.
@tomasino
One of the operators of the Tildeverse, a collective of like-minded "tilde" servers in the style of Paul Ford's tilde club, and acts as an administrator for that group's fediverse instance, https://tilde.zone.
Philip Kopetzky
Steering Committee member of the newly formed regional Wikimedia structure "CEE Hub".
Moderating a panel on making online spaces safe is no easy task, to say the least. Especially for a white cishet guy from the North. I will do my best to rise to the occasion.
@rysiek I think you're already getting at the important stuff – a lot of stuff worked, but it'd be really valuable to get some info on what doesn't/didn't work because those are the challenges we have to address.
Other than that, I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I would like to improve moderation on XMPP and could definitely use some orientation on best practices/design patterns for that – explicitly including UX.
@rysiek Oh, also maybe some approaches for how to handle conflicts between multiple people of different disprivileged backgrounds.
It feels like this is something where moderation outcomes could be improved and I'd be very interested in hearing how different mods approach situations like that.
I asked these questions of the panelists too, of course. Asking them here is my way of giving the broader Fediverse community a virtual seat at the table, a chair in this panel.
We only have on hour, and covering everything related to moderation of community-run online spaces in such a short time is an impossibility.
If you ask "how should a short panel on moderation be moderated" best leave it to the end then, or you'll just recurse into longer and longer who should moderate the moderators questions.
Finally: I am very excited to be able to talk about fedi and other community-run social spaces online at a conference like #RePublica#rp23.
Almost exactly a decade ago, in December 2013, I gave a talk at #30C3 about how walled gardens should be called out as de-facto monopolies: https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-
Community-run online spaces are one of the ways walled gardens can be defeated. So I am absolutely stoked to be able to help improve them by having thoughtful public conversations about them.
@rysiek Talk to the panel again about time. You have an hour, and I've found a whole lot of debate gets silenced in the interests of "nuance". It's a terrible balancing act, but helped if you have prior agreement that you can take away the mic for time alone.
@rysiek Huge step. So often I've been caught in the "Argh! 10min left to cover everything else" situation because the discussion has been so interesting.
@rysiek very practical tips: keep very tight time schedule; cut people off if they talk too much; you decide who from the audience gets to ask questions in which order : priorities those who usually do not get much chance to speak; as a moderator, you don’t get to have “opinions” : stay “neutral” & focus on other tasks (a lesson I have to keep on re-learning) ; ask practical help from friends & from organizers : delegate some sub-tasks like passing the mike around…
@rysiek Where are the women on your panel? Specifically Black women? Native women? Trust me, they know more about how safety needs to be addressed than you will ever learn. If you find them and listen to them the rest of us will be safer. #ListenToBlackWomen#NativeWomenLead
@Prainbow Chinmayi is a PoC woman, but I agree we should have gotten a more diverse panel.
Also, we did submit a similar panel (on abuse in walled gardens) for #RightsCon, where I would be joined by three amazing female panelists, two of them from the Global South. Sadly, RightsCon did not accept our panel proposal.
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