I guess it tells you more about “FOSS”todon than anything else that they chose to block a human rights activist/privacy advocate who wakes up and works at a not-for-profit on free and open software every day. Maybe if I were to work at Google and hack on a hobby open source project in the evenings I’d be acceptable?
@aral@maegul given their CoC I would guess that has something to do with their anti-advocacy stance or rule on "controversial" posts, I mean it's their server but 🤦
Edit: added screenshots
This also highlights the strange conflations that can or have happened with microblogging decentralisation.
A general topic (FOSS) and a moderation policy have been bound together for a server of people probably reading microblog feeds about all sorts of stuff. It questions the value of decentralisation in this web2.0 form (at least for microblogging).
@dimillian@ncrav@aral@maegul I'm curious to understand why people (and apps) largely follow this one-account-policy, rather than combining profiles on several (niche and non-niche) servers (and providing a really nice UX around this).
I know mastodon (and maybe ActivityPub) is built around different identities in different communities, but why do we have to use it that way?
For me ... the question ATM. Many are asking their respective platforms to re-invent everything on every other platform. Apart from being inefficient, it just won't happen.
The killer feature for the fediverse may very well be building out an aggregation layer so that platforms can do their thing and we users can mix & match however we want.
Such may even require new aggregating servers where user accounts actually live??
@maegul@dimillian@ncrav@aral mmh. I dislike the idea of aggregating servers simply for the fact that it's another centralized thing.
Having different servers represent different communities (in the traditional, offline sense) makes a lot of sense to me. I'm thinking more in terms of one portable, controlled-by-nobody-else, user interface that lets people interact with all these communities.
Yes on the uncentralised options! Except that they'd probably work well in terms of performance and caching etc, and probably wouldn't result in more centralisation than we've seen already from mastodon and mastodon.social.
If the software were open, then you could hope/expect multiple instnaces to be run with different focuses in terms of topics/niche-instances and policies around moderating/banning accounts. Also, different UI designs, which would be important!
@ncrav@aral@maegul meanwhile, one of their users railing against women posting photos of themselves breastfeeding is apparently fine. (A victim blaming reply to a post about a trans woman who was harassed for posting a photo of the last time she was able to breastfeed before starting chemotherapy.)
@ncrav@aral@maegul yeah this is basically why I left #fosstodon. They didn't block me or anything, but took the (in my opinion) wrong side when someone complained about one of my posts that was apparently commercial.
@maegul@aral unfortunately this is what happens when mods and admins think they know what's "best" for all their users.
Pro-tip, users are quite capable of figuring out who they want to follow/mute or block themselves without some overzealous mod or admin deciding for them.
@aral it does, I still follow you and I saw your boost from @doot with no issue. Can you explain how you came up with such conclusion and how I for one can see and intract with you both from my Fosstodon account?!
@aral fosstodon is mostly a troll instance, I have a couple followers there but the vast majority of interactions with them are some "Well Actually GNU Linux".
@aral That's a weird call. I think silencing is generally a good feature, but my perspective is knowing and trusting all the people who run the instance I'm on to make good calls.
The next time I’m silenced, be there for me. Remember, “When they came for the…., I didn’t speak. When they came for me, there was no one for me.” This time I was there for you🤭
@aral@fosstodon for what it's worth - it's not loading in the UK right now. Not your profile - the entire site. Took ages to do anything and then got something went wrong on our end.
@aral@fosstodon weirdly if I try and load your profile in a browser via fosstodon it redirects me to your profile on ar.al ? I don't think that used to happen?
@aral@fosstodon Hmpf you're making every disagreement on strategies, e.g. whether we should federate with P92 or not, as a fundamental disagreement on our values. Yeah Fosstodon might have silenced you because they would think free software would be ruined by organizations asserting their own moral judgements on their audiences already so they wouldn't want yours to spread there, according to a well documented phenomenon that Facebook has leveraged to split the fediverse and encourage defederations and other kinds of defect from people concentrating too much power, you doofus. Maybe the P92/Threads audience is an asset for the fediverse and maybe our own judgement is biased because some of us are Facebook/Twitter survivors. Speaking as someone who's found half of the arguments to pre-emptively defederate from Facebook.
Maybe that “meeting under NDA” move was similar to transferring them a license for contents we share there or in connection to them, preventing privacy/free software advocates from communicating there: to get the most radical instance admins to defederate. From a chaotic neutral point of view, this is an elegant solution to the problem of having to censor each instance individually and taking the blame for it.
And there are also excellent reasons to do this (pre-emptive defederation).
What I can see of your post on the Fedora forum on your account – asking the Fedora developers if opt-out telemetry will be implemented in their enterprise distribution – feels weird, because I've actually enabled some degree of temeletry in Fedora, i.e. anonymized performance reports, to help them to improve their product. That's literally why they're developing Fedora, because RHEL is a stable fork. IBM has imposed layoffs on Red Hat and now they're doing union busting but I don't think that would be super relevant in the context of technical, GDPR-compliant telemetry. Someone has answered you they posted something on the forum and again, I won't read it, but what I can see on your account is basically implicit calls to hate (because you're posting to thousands of people, some of whom having an abusive socio-technical environment) and divisive.
And you're making it all about you being the good free software developer and them being the defected free software instance admins, and you're wondering why someone would silence you? I understand that your NPO could be scarce, you could be wondering whether or not you'll be able to continue your work next year, and I think it's important by the way, but then there's your work at the Small Net Foundation and there's your Mastodon account.
A common and especially nefarious mistake in political communication is to make moral judgements. An FSF member told me it was important to have a radical line, and I disagreed, saying that it was important to have a clear line, and then to let people decide whether it's more important to them to use free software or to get their diplomas. People have their own moral senses and they tend to take good decisions in their own environments and contexts, left-wing political propaganda should strive to share information and should take common moral judgements in account of course, but not try to change their audiences'! Now, sharing moral judgements increases an illusion of solidarity when people approve what you say or hit the ‘fav’ button, but this is an illusion, you're actually weakening your cause by getting these posts shared.
With all of my respect towards you, your values, and your work, your communication here feels misguided. I think we could have a conversation anywhere you'd like and agree on all of what you're doing, except this small communication mistake that marginalizes your work among your ~40,000 followers (and their own social graphs).
@oceane I'm honestly confused by what you are arguing for, and I heavily disagree on your statement criticising moral communication in politics. Politics IS an application of morality. I wouldn't bother listening to a political opinion if it is not making moral arguments as its main argument, as no one should.
@unexpectedteapot Aren't you confusing morality (individual community intelligence) with ethics (collective community intelligence)? Yes, political statements should be grounded in ethics, but I'm no one to assert an individual choice on everyone.
In the FSF case, I'm sure people would use free software more if they felt it was flexible enough. I'm definitely using the Tor network more since I'm juggling between Librewolf (for SaaSS in which I'm authenticated) and the Tor browser (which I use to read documents, lookup Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, read a blog post, etc.). Anyway, forbidding free software users to use proprietary software is both the FSF's PRs and Microsoft's strategy. That's an example of the moral judgements I'm talking about, but IME it tends to be a poor org's publication, when it has nothing else to say than “capitalism is bad, join us now”.
@unexpectedteapot Hi, sorry, it took me a few hours to process it, but yeah – maybe you're right, and maybe there are different communities involved. I wouldn't dare to make an assessment on how my readers should interact with their own communities, or which compromises they should (or shouldn't) make. But in the FSF case there might be a confusion between a few communities, free software developers and users to begin with, and of course both communities with the FSF members. But there's still a silly sort of gatekeeping where you wouldn't be a true FSF member if you dared to use the professional software you might need (or even Windows) to, you know, reach a higher position.
As I said, I believe you're more talking about ethics than about morality, i.e., I expect political organizations to make political statements on collective action rather than on individual practices. I don't think that would be their business, not just because it would be inappropriate or orwellian (I don't know, and this isn't the topic we're discussing, is it?), but also because they wouldn't know much about them. For example, domestic violence is a political problem especially because it's structural, it usually happens with the same “structure”, concepts are being developed and shared about this, to protect potential violence victims (e.g. the cycle of violence, red flags, etc.).
But then, there's the activism community, and there are the numerous beneficiary ones, aren't there?
@aral I’ve checked your account and it hasn’t been limited in any way from what I can see. Are you certain it was limited? How did you come to find this out?
There’s nothing in the moderation audit log and the last report we received for your account was around 6 months ago, so there was nothing actionable to limit your account.
@aral ah, I found it - your account was limited like 6 months ago but it seems folk have only noticed in the last day or so. That’s why I couldn’t see it in the logs.
The limitation was lifted last night, so you should be good now.
@aral Mastodon should send a notification when an account is limited/suspended etc. but I’m not sure if that’s the case for remote accounts. It probably isn’t.
I’m sure you can appreciate that we don’t notify every account we take action against as it wouldn’t be sustainable.
@aral as for why (I must stress this my own opinion, not that of the mod who worked the reports) some of the language used was argumentative and stand offish, we prefer to avoid that.
Anyway, thanks for raising it and I’m glad we came to a solution. 👍
If the #fediverse is worth something I belive is for advocacy for or against something NOT for perusing censure of different points of views. Any server or instance that promote censure of resonance point pf views is in the wrong place. Needless to say that racism, nazism or misogyny is NOT a point of view.
@aral@fosstodon Maybe no one told the Fosstodon admins that because you're a human rights activist/privacy advocate who wakes up and works at a not-for-profit on free and open software every day that their rules just don't apply to you and you can say and do whatever you like and they can't ever do anything or risk your ire?
But others are also free to interpret those actions as they see fit and decide whether or not they want to be governed by those rules and how they are applied.
@aral Well, for the record, this is what it looks like to me. Ever seen one of those videos with a tired looking highest patrol officer giving a speeding ticket to someone screaming, "Don't you know who I am??!?" That's this in a nutshell.
@aral@fosstodon I'm on Fosstodon and could, and still can, see your posts. Do you have confirmation that they have limited your account? Do instances have a public log of limited accounts? I have @kev and @mike as very reasonable and transparent. Hope we can get this straight.
@emanuel Just edited the post to make it clear I was silenced not suspended. Not that that’s great but important to be precise. I’ll update the other post to make it clear that that hasn’t caused people to unfollow. (I was confused because someone said they had to re-follow.)
@aral@fosstodon That's disappointing. I don't see why anything that's even remotely related to FOSS would want to block you. Sure, you're vocal and (positively!) radical, isn't that exactly what a movement needs? Even if you don't always agree? Sigh.
@aral@fosstodon Is it possible there was just enough reports against your account / posts that you were blocked as a result. I find @kev and co to be reasonable individuals and would hesitate to attribute malice. Fosstodon is an incredibly popular Mastodon instance, with a big user base, so I would wager some mistakes just happen during the process of administrating it.
@aral no I don't follow @doot account. And using Tusky (which I have used all this time) I can see their profile and read their posts. Shall I share screenshot?
doot appears as blocked by mods for me. Once I click to show anyways, so long as I do not refresh the page, it will continue showing the profile. The moment I do a full refresh, it shows the same thing again (so likely retained in page state until it's cleared on refresh).
@JoshStrobl
You are using web interface and I use Tusky onmy phone (I don't have access to a computer at the moment so I cannot test, but perhaps you can use a different client if you have access to your phone. On my phone I can see both @aral and @doot without any warning or issue. Also I cannot comprehend how Aral's views and points are againts policy of Fosstodon. So I rather be cautious about jumping to conclusions, and exhaust hypotheses first.
@Mehrad@aral@doot@fosstodon@kev It loads fine on Ivory and also tried on Mastodon for iOS, so it may be that the functionality is specific to Mastodon for Web?
@JoshStrobl@aral@doot then perhaps we should wait for @fosstodon, @kev, @mike response and then if it is a policy, ask the details, and if it is a glitch, file a bug report on mastodon web client. Your tests conclude that official iOS app and Ivory work "normally", and my test shows @Tusky also behaves the same. So the "outlier" so far seems to be web client. But I'm very interested to see how the story unfolds.
"A limited account is hidden to all other users on that instance, except for its followers. All of the content is still there, and it can still be found via search, mentions, and following, but the content is invisible publicly."
IIUC it means that if someone you follow boosts a silenced account you don't also follow, you won't see it. If you use search, you will still find it.
Edit. doot via fosstodon.org shows "This profile has been hidden...", but not via Tusky.
@ttiurani thanks for the explanation. I don't have @doot account those that I followed, and yet when @aral boosted their post, I saw it on my wall (and that's how I joined the discussion). But as you said, Tusky, which I'm using, is showing both account normally. In my [perhaps flawed] logic, a server-wide policy should apply on all users regardless of their client. That is why I asked for testing and investigation rather than jumping to conclusion.
@Mehrad@aral@fosstodon@kev Because it was? You think I'm just gonna make up some random bullshit and what...GIMP some screenshot? What would the objective be there? I'm perfectly happy with Fosstodon, I got no reason to stir shit up. @hyde ping me, couldn't see @aral, went to his account and got the message.
Following the account does not provide any prompt.
@JoshStrobl@aral@fosstodon@kev@hyde all I'm saying is that I (as you can see) have no issue seeing the posts, following @aral and I don't see any warning or notice in the client I use. So we better investigate rather than pointing fingers.
@aral@JoshStrobl@fosstodon@kev yes, I see his post and I don't see what he sees. That simple. There is something wrong, sure, but it is not what you claimed it to be because I'm from the same instance and I saw your posts in my wall (that's how I found out and replied)
Not really. I tend to notice when other instances block this instance more often than I find there is an account that I can't follow from this instance.
There are a fair number of accounts that I can't see from my backup account that I can and do follow from here.
@aral@fosstodon You're a contentious figure that likes to make dramatic statements. That does tend to rub some folk up the wrong way. Fairly or unfairly.
Add comment