Raccoon

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@RealJournalism
The cost #Putin's #genocide against #Ukraine has leveled upon #Russia, in both material and human losses, and international goodwill, is absolutely devastating. It will take them DECADES to recover, and even then, they will never return to the path they were on in the 2000s, before his election.

Russia's children are a #LostGeneration, their only hope to leave the former country that was once Russia. They will beg their parents what could have possibly been worth this, and their only answer will be that Putin said nice things about them, and going along with the man who said nice things was easier than standing up for their own future.

It is a tragedy: Putin's dictatorship has destroyed the #Russian future.

#PutinIsAMassKiller

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@BeAware @bigMouthCommie
Yeah they can, there's a button for it when you look at an account. We just posted instructions on how to do that with Threads.

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@thesquirrelfish @cloudguy
What is the deal with this latest round of y'all doing this? Like, obviously we aren't annoyed with her because she just said a thing. She went before parliament with this shit, she wrote entire essays about how the Y chromosome is the rape gene or whatever.

She called you yourself a rapist, because you have a Y chromosome, and then she pushed it in front of parliament.

Why do you people feel the need to gaslight and strawman people who don't like discrimination? Who are you earning your brownie points with when you pretend full-on political movements to arbitrarily restrict individual rights are a matter of "personal opinion"? Why do you have to make this "stand against inclusivity" with her when everyone can clearly see she's just taking her trauma and refusing to deal with it in a healthy manner instead of forcing it on the rest of society?

You don't have to hate her, and you don't have to even agree, but why bother to lie about the issue?

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@hosford42 @accretionist @simon_brooke @UkeBLCatboy @starshine @graphite @larsfrommars
Speaking as staff on your server, which is so well-funded Nic has actually closed funding down, I don't think "Free Riders" are an issue on the minds of server owners right now...

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@thisismissem
I think running a server is political power: we are basically like the despots of little virtual nations of people. We make these sort of diplomatic decisions with each other, across boundaries, and while people can move between servers if they have an issue with how the one they're on is being governed, larger servers still have an advantage in that a block of or from us can cut smaller servers off from thousands of people.

We form coalitions, like FediPact, TBS, etc, when we have a larger goal that we want to achieve and a general methodology of how we want to achieve it. The biggest example might be FediBlock. Not everyone has to agree with those coalitions, not every coalition is going to be good, but I think that's a good word for it.

That said, I would really like for us to talk more between servers, as staff. I feel like that should be a bigger part of our culture, perhaps even built into the software itself.

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@thisismissem
It would also be good, as a simpler fix, for me as a moderator to be able to mark a report to send my actual account name, so the staff of the other server can see it and PM me about it.

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@thisismissem
Hence why it'd be for staff-only. Then again, wouldn't a warning like "only do this if you trust the other server" suffice? I will note, TechHub blocks any server we don't trust the staff of not to behave this for...

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@dhrystone
> "where those beliefs don't negatively impinge on"

Those "beliefs" negatively impinge on the lives of innocent people when he ACTs upon them. That's the problem with this argument about "opinions": no one gives a shit about his opinions, we care about how he is getting a chunk of this money (donation fraud) and what he is doing with it (funding the oppression of minority groups).

Please do not reframe legitimate concern about a person's deliberate and meaningful real-world actions as being "a difference of opinion".

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@ill_logic @wjmaggos
Not sure it exists, unless it's Liberdon?

I'm told they're "conservative", but I've never seen a post from there advocating the government kill all minorities and assign them 12 year old wives, which is like the number one "brilliant idea" we are "censoring" when we block "conservative" servers, so IDK if they're not just more "liberals"?

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@ill_logic @wjmaggos
...wait...

...shit... is it TechHub? Are we the most conservative server in mainstream Fedi??

...the senile people told me this day would come...

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@wjmaggos @ill_logic
> "everybody federating with everybody"

But that's not how it was intended to work.

The fact that some servers block servers which others do not is a core part of decentralization: moderation decisions are up to individual server staffs. Different servers have different rules about content, and this makes blocks effectively inevitable, simply because one server may have content that goes too far in violating another server's rules, even if both servers are good faith.

Users can choose to leave servers if they have issues, as I did with .Art.

I try to make decisions here on Tech Hub that maximize freedom to talk about tech, short of giving people a reason to leave or other servers a reason to block, but if other servers don't like us and still want to block us, that's their right.

I will say, I don't think mainstream Fedi actively blocks "conservatives": we block people who are racist, sexist, pedos, and/or incapable of participating in good faith discussion.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@clive
As a fan of Dave Seville, all I'm hearing is Dave Seville singing slowly, which was the entire trick he used to make these. That's why he's considered to be one of the pioneers, if not the creator, of electronic music.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@MattHodges
Was literally arguing with someone last night about whether Joe Biden was going to do anything about the marijuana stuff, and they didn't believe me, and here, the next morning, he does this, on top of the fact that he's trying to get it rescheduled to a much lower level of substance regulation.

Let's also remember that this is a massive blow to several negative-externality industries, especially the government-corrupting private prison industry, which have been using the extreme laws against marijuana as a source of profit and power.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@littlemiao
Hey, thank you for posting that screenshot, as there is actually a lot of discussion right now of blocking that entire instance because of that admin making anti-semitic comments. I'm actually surprised your admin, @serge, hasn't blocked Eskimo outright, but perhaps he hasn't seen that post on the Fediblock tag.

Remember, you have an admin/mod team here who are also victims of bigoted comments, who can and will actively go after this stuff. Make sure you use the report button, and we mods will try and do what we can.

Sorry again you're seeing this on here. It's an uphill battle to catch these instances.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@serge @littlemiao
> "I also wanted to share it publicly because not everyone is aware of the extent of antisemitism"

Yes, and that's something I wanted to thank you for. Those of us who aren't obviously members of persecuted groups hear about this but never see it, so it's always great when someone actually posts receipts, so everyone can see it in the wild.

Doing this spreads awareness.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@sickmatter @dukepaaron @endantisemitism @serge @littlemiao
Regular Jewbilation, to make all the white people gay. :V

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@serge @sickmatter @dukepaaron @endantisemitism @littlemiao
Yeah that's what I was referencing. They hate queer people because queer people have rejected the patriarchy and are less like the to breed more white people. In order to embrace the white patriarchy, they have to deny the idea that white people could possibly be born queer, so they have to give the imaginary Jews mind control space lasers that turn white people gay.

Sometimes I think maybe they aren't actually even talking about actual Jews, but some sort of mythological creature that lives in the ether of the collective white supremacist imagination.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@freemo
Interesting. I think the only thing I find disagreeable is your welfare versus UBI thing. What's your actual argument there?

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@retrohondajunki @msbellows @maxleibman
Just wanted to chime in, as the moderator of OP's instance, I don't believe in the paradox of tolerance because I don't believe in tolerance. Persecuted groups seldom do anything I would have to "tolerate", and if I did have an issue, that would be a me problem. Meanwhile, I refuse to tolerate people who demand that everyone else go along with their insane exclusionary worldviews.

That said, as I've been posting, our policy with them is currently not to block until they do something that makes TechHub a worst place to be. I just don't see what that could be if all they're trying to do is get some actual organic post activity on their lame duck network of ads and influencers.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@Vorsos
I'm aware they have moderation issues, I'm not aware of the extent of them or how badly it will affect us here. Why, is their Nazi problem worse then I realize?

Pretty much all the servers we are blocking are either sanctioning content we don't allow here (eg Cheese Pizza) or people who will harass our users (racists), so if that's the kind of traffic they bring, yeah, they will get banned like any other big Nazi server. I think the only nuance of the policy here is that we're giving them a chance to fuck it up themselves.

That is a good point though, maybe I should go look further into just how bad things are there: if they're just going to flood our feed with bullshit, you're right, there's no reason trying...

I think this comes down to what makes this place so much better than a for-profit network: we are actually users, so we have an actual incentive to make it a good place to be.

Raccoon, 5 months ago

@Vorsos
To play devil's advocate for her, there is a difference between a little server that was literally made so that Nazis would have a place to post, and a server that is so big that posts start slipping through the cracks, simply because of volume. I know one of my issues I had when I had an account there was that she had blocked Kolektiva because I guess there was "too much harassment" coming out of it, despite it being a large server.

Let's not forget that Mastodon.social, where the vast majority of new users come in through, is the literal elephant in the room when it comes to this concept. Moderation is weak there because they pretty much have to take all good faith users, and their moderation team can't keep up with the volume of posts. About half of the reports we get here are on things from that server, but we're willing to deal with that because the majority are good actors.

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@nus
This feels like needs to be stacked on its own FediBlock post, so people can see it, because I don't know that they will in the comments of an older post on the hashtag...

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@nus
For reference, the FediBlock tag is a special hashtag used as a sort of early warning system for content that server administrations or individuals on less moderated servers may want to preemptively block.

In order to use it, you take some screenshots as you did here, perhaps some links, of the most egregious behavior being done or accepted by server staff, and make a post beginning with the hashtag #FediBlock, followed by the URL of the server or account, then give at least a paragraph of explanation after that. Attach links / screenshots, CW accordingly (Begin with "FediBlock"), and post.

Staff of servers will see this and verify your report, then choose how to respond. Do not expect every server to block, as it is really a matter of how much bullshit people are willing to put up with. I also don't recommend doing it with single accounts unless you know they've been reported and their staff has done nothing, because we often investigate whole servers.

Hope that helps.

Raccoon, 4 months ago

@ksaj @funkaspuck @GayOldTime
Unfortunate Acronym: so unfortunate that it apparently comes up in my moderation sweeps. 😆