@aral@Gargron of all the pro-meta blog posts in the past six months, I have never read anything to the tune of "Threads is bound by Mastodon's terms of service like any other instance."
Hundreds of thousands of published words and none formed a sentence close to that. Not even in the form of a question. Odd.
@bear@aral ...but isn't the practical solution moving to another server that doesn't federate with threads, that's the nice part of the fediverse, you can make choices?
@ErikJonker@bear Of course. But when the flagship instance makes a choice, it means something. Should there be a flagship instance? No, that’s a design failure. But there is. So what they do matters. Mastodon.social federating with Meta/Facebook/Threads legitimises Meta/Facebook/Threads. One of the ways we said the fediverse (and Mastodon, initially) was different was that instances would protect people, not just leave them to fend for themselves.
@aral@Gargron This is a tough one, because a mastodon server has 2 choices: block users and block servers. Generally, you'd block a server if its own managers are unable to moderate their own users (thereby making it in the interest of the server managers to maintain some moderation). However, I think we can all agree that Threads is going to be a hot-mess that is never going to be seriously moderated.
So, the question is, "how" can this be done without completely cutting them off? Or, perhaps it's best NOT to accommodate them and just shut them off?
I have lots of family on Facebook, but my account has been inactive for 5yrs now. I'd like to avoid ever going there and just have them on here -somehow. But, I'd rather not hear from them and avoid hearing a bunch of nazi ranting and disinformation every day.
If there's a way to do it, it would be cool. If not.... meh. block them.
@coldfish@aral@Gargron
The fact that Threads is set up as a monolithic instance that prevents anyone from blocking it in piecemeal is a Threads problem, not a fedi server admin problem (the same is true of Bluesky).
Like you said, Threads can't be trusted to properly moderate its content and the tool that server admins have for that is defederation. Making individual users have to handle a deluge of toxic content themselves has never been seriously considered as an appropriate response by any instance that cares about its users.
The fact that Threads is so massive isn't a reason for federating with them, it's the reason why it's even more absurd to act like this is a problem that individual users need to deal with.
If we defederate from toxic instances that have hundreds, maybe thousands of users, why in the good god damn is it not an obvious decision when we're talking about an instance with millions of users?
I thought this point was key: "the line, for some of us, isn’t about 'non-commercial' or 'non-algorithmic,' but about Meta’s specific record of bloody horrors." Meta/Facebook is in some ways much worse than I realized
@aral@eatyourglory I’m not sure if I agree completely with this statement.
Defederating Gab, poa.st, cum.salon or RapeMeat was really a no-brainer.
Those were instances created by trolls/fascists/homophobic/misogynist admins, and specifically dedicated to people who share the same ideas and the same ways of treating others.
There’s literally no doubt of the ideology of a person who joins one of those instances: if you join Gab or poa.st, then it’s quite easy to identify your ideas as well.
Can we say the same about Threads? Can we say that everybody there is a transphobic, or a Nazi, or a troll? Can we say that the admins explicitly embrace and actively promote these ideologies?
When you have an instance with millions of accounts, you’re always statistically likely to get jerks. The questions that admins have to ask before defederating are:
Are jerks a clear majority there?
Are the failures at moderation due to the website administration actively promoting jerks (like it’s the case for Musk’s shithole), or are they due to the challenges of scaling up moderation, or to bars that are just set higher than many Fediverse admins?
If we defederate it, what are the risks of cutting out a lot of useful traffic (like institutional accounts, or harmless accounts that are followed by many users on our instances)? In other words, does the signal/noise ratio justify sacrificing the signal in order to protect users from the noise?
What are our thoughts about striking a balance between protecting our users from abuse vs. giving them a chance to connect to whoever they want to?
I have the impression that for Threads the response to these questions is negative, at least for now.
Of course, I’m monitoring the situation, and I’m ready to pull the drawbridge at the first signs that Threads has a negative net added value for the Fediverse.
But that doesn’t seem the case for now IMHO (I actually see a lot of nice/decent people on Threads that are genuinely curious about the Fediverse), and I’m not sure if I would handpick a few cases of moderation failures to make an argument in favour of defederation (rather than individual blocks/bans/mutes).
@fabio@eatyourglory Have you actually clicked the links in the post and read the articles?
(Because the issue here is that Facebook/Meta is a bad actor, that Facebook/Meta are not moderating transphobia, etc. And that Facebook/Meta should not be federated with in the same way that any other fediverse instance that does what they do would be. If they’re not being defederated then it’s for one reason alone: their size and what some people feel they can gain from that audience.)
@aral@eatyourglory I’m very well aware of Meta’s challenges with content moderation. And I definitely would like them to be called more accountable for this.
I’m just challenging the idea that full defederation of a platform with millions of people is the right way to respond to these failures, or if more granular measures (blocks/mutes) can be implemented.
Again, if the tree was rotten at its very roots (Gab, poa.st etc.), there would be no doubt about it.
If the head of the platform was actively engaging and promoting hateful ideologies (like Musk), there wouldn’t be any doubt either.
But for now I don’t see any such strong signals from Thread.
@fabio@eatyourglory So GLAAD’s year-long set of receipts are not enough. (First link.) You’re also OK federating with a company that literally bought a VPN service so they could man-in-the-middle attack the encrypted communications of their users while they were using the services of their competitors. (Second link.) This is who you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to?
@aral@fabio@eatyourglory so because Zuckerberg isn’t enough of a pathetic, desperate, insecure narcissist like Musk but instead a quiet sociopathic piece of shit, he gets to spread unfettered hate? lmao
@aud@aral@eatyourglory far from it, I want him called accountable for his unethical business practices, for his failures at moderation and for being a sociopath.
It’s just that I don’t think that full defederation of a platform with millions of users, and giving up our chance of finally making the Fediverse more mainstream and stopping using other platforms to communicate with our friends and relatives, is the best solution.
@fabio@aral@eatyourglory I don’t think viewing this as “a chance to make the fediverse more mainstream” is correct. This is the fediverse equivalent of the infamous casting couch: bluntly, we’re going to get fucked and get nothing out of it. Meta has enough lawyers, engineers, compute power and paid product managers to make sure he gets way more out of this than anyone else will. He doesn’t enter into arrangements this like unless he gets more out of it than he puts in. If the “plan” is 1. Federate, 2. ????, 3. Social media freedom, then there’s no way in hell the fediverse is going to end up the winner here.
@fabio@aud@aral@eatyourglory no server should have millions of followers. It goes against everything that makes the fediverse...well...diverse. The fact that servers can be held accountable is what drives the need for moderation, it's a tool in the arsenal of any decent admin. Threads takes a huge shit on all admins because they are monolithic. Threads takes away tools for moderation from all servers. That's why anyone with any sense should defederate now.
@greenWhale@aud@aral@eatyourglory I don't disagree with your argument. The larger the server, the harder it is to moderate effectively.
On the other hand, discoverability, availability of content, and having a self-contained social platform that doesn't require us to open Facebook or Instagram, can only happen when we get a big platform plugged in. We can't expect to solve these problems by adding small instances of 10-100 users each to the pool. We've been trying this for a while, and it didn't really work.
If we want all of our friends, relatives and elected politicians to be on the Fediverse, then the best way is to have Mark let them take a walk outside of the fence he's built - and that's exactly what's happening now.
Eventually, I believe that higher adoption and ability to effectively moderate everything are mutually exclusive. We just need to pick which one we prefer.
@fabio@greenWhale@aral@eatyourglory “ then the best way is to have Mark let them take a walk outside of the fence he's built - and that's exactly what's happening now.”
Citation needed, badly. And in the meantime, you expose tons of people to immediate danger (LibsofTikTok, etc). Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations. Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.
Go prove some of these wild ass conjectures before you willingly throw minorities under the bus without a plan. You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs. Or a plan, at all. Yeah, some people might jump to new servers… but what’s much more likely is that Meta will utilise its new position in harmful ways. See: literally everything Meta has ever done
@aud@aral@fabio@greenWhale Is Threads actually actively suppressing conversations about the Fediverse? Every time I go on there I just see posts about it.
@eatyourglory@aral@fabio@greenWhale could be I misread or read something inaccurate, then. But even in that case, great: best way to get people off corporate social media is by going there and doing it, not by giving the corporation power here.
@eatyourglory@aral@fabio@greenWhale I don’t know anything about flipboard, so that’s certainly a different conversation in one sense. But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).
I feel like there’s a divergence in social network philosophy in the Fediverse community that is becoming hard to reconcile.
Many believe that the primary goal of social media is to proactively shield vulnerable users from any possible forms of abuse or trauma. Even if that comes at the cost of proactively defederating whole instances that aren’t strictly aligned with our approach to moderation or with our ideology. Even if that means proposing to proactively defederate all the instances that run Pleroma/Akkoma software just because many of their contributors are perceived as too liberal (yes, somebody actually went as far as seriously proposing that). Even if that means harming discoverability, availability of content, or splintering the Fediverse into smaller bubbles and reducing its potential reach.
I personally belong to the camp of those who believes that the primary goal of social media is to enable people to connect as easily as possible to others and discover content with the least amount of frictions, and give users enough power and tools to granularly decide what content they want to see.
I want to minimize the harm to vulnerable users, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of everything else.
The user is in charge. The user can block/suspend/mute/report anything they don’t like. Sure, in extreme cases drastic decisions ought to be taken, and a whole instance with 100s/1000s/10,000s of users needs to be defederated. But such extreme cases IMHO include things like poa.st, Gab or X itself, where the tree is truly rotten at its roots, where the admins themselves endorse violence/prejudice, and/or where, picking a random user out of their base, it’s statistically very likely that that user is an absolute jerk/sociopath.
IMHO that doesn’t include Threads. Sure, Mark’s behaviour is something that we should keep a constant eye on. Sure, the higher the number of users, the higher the probability of bumping into jerks. But it’s just up to us to filter/mute/block/report them and move on. We don’t throw the whole platform away because of the sporadic jerks, because on such a large platform there are actually also people (like many of our real-life friends, or relatives, or journalists, scientists and politicians) who would add a lot of value to my feed, and the cost of losing all that content to me is much higher than the benefit that I would gain from making the Fediverse completely/proactively impermeable from the Libs of TikTok.
It’s like taking a public bus in a busy city: the busier the bus, the higher the chance of bumping into some scum who throws racial or homophobic slurs to other travellers. In such conditions, depending on the magnitude of the offense, most of the people would either:
Move to another seat
Directly address the offender and call him/her out for being a jerk
Report the offender to the bus driver (or the authorities)
The alternative would be to stop taking public busses, and inviting everyone to stop taking busses as well, because the risk of bumping into potentially traumatizing confrontation with a sociopath is non-zero, and maybe criticize the bus operator for not preemptively preventing a potential fascist from taking the bus.
Which of these two approaches sounds more reasonable to you?
Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations.
This isn’t true. After announcing support for Fediverse sharing for US, Canada and Japan, I’ve actually noticed that a lot of people on Threads started talking about the Fediverse. Many were wondering what it was. #Fediverse was among the most popular topics discussed on the platform. I saw even some people open up Mastodon accounts to test how the integration works.
To be clear, I hate both the management of X and Meta from the bottom of my heart. But credit is due where it’s due. Musk used to mock “Masturbodon”, preemptively ban any Twitter accounts with a Fediverse handle in their profile, aggressively shut down one after the other all the APIs used by services like Birdsite to bridge tweets to the Fediverse, and basically prevented anybody from even talking about the Fediverse on its platform. Threads, on the other hand, invested a lot in building this integration, lets people talk about the Fediverse freely, it doesn’t mock it nor it’s aggressive towards us.
Sure, it doesn’t mean that I trust them. It doesn’t mean that I support their way of developing this integration (through meetings with ActivityPub luminaries covered by NDAs rather than truly building in the open). It doesn’t mean that I don’t see risks in the future. But I don’t feel like it’s fair to put X and Threads in the same bucket when it comes to their approach towards the Fediverse just because they are both big and both run by very unpleasant human beings.
Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.
The alternative to “users on Threads will only see federated content through Threads” is “users on Threads won’t see anything outside of their bubble at all”. If they see your posts, there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll click on your profile and maybe follow up on your instance. If they don’t see your posts, this chance is much lower.
You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs.
I can’t make a plan that is better than theirs if they have all the content and all the users.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of years trying to convince friends and relatives to do the jump.
The questions I get from them usually aren’t along the lines of “is the protocol/source code open or closed?”, nor “what are the odds of bumping into jerks on that platform?”, nor “how will moderators/admins proactively prevent me from seeing potentially disturbing content?”
No, most of the questions I get are along the lines of “can I still follow this celebrity/politician there?”, or “can I still talk to my relatives and friends from there?”, immediately followed by “how easy is it to use?”
If the answers to all these questions are negative, then we’ve lost a user. It’s a war that we can’t win. If however there is some form of permeability between large corporate platforms and smaller federated platforms, and those who feel that it’s too hard to onboard on the Fediverse have an “easy path” to interact with its content, the offer becomes much more compelling.
But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).
You can’t possibly scrutinize the funding sources of each single corporate entity that decides to join the Fediverse. And, even if you do, you’ll probably find some stinky hedge fund or VC money everywhere.
For as much as I would love a Fedivese that is completely made up of no-profits and volunteers, I know that we’ll never get traction that way. If a business joins the ranks, then we get more attention and more content.
The Flipboard case is a good one. But I could also add Wordpress, Tumblr, and many other companies that recently have either built an integration with the Fediverse, or are working on building it. I personally don’t see how they could threaten the Fediverse either. If the number of jerks on the Fediverse increases when these companies integrate their products, we can just block the jerks. If the number of jerks goes out of control, or if the company proves to be malignant in its intentions, we can block/defederate the domain. But I don’t see how the existence of businesses in our space could threaten our space. Eventually, users and admins have a lot of granular control, and they can decide what they want to see. The existence of businesses who use the ActivityPub protocol to publish their activities isn’t a threat to the Fediverse any more than the presence of businesses who use HTTP over TCP/IP is a threat to anyone who wants to run their own website.
@fabio@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale actually, do you know what? You are a fucking asshole. You deserve to be told that, because valuing “growth” and “discoverability” makes you a fucking asshole. You say it’s not your responsibility to protect vulnerable people? You’re arguing it’s wrong to do so, you fascist piece of shit. The kind of internet you want, one where minorities are unsafe because you value convenience and growth, is a horrible thing.
You would literally not even be here were it not for vulnerable people. Fuck you, fuck your dipshit privileged mindset. I hope a pigeon shits in your mouth this weekend, you ignorant tech bro piece of fucking garbage. You block ME, idiot; I’m not the one out here saying YOUR life is acceptable collateral damage, WHICH IS WHAT YOU ARE ARGUING FOR. God. You really dove to a new low for this one, you arrogant jar of fermented piss.
Go take your “everything exists for me” mindset and jam it up your own ass.
@fabio@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale you are not a friend to minorities; you are carrying water for white supremacy and capitalism and spilling it all over the rest of us.
@fabio@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale and if you find me cursing at you more “disrespectful” than telling minorities their safety is worth less than your ability to avoid inconvenience… I mean, I’d say that’s an opportune time to reflect, but you lack that capacity.
@aud@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale get your shit together and wash up your mouth with caustic soda before ever attempting to talk to me again. I’m just sticking rational arguments together without ever getting personal. I expect the same level of respect.
I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years. With my own money, with my own time, and even risking my own career and incolumity for people I didn’t even know.
And I’ve done so because I’ve been myself among oppressed minorities, and a target of discrimination for most of my life, and I’ve started from a quite low spot in life too. Just because I don’t constantly show off my trauma, or slam an oppressed minority badge of honor on everybody’s face and ask for everybody’s pity, it doesn’t mean that I’m a privileged white guy who had daddy paying all of his bills, and doesn’t know what it means to be publicly discriminated.
Don’t you even realize that YOU are the fascist jerk here?
You talk so much about protecting oppressed minorities from aggression and prejudice, and yet you are the one who’s dumping a full page of aggressive scatology upon a stranger who has probably gone through more shit and prejudice than you - and all just because I’m trying to have a civilized conversation about the trade-offs between discoverability/connectivity and sealed insulation from any possible source of injury.
You talk so much about preventive defederation, throwing the baby away with the bathwater if that’s the price to pay to make sure that nobody ever interacts with any potentially disturbing content, and you don’t realize that you’re just creating an unscalable and sealed safe bubble that does more harm than good. You probably wouldn’t tell vulnerable people to stay sealed in their houses only with their trusted friends around to avoid any contact or potential conflict with a potential jerk on the bus, at the mall or on the street. Yet that’s exactly what you’re advocating here, telling yourself the unforgivable lie that ascetic digital exclusion from the rest of the world is the best solution to strengthen the oppressed.
You talk so much about diversity, and yet you are the one throwing insults (including the f words) at somebody who is on the same ideological camp as you, but who just so happened to reach a different conclusion than you on a certain problem, and is trying to rationally consider all the trade-offs of a difficult problem. You like diversity only as long as everybody’s conclusions are exactly aligned with yours, and you bark like a rabid dog at anyone who deviates from the only path that you feel it’s righteous, and you’re so busy enjoying the nauseous smell of your ideologically inconsistent farts that you don’t even realize that your aggressivity and your inability to engage into a civilized discussion with someone who disagrees with you on a particular topic makes YOU the true fascist here.
Now just go back and re-read the messages you’ve sent me in this thread. Do you feel proud of them? Does your aggressive language show a good picture of you? Do you feel like your friends and family would be proud of you for showing such an ugly side to a perfect stranger on the Internet who just happened to disagree with you?
If you can answer affirmatively at all of these questions, then please proceed at blocking me before I do that with you. It means that you belong to that extremist minority of the minority that takes pride of its purist ascetism and does more harm than good to the world.
Otherwise, I expect an apology for your motiveless aggression.
"I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years."
@fabio@SallyStrange@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale No one is talking about getting bullied, you dumb fuck, we are talking about people being murdered. You keep downplaying shit because you're a fucking asshole. Get. Fucked.
You horse's ass, weren't you going to block me already?
@aud@SallyStrange@aral@eatyourglory@greenWhale I see. So your line of reasoning actually is “don’t go on Facebook, or you’ll get murdered”. Of course. Very logical, very rational, and very helpful.
King did not encourage people to sit next to white supremacists on the bus in order to broaden their minds. That's a later propagandistic retelling of the event, intended to take the edge off it so as to avoid broadening the minds of modern day white supremacists.
He organised specific acts of public civic disobedience, breaking the law in ways that not only carried criminal penalties but which would attract significant media attention. The bus action was part of this. They also blocked roads and shut down businesses. This caused an immense outcry, particularly from people who considered themselves 'respectable' and who wanted civil rights to be based around persuasion rather than coercion.
The intellectual descendants of King are those people who blocked weapons shipments to Israel by parking their cars on a bridge and throwing the keys into the water below. They're those people who burned down the construction equipment at Atlanta Cop City. They're the people who blockade refugee deportation centres.
White supremacy is not about individual bigotry. It's about a society which runs in a way that is convenient to White people and inconvenient to minoritised people. King, and his intellectual forebears and descendants, are those who use their bodies to block the smooth running of this society, so that its day to day operation is impossible, even when threatened with violence from law enforcement.
King did not encourage people to sit next to white supremacists on the bus in order to broaden their minds.
Maybe not broaden the mind of an individual supremacist, but it’s hard to deny the power it had on broadening the minds of many other Americans.
Discrimination and prejudice feast on ignorance and dehumanization. It’s easy for many folks to build a narrative of discrimination and dehumanization towards people that aren’t seen as part of the society. That was the whole point of segregation. If you see that someone shares the same needs as you, the same places, the same emotions, the same interests, then you’re less likely to dehumanize them only on the basis of their skin color.
The goal of civil disobedience was to force the wider society to acknowledge that black people were also part of it. You can see this doctrine in his 1964 speech on South Africa’s apartheid:
While living with the conditions of slavery and then, later, segregation, many black people lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. Many came to feel that they were inferior. This, it seems to me, is the greatest tragedy of slavery, the greatest tragedy of segregation, not merely what it does to the individual physically, but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. And this is exactly what happened.
Then something happened, and circumstances made it possible and necessary for them to travel more—the coming of the automobile, the upheavals of two world wars, the Great Depression. And so his rural plantation background gradually gave way to urban industrial life. His economic life was gradually rising through the growth of industry, the development of organized labor and expanded educational opportunities. And even his cultural life was gradually rising through the steady decline of crippling illiteracy. All of these forces conjoined to cause the black people in America to take a new look at himself. Segregated masses all over began to re-evaluate themselves.
Did he say “they were empowered by surrounding themselves only with people who looked like them, thought like them and behaved like them, seclude themselves from the world and shelter in safe havens”? No, he said “they started to travel more, to experience the world more, to encounter other people, to educate themselves more, and learn that they had nothing less to offer than the whites”.
So the original point you made is that we should not defederate from Threads even though there are many transphobes and other hateful bigots there.
You are now quoting King when he says that the widening of the southern Black minds came from when they left their plantations and travelled to northern cities where there were wealthier Black people and less openly racist White people, and they learned that the world was larger than just the local southern White people who despised and oppressed them.
I think you're attempting to draw an analogy.
In this analogy, clearly the transphobes on Threads are the equivalent of those southern Whites who enforced the brutality of Jim Crow.
So... is Threads the southern states? Are you arguing that trans people on Threads have never thought to come to Mastodon and experience a less oppressive (though still imperfect) world? Because that's not an argument that a person could make if they were, y'know, familiar with trans people on Threads.
It's also an argument which would lead to the suggestion that King would want people to organise illegally and risk arrest to shut down the infrastructure of the Threads network. Which is pretty fucking metal, but one that is considerably spicier than what you've been saying up until now.
Or are you suggesting that maybe trans people on Mastodon would be enlightened by being exposed to Chaya Raichik and her fanbase? Because that's an even stranger position to take.
-complaining about being perceived as privileged and white
-claiming that "minorities" lack exposure to bigotry, that MLK wanted Black people to "sit next to white supremacists," characterizing the world of white segregation as "real"
Just because the dumpster fire of Musk is arguably stinkier, doesn't make Zuckerberg's dumpster fire tolerable.
And all this "I've done more than you posers could ever imagine" stuff is astonishing arrogance, especially when you're talking to complete strangers! And then you complain about people making too many assumptions about YOU?
Yeah, the pigeon shit comments are harsh, but calling it "worse" than the things fascists say is an absurd exaggeration.
And you know what? It's condescending and gross to lecture everyone about what marginalized groups need, when you're talking about what's good for "them"-- and not talking about groups you actually belong to. No matter what oppressed minority "badge" you claim you're not slamming us in the face with (in multiple 10+ paragraph tirades about how you're more oppressed and a bigger activist than everyone here) maybe you should stick to speaking for yourself.
@aral "but muh clout!" These people will sweep aside decades of Meta abuse to gain access to more clout/followers. It's shocking to me anyone on the fedi thinks this way given the culture here. If you want to clout chase numbers go to BlueSky or Twitter where that's the point of the platforms.
They'll deny that this is the reason they want to federate with Threads, but also of course that's the reason. Humans are not complicated and are way more transparent in their actions than they think.
@eatyourglory@aral because trans people are babies, they cannot know how to defend themself, and like... use mastodon to block servers and users, so big admin guy have to think for them.
Agreed, not defederating sends the wrong message. If admins are worried about the legal aspects of this, the UK online harms bill should give you legal protection, as that says services need to protect users.
If we grow, there will always be a ton of people able to make a decent argument that something is racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. it will be endless battles between mods over what justifies action or else face defederation. and also tons of individuals having no idea they are silenced by entire servers. I get strict rules internally but servers blocking/silencing servers or individuals must require a higher bar and be done more transparently. #fediblockmeta
This IS the endless battle between mods you refer to. So let's get out hands dirty, no?
It certainly sucks to have to let go such a big number of people in a network. But if those admins fuck up too hard (as they do) – you can't just give it a pass, especially if it is a big instance.
if the users on #threads become routinely abusive of fedi folks (by poisoning hashtags and tagging people here with crap), we will need to consider defederation. and their size will make that much more annoying to do.
that there is horrible shit there and they are abusive to their users is not a reason to block them imo. it's a reason to federate and welcome people to move here while retaining their connections there and avoiding the bad meta data policies as much as possible.
I have a Facebook account to stay connected to friends and family. I barely use it but I don't see the horrible shit. same with the crap on the wider www that I never see. this is true for most people and I see federation as more of a way out than helping the shit spread.
here we've had fights over a Harry Potter game and whether the BBC should be welcomed cause they have anti trans people on their shows. many consider criticism of Israel to be antisemitic. our norms need work.
I mean routinely as in if we regularly see direct abuse from threads users. individuals you can block/silence as a server but a flood of users there doing that shit would call for blocking/silencing that server at some point.
imo we have lots of goals. I understand safety is the top one for many. I wish we weren't thought so poorly of for not agreeing . for trying to better balance it with other concerns. I don't think we will find compromises that work for everyone but should try.
@wjmaggos I think it is a sane approach to tie de-federation to how effective admins can control the activity of their instance and enforce good rules. It isn't the relative density of how big the proportion of bad actors is. By your approach we would be waiting for an IMMENSE TON OF SHIT hitting the fan before "considering" defederation.
You also don't sanction states by the amount of bad deeds of its citizens. You go about how what is deemed ok officially.
Defederation should be based on protecting the fedi as a network. On the fedi and www, there will be crap. And stuff many hate but you don't. On your fedi server or blog, post anything legal imo. But when you intentionally intrude on others' experience, there becomes cause for action imo because it can make the entire network a shitty place to be. That should be the focus of server vs server policing.
@wjmaggos I don't understand, indeed. You say crap existing in the internet is a thing we have to deal with, but when there is a proposal how to deal with it you say "just deal with it"? I don't follow.
does saying "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" constitute antisemitism? Or "Israel is an apartheid state"? or "American politicians continue to support Israel because they are getting paid off"?
I don't think any of that does but I completely understand others saying those statements either are directly or they endanger Jewish people. for people who think this, what I wrote above is crap. you can keep it off your server but defederating a server for it goes too far imo.
@wjmaggos Did you even bother to click on one of the OP links? The problems with Meta, Facebook and Zuckerbergs stuff in general can't be summarized by what brought up even by a far stretch.
I did and of course you don't see it that way. I always bring up Israel and antisemitism to lefties cause it seems to be the only issue most of us see as justifying possibly upsetting people in order to discuss freely.
were you around when people got pissed off about some liking the Harry Potter videogame or the BBC starting an instance even though they have transphobes on their shows? what's in the OP should be defederated from but you'd defend federating with harrypotter.social?
@wjmaggos You deliberately seem to deflect that the OP talks about mastodon.social, their own server rules vs. threads.net and the shortcomings of Meta.
Israel, Harry Potter or the BBC? This isn't about upsetting some people for some reasons – wich I'm fine with generally.
when I was composing my reply, I had a line that that MS policy would have to change. so you're right that I didn't address that, but I think they're (we're?) gonna have to go the other way.
now if somebody was clearly pro Israel and Jewish and somebody else posted what I wrote in replies to them once or twice during a conversation on the issues, that's probably not harassment. doing it relentlessly, esp if the replied to says they consider in antisemitic, clearly is. or doing it at random times. I'd argue the person should silence/block them or maybe eventually their server should. but only block their server if this is happening a lot from multiple accounts there.
@wjmaggos@Gargron If the two links I provided in the original post do not meet your bar for defederation then there’s something wrong with your bar. It also tells me your instance is not a safe space for vulnerable groups. And if your instance happens to be the flagship one and you’re fine with this, it tells me you’re legitimising this behaviour on the greater network.
@aral@wjmaggos@Gargron You mean vulnerable groups that don’t include Black and Brown people. There’s plenty of evidence regarding how they’ve been treated especially during the great Twitter migration, by many of the same people and instances worried about Threads, yet those instances weren’t defederated. I’m all for protecting people but clearly you guys are only about protecting white people. Didn’t see this outrage when Black people expressed their treatment
@darth_akeda Clearly, you’re making assumptions about people you don’t know. But I am white-passing and you probably assume I’m also American so I guess that’s why. (Hint: I’m from the part of the world that Americans bomb.)
Anyway, so, needless to say, no, of course that’s not what I mean but I also don’t appreciate being attacked for what you assume me to be.
@aral@wjmaggos@Gargron They’ve been safer and more welcomed on Bluesky and Threads than they’ve been on Mastodon, yet those places are supposedly so terrible and this place so safe. My ass it is
yeah not sure where black and brown folks feel safer but I know many wanted quote boosts. and I admit those are a vector of abuse. we're not going to find perfect solutions that make everyone more comfortable here.
@aral@Gargron New here.. .Can you explain how something typed on a screen can hurt anyone? Are you saying that some people are so fragile that words ruin them? If you are trying to make the platform WOKE, then just say it. People don't need to be here. If this is not a platform of free speech and fair debate, then just say it. Brand yourselves as extreme left. It is your right to be any flavor you want. If you think you can survive on that market, then go for it. I support your efforts. But don't ever think you can bully me into how I should think. That will never happen.
@aral@Gargron Just to give the other side of this: there are probably a lot of pro-trans people who see server-level defederation of an instance as big as Threads as a draconian over-reaction in light of available user-level blocking tools. I just don't see any room in this thread for reasonable disagreement. It doesn't help that the few people I am seeing disagree are wearing their awfulness on their sleeves. Social media incentivizes a black-or-white viewpoint and I see tons of that here.
The problem with leaving responsibility to user-level blocking tools is the size of the server in question; blocking individual threats contained among 120'000'000 users would be a full-time job. Also: you're saying you're willing to expose users to that harm. There's no real argument for this that doesn't ignore/think acceptable that prospect.
@aral@Gargron Still haven’t seen one argument that makes sense to have bloody meta in the fediverse.
People on meta will NEVER care 1 second about the fediverse. If you want to connect with your family on meta, join meta. The whole point of the fediverse was being an alternative, not a replacement.
@tripop@aral@Gargron Yes, I wish everyone their own personal online space, where they feel save to connect with other people without any interference of big tech monsters. Fediverse can make that happen.
Letting meta in without any resistance is a sell out, and probably not so brave.
@hans@aral@Gargron And it's already here with the fediverse. Every admin can open a small communities, and do that. But here it's not about that, it's about put pressure on the one that command and have power other the biggest mastodon instances and decide for 244K users.
@hans@aral@Gargron And i mean, if we see them, they see us. So maybe, we could lets the users of this biggest social media platform see that they're alternatives ? That they can create instances ? And use it like they want ?
Like imagine : it's not threads that's a menace to fediverse and mastodon and all, it's the opposite.
@tripop@aral@Gargron I admire your optimism, but the track record of meta is so bad, I really cannot trust them for 1 second.
The fact that they enter the fediverse is nothing less than an attack to destroy.
@aral@Gargron To dedicate time, effort and brain cells to formulate arguments against something that doesn't directly affect you baffles me . Why not just move away, block or ignore that which you can't understand? I'm neither pro or against trans people , it's their lives but this open outrage is getting out of control . I didn't need to read, write or see that. 😕
@aral@Gargron I left mainstream social media over six years ago. I haven't missed it. I came to Mastodon last year in the hope that I could use the Fediverse to primarily champion mental health and interact with folks that have a decent moral compass. Even though I blocked the Threads domain, simply allowing Meta to federate has me questioning whether or not I can stay. I suspect many Mastodon users like myself came here to avoid Big Tech in the first place.
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