novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️Let me sum up my thoughts on the whole #TheBadSpace clusterfuck once and for all here, and then I'll leave the subject be. I think someone needs to do this kind of summary anyway. This message has been accidentally deleted twice now thanks to various interruptions, so it's overly longwinded now, sorry.
The first thing I want to say is that the problem TheBadSpace is designed to solve is a real one, and one that absolutely does need to be solved. The fediverse has a real fucking issue with racism and anti-Blackness, one that needs to be dealt with, and despite everything, I *am* glad someone is at least attempting to solve that problem. I applaud Ro for that. I will never deny that there is a racism problem here, and I really want the fediverse to become a safe place for my nonwhite comrades.
However, my problems with TheBadSpace are many. A very few of them are core methodological problems, and most are just issues with how it has been handled that reflect poorly on whether it should actually be trusted, but these should also clarify why it is justified to be angry at TheBadSpace instead of silently just pitching in to help, as Ro demands of his critics (lest they be labeled racist).
1. The core methodology of putting together a list of centralized "trusted authorities" to vote in some sort of senatorial tribunal to determine who is and is not trusted to federate with a wide swath of the fediverse seems like a fundamentally flawed one to me. Isn't centralization and homogeny the things the fediverse was created to fight? Yes, no one is being "forced" to use TheBadSpace's block list, but since it claims to solve a problem that very much needs solving, many people will use it or already do, and it's hard to deny the high probability, due to ease and inertia, of people simply importing the entire list wholesale rather then picking over it to decide which exceptions to make, which means that "we're not forcing you to use the whole list if you disagree" is a bit of a weak argument. Most admins will use the whole list. Plus, TheBadSpace already has an established habit of putting instances on the blocklist for even federating with instances that are themselves on the blocklist, no matter how distant and attenuated the original block reason is or whether it even justifies guilt by association, and without analyzing the nature of the interactions. That creates social pressure. I shouldn't have to explains systemic and social power dynamics to leftists. I would much prefer a more grassroots, autonomy-fostering approach, a community-sourced, distributed wiki where information about various fediverse figures and instances is collected by the community to share, and where citations are generally encouraged.
2. The practice of blindly importing the entire block/silence/limit lists of those authorities without any differentiation or nuance means that you're not just importing the moderation decisions that were based on safety, but also the ones that were made on the basis of petty drama, bigotry, bias, tone-policing, or just the particular atmosphere those instances tried to curate. It's disheartening that this would be the initial approach, the place to start. It doesn't bode well for the integrity of the people making the list, or their mentality.
3. You might argue that the above is just a function of it being incomplete, that they were just importing those big lists first so they could whittle them down, but I think that approach will cause harm and belies a harmful mindset. Harm, because it means that you are still initially accusing innocent people of terrible things without an ounce of evidence --- in this case often marginalized people, transfems, who are basically the most acceptable scapegoat at this point, that everyone loves to ignore and vilify --- and then only retracting that when someone proves to you that you shouldn't have said that, which means those accusations were still out there, and many people will go on believing them or happily resurrect them. Harmful logic, because it is fundamentally still "guilty [if accused by my friends] until proven innocent" logic. Indiscriminately importing a gigantic blocklist that may include people that don't deserve to be blocked over safety, and then when people get upset just saying "tell me who and I'll take the accusation down" is preposterous and unjust, and again doesn't bode well for the fairness or integrity of the people behind the list. Worse, the default where reasons weren't clear wasn't just to put the instances in the blocklist down as needing to be blocked for nonspecific safety reasons, the default assumption was that they were there for "hate speech, bigotry, and poor moderation", which are *very specific* and *very serious* accusations to make when you have no evidence. They should have held off on specific labels till there was evidence for them.
4. What this demonstrates is that TheBadSpace doesn't seem to feel the need to publish, or even *have* receipts before posting accusations, and when you combine that with their stated policy of lack of transparency regarding where accusations come from, it removes a lot of people's agency to decide for themselves who should be on the list. If you're gonna claim your list isn't authoritative and people don't have to take it wholesale, you should act like it.
5. The specific "trusted authorities" that they chose to base the list on are a small set of instances, some of which --- rage.love and mastodon.art for instance (https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/111047784022282120) --- are suspect in their moderation policy and general trustworthiness (as further demonstrated by the discriminatory character of the under-justified entries on the block list: https://mastodon.social/@TheGoodSpace/111052271194393071), and many of which *share moderators*, meaning they're not separate votes representing a wide range of opinions at all. And the fact that their moderation decisions are taken as canonical by default (if at least three of eight agree) means that by default all the decisions these trusted authorities make are taken to be infallible, even their biases and petty drama and false accusations, and the burden is on everyone else to push back. The defaults of a system are important!
6. The creator of TheBadSpace actively deferred to fucking mastodon.art and *Welsh Pixie* when it comes to moderation decisions and appeals processes (receipt attached), which is a very bad sign, given Pixie is *known* for false accusations and bullshit. That's not a heartening sign.
7. Worse, Ro, the creator of TheBadSpace, has spent his time accusing everyone who disagrees with him and criticizes TheBadSpace "racist" and "anti-Black", saying that we're just getting upset that black people are "defending themselves" and "getting better at spotting you [racists]," calling trans women dickheads, tone-policing, refusing to even acknowledge the harm he has caused, and so on. Is this the behavior of someone who's fit to lead a project like this?
TLDR, I think TheBadSpace has definitely caused harm, so people's anger and outrage at it are understandable even if that harm can be "fixed," because that won't undo those accusations getting out there in the first place, and I think that there is a lot of circumstantial, behavioral evidence to suggest the people behind it don't have a good mindset and so it won't be trustworthy going forward. And even if we ignore those things and chalk it all up to "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" --- as Ro and his defenders do --- there are at least two core implementation problems that should make people pause in embracing TheBadSpace.
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