Like on some level, it's pretty fucked up that this entire protocol (correct word?) essentially posits that there's a valid reason you might WANT to federate with known nazi servers. Not directly, but that's how it works in practice. Whenever a new person signs up a server, they have to essentially tell it "please don't give places like Poast access to my users" and in many cases those new admins are the least qualified people on the fedi to know about the existence of those nazi sludge holes.
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AnarchoNinaWrites (anarchoninawrites@jorts.horse)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 05:01:35 JST AnarchoNinaWrites - AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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AnarchoNinaWrites (anarchoninawrites@jorts.horse)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 05:05:19 JST AnarchoNinaWrites And you can say "that's just how it works," and you're not wrong that *I* don't have the technical knowledge to change that. But also, for all the problems centralized moderation and closed system social media has, this isn't necessarily one of them. If there's *nothing* that can be done about the problem, then there's a hard limit to how far the fedi itself can really grow because that's going to be a problem long term for the targets of nazi abuse and harassment.
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AnarchoNinaWrites (anarchoninawrites@jorts.horse)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 05:14:44 JST AnarchoNinaWrites I myself came pretty close to running away screaming when I found out how "block" works (or doesn't work well enough) on here. Ultimately I decided that I valued what fedi provides me with, more than I valued my absolute ability to keep fascists who want me dead from interacting with and accessing my posts if they're determined enough to do so. But the fact that it isn't (and maybe can't be) safe, was a very real problem for me - someone again, nazis would like to kill for multiple reasons.
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AnarchoNinaWrites (anarchoninawrites@jorts.horse)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 05:14:58 JST AnarchoNinaWrites It's easy to describe the problem in terms of trade offs; but you also have to understand that we're not all trading equally here.
What for you may mean "once in a while a 4chan shitposter shits up my replies" means something entirely different for me, an antifascist trans writer who has been getting myself on nazi kill lists for a solid twelve years online now.
Maybe you don't care, but it would be better to simply say nothing than, as opposed to hiding your DGAF behind a veneer of "helping"
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Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:15:16 JST Fish Id Wardrobe @AnarchoNinaWrites Speaking as a coder, this is a design problem that is common, and I've fallen for doing it myself: "the software can't tell which are the nazi servers, sooooo... I guess the admins of each server will have to make their own minds up each time. That's democracy or something!"
No, mate, assuming that every admin will be more equipped than you to make complicated decisions just because your *software* can't ... is a copout.
Yes, this is a hard problem. So?
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Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:15:20 JST Fish Id Wardrobe @AnarchoNinaWrites Don't get me wrong, I think it's *good* when software chooses to pass a lot of options to the folks running it. But you can't use it to evade responsibility for making good software. You end up with a system that is too complex for the admins to understand...
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Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:15:26 JST Fish Id Wardrobe @sashin @AnarchoNinaWrites What could?
Out or in -- if you make the admins work out what the technical pros and cons are you're making their job harder. Up to a point it can be empowering, but eventually we get to (guy sitting at desk with lemon press being pelted by lemons from a chute)
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Sashin (sashin@veganism.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:15:27 JST Sashin @fishidwardrobe @AnarchoNinaWrites It could be opt-out rather than opt-in
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AnarchoNinaWrites (anarchoninawrites@jorts.horse)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:16:16 JST AnarchoNinaWrites @sashin @fishidwardrobe I am literally talking to you here, on this server, because a bunch of self-appointed fedi safety police connected intimately to blocklists, decided to chase me offline by pretending that "Pig Empire" was an antisemitic slur and they didn't realize they fucked with the wrong trans girl. That happened. It's pinned in my profile.
The idea isn't useless, but if the implementation itself is ad hoc and there's nobody to watch the watchers - it can go very sideways.
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Sashin (sashin@veganism.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:16:17 JST Sashin @fishidwardrobe @AnarchoNinaWrites I guess that kind of power is like a honeypot for bad people. Or perhaps power itself is that.
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Sashin (sashin@veganism.social)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:16:18 JST Sashin @fishidwardrobe @AnarchoNinaWrites I'm imagining we could have smart block lists, lists of instances and individuals to block, that could be subscribed to. To radically reduce the amount of work moderation takes, so the same instance or individual doesn't have to be reblocked over and over again.
The mastodon software can have as a default that one or more of these blocklists are subscribed to as a sane default. So individual instances don't need to reinvent the wheel of moderation each time.
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Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@social.tchncs.de)'s status on Monday, 29-Jul-2024 06:16:18 JST Fish Id Wardrobe @sashin @AnarchoNinaWrites We tried blocklists, then shitty folks got control of some of them. This is not a one-off; it happened on Twitter too. Still, there may be some value in them.
I'd be tempted to look at what works now, and change the software to make it easier. Say, build in a registry recording which admins blocked what for why, and a federated sideband channel for admins to talk to each other.