Marco Rogers
I wish I could give more people some perspective into how things change on here when you are an instance administrator.
I just received a report against a user who isn't even a member of my instance. Remember, this is a single user instance. I am the only user.
This is a person of color who has been vocal in the current drama surrounding anti-Black racism on mastodon. The report comes from a very large and very prominent instance focused on LGBTQ+ communities.
Marco Rogers
The thing to understand is that this is politics. This Black user is not a member of that instance. They could block this user and go mind their business. But that's not what they want to do. This instance instead chooses to follow this person around the distributed fediverse and actively influence other instances against them. That is a choice.
Marco Rogers
@dalias @EverydayMoggie either way, the optics of how it lands in my inbox are not great. This is really poorly designed and communicated within the product.
Marco Rogers
@dalias @EverydayMoggie what's the reasoning behind this setup? Why would I give a fuck about a report from a random instance about a random user?
moggie
I could be wrong about this, but I think Mastodon just masks the identity of the individual who made the report in those cases.
Rich Felker
@EverydayMoggie @polotek Yeah, when reports are forwarded, the identity of the reporting user is protected because the instance the report is forwarded to might be malicious. All you see is which instance it came from. One of the many ways instances function as "privacy unions".
Marco Rogers
I'm also still learning how mastodon works for admins. And I feel like I get surprised every time. Like this report doesn't come from a particular user. It's submitted from the instance as a whole? Does that mean it's from a person with admin or moderator privileges on that instance?
Or maybe it is an individual user. But it just looks this way in my UI because they've chosen to be anonymous? I don't know. It's not clear to me, and I would actually have to do work to find out.
Marco Rogers
I can't imagine what it's like to be an instance administrator who is not prepared to navigate these cultural issues. Especially when you've actually agreed to be responsible for other people's experience on here. That's not a small thing. And a big part of the current discourse is that the mastodon ecosystem hasn't given instance admins and moderators enough tools and support.
Marco Rogers
Somehow, the thing that bothers me the most is how sloppy this is. If a real person had spent 2 seconds looking at who I am, they would see that I'm Black af, and non of that shit is likely to fly here. But they are sending these reports out indiscriminately. They can't even be bothered to be intentional about it. To me, that is the biggest indicator that this is bad faith rather than just them being misguided.
BeAware
@polotek reports aren't identifiable, for obvious reasons. They never include the name of the user that reported it.
Also, the post that was reported has to be engaging with your instance in some way, I thought. Maybe they tagged you in the post? Then the reporting user can choose to send the report to all instances involved in receiving the post.
More than likely they didn't specifically choose to send it to you, they just chose to report it to "all involved parties".
Marco Rogers
To be clear, I can be lazy and skip that work because it's just me here. If I was an admin for other people, it would be irresponsible of me to avoid educating myself about these features. I still plan to do so at some point. But as I like to point out frequently, I made the conscious choice to run a single user instance precisely so I can skip these headaches if I choose.
Eugen Rochko
@dalias @polotek @EverydayMoggie Mastodon has never exposed the identity of the reporting user to third party servers; it used to be masked by the admin user, then a special system user was created to avoid confusion, and finally the UI was updated to just show the server name when a report comes from a remote source. Non-Mastodon software may not have the same privacy protections in place though and just expose the actual reporting user.
Rich Felker
@polotek @EverydayMoggie I think it's a poorly done retrofit to fix exposure of reporting users to harassment & abuse.
What used to happen, and what happens at protocol level, is identity of reporting user gets forwarded. They replaced that field with a dummy admin identity without clearly marking it as dummy.
Because folks were reporting nazis on nazi instances, and the nazi instance owners would tell everyone to go gang up on the folka reporting them.
Eugen Rochko
@dalias @polotek @EverydayMoggie I’ll preface by saying the following is not designed for or helpful for single user setups. The behavior you’re seeing allows the admin to take action on a malicious reply to one of their users in cases when such a reply is seen by someone from a third party server first, theoretically making it possible to remove the reply before the actual recipient sees it.
Marco Rogers
I want to close the loop on this issue from an administrator perspective. Some folks here helped me understand more about how this ended up in my inbox. The consensus is that this report is an individual user and probably not from an instance administrator or moderator.
A user reported some posts from a thread that they found objectionable. Then they selected a checkbox that forwarded the report to the instances of *every other user* in that thread.
https://sfba.social/@EverydayMoggie/112878587331060045
Marco Rogers
I find this to be a very weird and poorly designed approach. But it's definitely a better story than instance mods snitch tagging Black people. I haven't verified this info myself yet. But I felt like it was worth updating this thread since I came on pretty strong initially.
Marco Rogers
I think this correction matters because it changes the optics of this quite substantially. I still think the person who reported this is probably trash, just based on the content. But I think it downgrades this from an active harassment campaign. In fact it sounds like it's trivially easy for a user to send a report that ends up looking like this to other random instances without even realizing it. That's bad too. But for a different reason than how this thread started.
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