The moderation policy changes at Meta are deeply troubling and should be a concern to anyone with a conscience. While the fediverse is a decentralized platform where different service providers have different moderation policies, at mastodon.social, hate speech is prohibited, and we will take action on any Threads account found violating our policies. I would strongly urge anyone with a Threads account to reconsider their alignment with the new direction at Meta and move to Mastodon instead.
@davidaugust Yes. Sadly the interoperability on Threads' side is still lacking in this aspect, and they cannot move accounts between servers like Mastodon users can. However, at least those who migrate can re-follow their Threads contacts manually to help them make the transition to Mastodon. Maintaining interoperability from our side is important to enable this.
@Gargron so that means that for the moment you continue federating threads at the instance level? Is this subject to ongoing scrutiny in regards to metas behavior?
@Gargron I find negativity generally annoying and counterproductive, which is why I love platforms or apps that allow *me* to decide what to filter out. (I have numerous filters set up in Ivory because while I appreciate someone’s creativity and many things they share, I absolutely do not want to hear their political opinions, regardless of their “side.”) So while I understand your perspective here, I also wonder who determines what constitutes speech that is not allowed in any given category.
@Gargron That's why I'm here. As parent of a trans young person I'm genuinely scared about the consequences of faceplants changes. They were bad enough already.
@Gargron I appreciate the approach, though. There’s still accounts (especially government ones) that I follow that I would hate to lose but I’m glad the team on mastodon.social is going to be moderating actively.
@Gargron applied to the real world, this means users with accounts on mastodon.social are not allowed to use hate speech. Users on threads are, explicitly. Their admin has said there are almost no rules at all. This entire instance is now at risk of the bullying and harassment that drove me away from fb and Twitter years ago, and you're explicitly allowing it, possibly even approving it
@Gargron Please consider defederating Threads from the instances you manage. They are now, by policy, tolerating harassment of minorities. If you would defederate a mastodon instance that allowed hate speech, you should also defederate Threads.
@Gargron if hate speech is so prohibited on fedi, i should be able to report it when i click on 'report this post' rather than having to find another way to specify that it is a violation.
please, make this place safer before patting yourselves on the back for being the better platform
@Gargron I’ve already been kicked off of Facebook and some other ones so I’ve given up on the idea of free speech because it’s only free speech if you’re spouting the party line
@fubaroque At present we receive very few reports about Threads accounts. 68 in total since its launch. For comparison, we handle about 4.4K reports every month.
@Gargron been trying to get my friends to join here, no chance sadly...somehow they feel like it's too complicated or don't want yet another account...I do like it here on Mastodon very much, though. I've even recently moved from mastodon.online to social to be better able to invite friends...but it is to no avail yet....
@Gargron Eugen, the OWNER OF THREADS and the entire platform guidelines violate "our policies". It's not about a single account.
Do they still meet the federation requirements? .online and .social already don't federate with many instances that explicitly allow and/or even target certain audiences and content.
Regarding the fav / repost and the lack of seeing outside your local timeline ... Yeah that's the design of ActivityPub. It's designed to work differently than a twitter timeline , and in fact, it's designed to work in an infinite way by using simple concept on which you can slap your favorite way to display data . I don't say everyone will stay, but at least let them try to learn it .
For one, people start to gain traction and then it flops because why? Ans: Popular posts become super annoying, recurring in TL dozens or hundreds of times per day..... so people react by muting those users and conversations.
Little if any chance you'll see replies (to other users' threads) from people you follow show up in your TL. Great candidate for a simple "algorithm"; as it stands its just poor engagement.
Picture-only posts where most people can't view the thread, because the only place to click on such posts is a 1px tall line about 3px under the poster's avatar.
Its very sad. Years back I donated money to Mastodon, but there are still UX holes you can drive a truck through and nothing is done about it. UX isn't taken seriously here, so its mainly techies that stick around.
@ErikUden@Gargron (GOnna be picky here but replacing mastodon with fediverse could be more welcoming and allow people to replace facebook with plenora and so on)
@Gargron Already moved over to Mastodon, along with Bluesky. These are my primaries, and I still use X, but I'm not in support of Meta apps, and anyone buying into Zuckerburg's "free-speech" community note rhetoric, clearly doesn't understand the end game.
@Gargron It would help a lot, if you're not willing to defederate right away, if you could go ahead and preemptively block the top 100-500 accounts responsible for directing hate. Everybody knows who they are and what they'll be doing with this new policy, and there's no need to expose the fedi to them.
@Gargron Playing individual account moderation whack-a-mole with Threads' much larger userbase is a bad idea and exposes users of this instance to harm. It allows for all sorts of doxxing and dog-piling which individual users from these groups are not emotionally and logistically able to handle. Please reconsider and ban Threads outright. This should not be a "just manage it yourself" situation.
@Gargron My 12 year's on Twitters ended in January 2023 and I joined Mastodon. My 18 years on Facebook is being replaced by Bluesky. Pixelfed has replaced Instagram. I'm torn about WhatsApp, my last contact with many friends and real world social networks.
@Gargron now would be the perfect time for Mastodon to prioritise features that marginalised communities have been asking for, around better privacy controls, retooting, etc.
I would love to see loud, affirmative commitment and action on these things from the Mastodon team
@tasket@rrb@Gargron The question is just whether they do it now on the basis of the pro-hate policy (with tutorial in the policy announcement no less!) or wait until the effects of that policy start to be seen.
At this point the former seems like a much better idea.
@tasket@rrb@Gargron It was largely defensible to federate with Threads when the problem was just that it was corporate and undermoderated - provided you could do your own moderation of them.
It's not defensible to federate with naziverse instances - that is, instances which explicitly allow and encourage hate speech. With the new policy announcement, including a how-to tutorial on transphobic hate, Threads has clearly become the latter.
@dalias@tasket@Gargron With Zuckerberg, it became obvious to me that he is a prostitute when they found an advertising target group labeled "jew haters." He builds a business on selling access to people that want to kill him and his family.
@Gargron I worry that the effort of moderating the rising tide of crap from Threads will become detrimental to this server. Do you have a plan that will result in threads being defederated? What is the threshold, and why is the stated direction from Meta enough to trigger severance?
@Gargron I have a threads account but Its largely been abandoned for the last few months as I take a deep look at what those platforms deliver for their end users. Threads always had a way more corporate feel to it and towards the end of my usage of the platform, began to be filled with more AI Slop as meta desperately looked to keep the platform alive. This aligns with their current plans of AI personas on their platforms which I cannot support.