Notices by Jon (jdp23@blahaj.zone)

I see it more as an opportunity to help today's fediverse evolve (which means transforming into something that it isn't today) in ways that build on what it's best at while also addressing what it's not so good at. The discussion we had about how I see it as unleashing energy to make progress on moving instances is an example. Similarly on the consent and privacy stuff, and that's a direction the fediverse should be moving in, the focus on Meta highlights the urgency.

On "they can scrape it all anyway", I agree that's language that Meta shills use as justification for just giving it to them. But that's not how I took @smallpatatas@mstdn.patatas.ca comment. I saw it more as the opposite, acknowledging that reality and suggesting a couple of things that could be done about it. @tokyo_0@mas.to, you may well be right that they're overkill for the problem we have right now, but my view is they're good things in general for the fediverses so now's a good time to channel the energy in that direction.

@ophiocephalic@kolektiva.social

Local-only posts don't exist in Mastodon because of Eugen, full stop. Glitch implemented local only posts in 2017, Hometown in 2018 or so, there is no excuse for them not to be in the main code base. I get very irritated about this!


@tokyo_0@mas.to @skobkin@lor.sh @smallpatatas@mstdn.patatas.ca @FinchHaven@sfba.social

The fediverse hasn't yet encountered an untrustworthy actor with Meta's scale and resources. The closest to date has been Gab, and maybe the approach of mass defederation that worked very effectively with Gab would have also worked with Threads. Instances that federate with Meta aren't using that tool this time, and instances that reject Meta are, so it's potentially an interesting natural experiment.

Of course that's not the only possible tool, and by itself it certainly isn't enough. Even putting Meta's maliciousness aside, their arrival here means things are going to grow by orders of magnified, so tools that have been effective to date almost certainly won't be sufficient in the post-Threads fediverse(s). As Evan points out "Big Fedi" advocates assume racist automated moderation technology as solving content moderation problems. I don't think it's likely to work particularly well on fedi (it doesn't work particularly well anywhere else, and also the algorithms is anti-LGBTQIA2S+ as well as racist).

A differeent approach, which seems more promising to me, is to start with what works well today on well-moderated fedi instances, and look at what it will take to get it to work in this new environment. So I think a lot of instances that want to be relatively safe and friendly to LGBTQIA2S+ people are likely to move in the directions @smallpatatas@mstdn.patatas.ca describes whether or not they federate with Threads.

- Well-moderated instances today rely on instance-blocking of known bad actors. Even if the hate speech and harassment coming directly from Threads can be managed by existing tools,with one orders of magnitude more instances than today's 20,000 (and new ones popping up all the time) then it's hard for me to see how today's blocklist-based approaches will work. Consent-based federation has its own challenges but "Everybody (including nazis and terfs) can federate and send instances to anybody on the instance until they're told they can't" is always going to be higher-risk than "Everybody (including nazis and terfs) has to get permission to federate and to send people who aren't following them messages or tag them or reply to them."

- cluster-level visibility is an extension of local-only posts: visible to (some) people you don't have a follow relationships with but not public. Any information that's published as an unprotected web page is available to everybody (including nazis and terfs and Meta and Google) and there is a lot of stuff that I would rather not share with everybody (including ....) Of course, I also want to be able to have discussions with people on my instance, and more broadly with people who aren't on my instance -- that's the potential of federation. Today "public" and "unlisted" are the only option for cross-instance discussions, and a lot of people don't even have access to local only discussions, so most stuff is completely public. But that's an artifact of today's fedi functionality, and I thiink a lot of people would prefer an environment where most stuff *isn't* completely public.

@skobkin@lor.sh @FinchHaven@sfba.social @tokyo_0@mas.to

I agree that communities are a useful concept and that it's very unfortunate that instances are the only community-like mechanism in Mastodon (etc). But I also think that instances are distinct from both cross-instance communities and instance-local communities. For one thing, local-only posts are currently the only enforceable way of limiting post visibility and I don't see that changing any time soon.

@smallcircles@social.coop @thisismissem@hachyderm.io @erincandescent@queer.af

@erincandescent@queer.af Great perspective -- and great thread @thisismissem@hachyderm.io.

That said, I look at it somewhat differently. Instances most definitely exist, it's just that they exist in spite of the AP protocol mostly not acknowledging them.

@tokyo_0@mas.to agreed that it'd be ideal to do it in an open way. I did search for "OAuth petition" as well as "Mastodon petition" and "fediverse petition" but didn't find anything.

@Brendanjones@fosstodon.org Thanks, those are all useful tools. When I'm thinknig of is different in two ways:

- those tools all require setting up an additional account.
- those tools are much more general but aren't optimized for the "petition" use case

One of the challenges in fediverse instance governance today is that there's no good way for people on an instance to collectively let their admin know how they feel about an issue. It strikes me that a simple petition app could work quite well here:

- people log in with their fediverse account to "sign" -- so it's verified that they actually have an account on the instance

- a simple "database" list signers to display them publicly

- an optional "let people know" button could make it easy to tell others about it

Does anybody know if an app like this exists -- or if there's a good template to use as a starting point?

#fediverse

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io 💯. Although, sad to say, the effort to portray criticism of the current Israeli government as anti-Semitic doesn't only come from right-wing anti-Semites, the Israeli government and many of its supporters (including some Jewish organizations in the US) have been pushing it for years. It's certainly true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are blatantly anti-Semitic, and some are cloaked anti-Semitism ... but I've said for years that the short-sighted attempt to define it as inherently anti-Semitic (or put such narrow definitions in place that in practice any criticism is anti-Semitic) would come back to bite us, and now it is. Sigh.

As you say though I think that the majority of liberal and leftist people are against anti-Semitism ... and for that matter so are a fair number of conservative people.

@kissane@mas.to have you been following the discussion of when replies are and aren't visible in the home timeline? TL;DR is that it's complicated and unintuitive enough that even experienced people get taken by surprise.

As well as being a problem in its own right, I was thinking of this with respect to the "can't find people or interests" problem that you mentioned as one of the top reasons why people in your informal survey didn't stay. One of the things that people don't generally seem to know is that replies by somebody you follow don't wind up in your home timeline unless they're to (or maybe boosted by?) somebody you follow. On the one hand if you're following a lot of people it's good for keeping your home timeline from being overhelmed, but on the other hand it adds to the discovery challenge.

If I see somebody replying about a topic I'm interested in, the person they're replying to may well also be interested in that topic; repeat enough times, and I've found a bunch of people interested in the topic. But if I _don't_ see the reply, then I can't use this tactic. Of course this isn't the only problem, but it complements the challenges of the lack of search (unless you can guess the hashtag and people are using it) etc.

RE: https://universeodon.com/users/siderea/statuses/110845657548300479

@tchambers@indieweb.social I know that's your POV! But look at @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io 's three points here. Do we have have the distributed moderartion and tools to meet those standards? No. Do we "protect" "our folks" now?

Since your POV doesn't acknowledge today's problems, it undercuts your position that you'll watch like a hawk and do something as soon as there are problems.


@jdp23@indieweb.social @kikobar@acc4e.com @mjf_pro@hachyderm.io @darnell@one.darnell.one @admin@m.bohlenlabs.com @feditips@mstdn.social

@FediPact@tech.lgbt did you see that the #fedipact was mentioned in this BBC article about #Threads upcoming features?

"But a planned system to make Threads compatible with some other apps, such as Mastodon, has met with resistance.....

[C]oncern among users has grown with over a hundred Mastodon communities joining what they call the "fedipact" - an agreement to block Meta from being able to access their community under any circumstances - so even when Threads does begin to support ActivityPub, users will not be able to access everything on the fediverse."


https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66155433

We're here, we're queer, we're federated: How queer, trans, and non-binary people helped create Mastodon and are shaping today's fediverse

https://privacy.thenexus.today/here-queer-and-federated-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

Happy #Pride!

This is a draft version, so feedback is very welcome!

#queer #trans #lgbtq #lgbtqia

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