Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net), page 4

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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?

@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.

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.

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.

The fediverse is a lot of work. And right now, it doesn't make anybody any money. In fact it costs a lot of money ab free labor.

Investing in the fediverse only makes sense if it *actually* gives us control of our own destiny.

I'm gonna repeat this a lot. Because it's going to take a while for people to unlearn what we usually do and instead create new dynamics.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112480816034536846

@ironchamber @RuiSeabra @timbray this person's bio does a very good job of explaining exactly what to expect from them. They are on brand, and I can respect that.

I see a lot of the drama that is happening between people of color on the platform and the mastodon dev team. I feel like I need any to help, but I'm not exactly sure the best way to do that. I'm more wary of making things worse tbh.

But I feel like there are two important things that feel clear to me. I want to say it out loud and have people either correct me or help me understand better.

The first thing is really basic. The mastodon dev team is very small. Regardless of whatever decisions they are making about what to focus on or not focus on. They can't do a whole lot. I believe they have been up front about that to anybody who will listen. So I don't think it pays to expect them to be capable of meeting these large issues.

Could we have better moderation today if they had committed to working on it a year or more ago? Sure, maybe. But at this stage, it's going to take a lot of work to get there. And the core team is underfunded. To me that means asking them to engage with this issue isn't actually a good use of energy. Whether they are aligned with our requests or not, they just can't do what is needed.

The second thing is well worth more discussion. And I'm gonna take a hard stance on this. If people of color still find ourselves dependent on a small team of white devs to get what we want, that is a failure of the principles of the fediverse.

I understand why it still feels like we have to ask the mastodon team for things. I'm not dismissing the reality of where we are. But our goal should be actively move away from this dynamic. How do we do that?

@kissane Amen.

@janl guarantees? On the web? Ha!

@janl this is what the Suspense thing in react does right? I don't fully understand it. But it seems like it's meant to wait until all async calls are resolved? Either way I find it very confusing.

@jenniferplusplus hot take. People don't actually hate ORMs. They hate databases. But they can't actually get rid of the latter. 😂

This was a great read. It gave me a lot of thoughts about how we overbuild a lot of things these days. "Boring" technology still works really well even up to pretty high scale.

"Serving a billion web requests with boring code"
https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/06/Serving_a_billion_web_requests_with_boring_code.html

Yep. I noticed that. It's worth noting that he basically says "I didn't want to choose this. But building a multi page site would've taken longer."

That's a hell of a statement. I disagree in general of course. But the context is important. Essentially he makes an assessment of his team and what they would able to get up to speed with. Building a SPA with react is the only thing they knew well enough to give them confidence. There is a lot to unpack there.
https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/112759194466807431