Notices by Fabio Manganiello (fabio@manganiello.social), page 2

Now - can someone tell me why the hell the base installation of an IDE needs to be 2.6GB?

I refuse to believe that the most common way of building a mobile app involves running software that weighs 2.6GB.

I want computers with 512MB of RAM and 25GB of hd storage again. I want hard constraints again so developers are forced to write better code, and they can’t get away anymore with this crap that occupies whatever amount of RAM and disk you give to it.

As available hardware resources have gone up, code quality has gone down - to the point where your app for writing code weighs more than media-heavy apps like Blender or Reaper, a React/Vue hello world installs 100MB of node_modules, and running a Gradle build of a simple Kotlin project eats more RAM than a graphical-intensive videogame.

I’ve decided to go full-in with my own mail server. The #ProtonMail bridge over SSH+VPN tunnel is no substitute for a proper mail server - plus it’s awfully slow when used as a full IMAP server and it breaks the IMAP implementation in a lot of ways.

I’ve created my new domain, gone through the configuration of DKIM/DMARC/SPF like a good postmaster, just to get immediately blacklisted by @spamhaus on my first outbound email.

I’ve been through this before, but in my previous experiences a blacklist removal ticket would be either resolved automatically or within a couple of hours at most.

In this case, nearly 24h and three tickets later and nothing is moving. Not even some directions on how to get removed or an ETA. The mailboxes have already been all migrated with forwarding configured on the old addresses, but outbound email is still broken because being blacklisted by a single company means being unable to communicate with nearly any mail servers out there.

Does anyone have any tips on how a #Spamhaus blacklist removal process can be sped up?

@freemo I guess it depends on the company and the person in charge, but my experience is with CIOs without CTOs. In such scenarios, my experience is that the CIO is spread very thin across multiple areas of competency. It’s not really a lesser position, but one that, without a good separation of areas of concern, risks diluting the impact by putting too much on the plate.

Advice to the fellow engineers out there: never work a for tech company that doesn’t have a CTO.

Or where the role of the CTO is replaced by the more lightweight role of CIO, or worse by a VP of technology that doesn’t sit directly on the board, or reports to someone else in the board.

It’s a frustrating trend I’m seeing more and more often in the industry (and even my own employer has embraced it for years).

As technology becomes more and more complex and entangled in all corporate processes, it’s outrageous that those who are in charge of building that technology have reporting lines that end with a CPO or CBO instead of a technical person who can actually bring their voices and technical concerns to the board as a peer.

Companies that don’t hire a CTO or don’t have one sitting in their board are companies that have a clear statement: “we are not a tech company, we consider tech only as a mean to achieve our goals, we don’t give tech people the same importance we give to product/business/marketing people, we see tech as a mere instrument whose direction should be established by product and business people, not by technical people”.

Companies that don’t hire a CTO are doomed to never adopt sound technological strategies, they are doomed to be reactive rather than proactive (after all who cares about technical debt if nobody is in charge of making sure that such concerns bubble all the way up?), they instead chase all the butterflies proposed by tech illiterates, and they talk all the time about “pivoting and re-pivoting” because they have simply no clue of what they are doing.

I’ve had some quite passionate (euphemism) discussions in the past couple of days with people who accused me of “throwing minorities under the bus” or “allowing Meta to scoop up everybody’s posts” just because I’ve temporarily decided not to defederate #Threads from my personal Akkoma instance.

What’s interesting is that some of those accusations came from people who, in some cases, had their profiles fully public and searchable, on instances with webfinger enabled and without authenticated API constraints.

Their posts are already available on any search engine, searchable on Mastodon, their profiles can already be enumerated via API, and, even if their instance blocks another one, users on the blocked instance may still be able to see their content (especially if reshared/quoted) through unauthenticated API calls. But yeah, they think that the problem is with my tiny personal instance not defederating what they don’t like.

I’ve got the impression that there’s a lot of confusion on the #Fediverse on how to customize the #visibility and #privacy of your content, and how to make sure that only those you wish will ever be able to see it.

In order to prevent pointless retaliatory blocks/defederations towards instances whose only fault is not to block what others want them to block, and in order to prevent the Fediverse to splinter into small islands along totally arbitrary fracture lines on the basis of unfounded beliefs about how it works, I’ve put together a sequence of steps to check if your profile and your content are really private and sealed from unauthorized access (if that’s what you wish) - thanks to @gruff for the suggestion, and thanks to @evan for validating some of my assumptions.

@Gargron you’re welcome to validate my hypothesis about how AUTHORIZED_FETCH and DISALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_API_ACCESS work on Mastodon - I knew about AUTHORIZED_FETCH before, but I see that its functionality is now split on two environment variables, and I’m not sure if both instance A and instance B need to have it enabled to prevent content leak towards blocked instances from reshares/quotes.

cc @fediverse @privacy

@happyborg

Mmm, that’s like saying tolerance requires accepting the intolerant.

My proud Popperist side is horrified by this interpretation of my words.

I firmly believe that it’s our duty to be intolerant towards the intolerant, and proactively kick fascist asses to the hell they belong to.

But when “intolerant” is applied as a label to anyone who doesn’t proactively defederate a platform where the definition of “intolerant” is statistically likely to cover at most 5% of its user, I have a problem.

In short, I don’t think that it’s ok to be intolerant towards those who are on the same side as yours, but just happen to have a different “intolerance tolerance” bar, because nasty fracturing feedback loops may occur from such a transitive law.

And I also don’t believe that voluntary reclusion that excludes that 95% of potentially innocuous users amid fears of encountering that 5% of potential jerks is a scalable solution that empowers vulnerable people to be really part of the society - it instead reminds me a lot of the features of a cult.

@happyborg well, if we talk from a strictly technical point of view, I don’t see the issue there.

I mean, if an admin of an instance cares that their garden is completely insulated from risks of scraping/forwarding of their user content, then they already have the tools for it:

1. Encourage user who care about their privacy to make their profiles private / followers-only.

2. Disable /.well-known/webfinger.

3. Enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH on their instance configuration (Pleroma’s APIs are authenticated by default, but Mastodon requires that environment variable to be explicitly enabled).

4. Encourage other federated instances to also enable AUTHORIZED_FETCH.

If all these four conditions are met, I don’t see how Threads, or an instance federated with Threads and also with theirs, could be exploited to extract information about their users.

Meeting all four conditions means that:

1. The posts of a user aren’t publicly accessible, and they can’t even be crawled by a search engine nor by an under-the-radar bot instance. If some admins complain that my instance not defederating from Threads threatens the safety/privacy of their users, they should probably first make sure that their profiles are actually private and their content isn’t already indexed on a search engine. Because that’d be like asking me to close a small door on the back when they’ve actually let the flood gates open.

2. AUTHORIZED_FETCH closes the loophole on the “indirect content fetch” side. Consider this case: instance B is federated with both A and C, but A has adopted a strict “no-C” policy, while B has implemented a “wait-and-see” policy. If user Y on instance B boosts/quotes a post from user X on instance A, and both instance A and B have AUTHORIZED_FETCH enabled, then a request from C to download the post from B with the quote from A will have to go through an authorization phase from both A and B. If either fails, then the user on C will either see an empty post or nothing, depending on the implementation.

That’s what I mean when I say that, technologically speaking, we already have the tools to ensure that those who want their content to be shared with a controversial instance, but don’t want to lose the existing connections to other instances on that basis, can already do so without any side doing compromises.

If we want to talk about the ideological side, and whether we want to build a community with a single consistent position on certain issues, or a set of independent islands with different values that can still communicate talk to each other, regardless of who else they also like to talk to, then it’s another thing.

p.s. I think that AUTHORIZED_FETCH helps but it’s not the ideal implementation. For the chain to work, all the instances in a “federated chain of trust” need to enable it, or the risk of exposing unwanted content (especially upon repost/quotes) is non negligible. And the fact that it’s not even enabled by default on Mastodon (the software used by 73% of the servers here), and that many admins don’t even know about it, or didn’t enable it, means that my little Akkoma instance (with authorized fetch) federating with Threads is the least of the problems. IMHO either that option should be enabled by default (even if that means breaking back-compatibility with instances that run Mastodon < 3), or complemented by another feature that doesn’t require strong authentication (like chains of referrals).

@gruff @happyborg honestly I haven’t found much around. Everybody seems to hysterically yell “we all must defederate Threads, otherwise everybody’s privacy will be diluted!”, which means that few probably have a clearer picture of the settings already available and how cross-instance content forwarding works. I may work on putting together this information in a more articulate stand-alone post.

Disclaimer: this information is based on my understanding both of the protocol and the available settings, which in turn are based on on skimming through the source code myself. I’m not sure if other loopholes are available (for example posts cached on other instances and indexed), so I’d love to get confirmation from someone who has contributed to the Fedi more than me.

@gruff cc @evan - I’m not sure if tag notifications from the Fedi already work for Threads accounts.

Me: “After a long consideration, I’ve decided not to defederate Threads from my personal instance, because the benefits of being able to reach out to my friends and relatives using the open tools that I’m contributing to build and run outweigh the risks, but I’ll keep an eye on it, I may reserve the right to block Threads later, and I respect and understand those who prefer to block them instead“.

Easily triggered strangers on the Internet: “You self-entitled privileged cis tech bro, you are not doing enough to protect vulnerable minorities from the fascist harassers in the world out there, I hope you die from a gut infection“.

So much for “the Fediverse is an open place that embraces diversity and mutual respect where everybody should feel safe”.

I feel like @zuck may achieve his goal of killing the #Fediverse through divide et impera without even needing to kickstart the E-E-E phase.

The simple announcement that #Threads is going to federate has caused such a huge backlash, and so much pressure and retaliatory blocks and defederations towards users and admins guilty of not doing enough to block this perceived “cancer” (including @Gargron), that I feel like the Fediverse is at risk of splintering in two - a subset of instances that will not defederate Threads, and another subset that will defederate it, and wants to cut all the bridges with those who haven’t done so.

@aud @aral @eatyourglory @greenWhale > And in the meantime, you expose tons of people to immediate danger (LibsofTikTok, etc).

I feel like there’s a divergence in social network philosophy in the Fediverse community that is becoming hard to reconcile.

Many believe that the primary goal of social media is to proactively shield vulnerable users from any possible forms of abuse or trauma. Even if that comes at the cost of proactively defederating whole instances that aren’t strictly aligned with our approach to moderation or with our ideology. Even if that means proposing to proactively defederate all the instances that run Pleroma/Akkoma software just because many of their contributors are perceived as too liberal (yes, somebody actually went as far as seriously proposing that). Even if that means harming discoverability, availability of content, or splintering the Fediverse into smaller bubbles and reducing its potential reach.

I personally belong to the camp of those who believes that the primary goal of social media is to enable people to connect as easily as possible to others and discover content with the least amount of frictions, and give users enough power and tools to granularly decide what content they want to see.

I want to minimize the harm to vulnerable users, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of everything else.

The user is in charge. The user can block/suspend/mute/report anything they don’t like. Sure, in extreme cases drastic decisions ought to be taken, and a whole instance with 100s/1000s/10,000s of users needs to be defederated. But such extreme cases IMHO include things like poa.st, Gab or X itself, where the tree is truly rotten at its roots, where the admins themselves endorse violence/prejudice, and/or where, picking a random user out of their base, it’s statistically very likely that that user is an absolute jerk/sociopath.

IMHO that doesn’t include Threads. Sure, Mark’s behaviour is something that we should keep a constant eye on. Sure, the higher the number of users, the higher the probability of bumping into jerks. But it’s just up to us to filter/mute/block/report them and move on. We don’t throw the whole platform away because of the sporadic jerks, because on such a large platform there are actually also people (like many of our real-life friends, or relatives, or journalists, scientists and politicians) who would add a lot of value to my feed, and the cost of losing all that content to me is much higher than the benefit that I would gain from making the Fediverse completely/proactively impermeable from the Libs of TikTok.

It’s like taking a public bus in a busy city: the busier the bus, the higher the chance of bumping into some scum who throws racial or homophobic slurs to other travellers. In such conditions, depending on the magnitude of the offense, most of the people would either:

1. Move to another seat
2. Directly address the offender and call him/her out for being a jerk
3. Report the offender to the bus driver (or the authorities)

The alternative would be to stop taking public busses, and inviting everyone to stop taking busses as well, because the risk of bumping into potentially traumatizing confrontation with a sociopath is non-zero, and maybe criticize the bus operator for not preemptively preventing a potential fascist from taking the bus.

Which of these two approaches sounds more reasonable to you?

Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations.

This isn’t true. After announcing support for Fediverse sharing for US, Canada and Japan, I’ve actually noticed that a lot of people on Threads started talking about the Fediverse. Many were wondering what it was. #Fediverse was among the most popular topics discussed on the platform. I saw even some people open up Mastodon accounts to test how the integration works.

To be clear, I hate both the management of X and Meta from the bottom of my heart. But credit is due where it’s due. Musk used to mock “Masturbodon”, preemptively ban any Twitter accounts with a Fediverse handle in their profile, aggressively shut down one after the other all the APIs used by services like Birdsite to bridge tweets to the Fediverse, and basically prevented anybody from even talking about the Fediverse on its platform. Threads, on the other hand, invested a lot in building this integration, lets people talk about the Fediverse freely, it doesn’t mock it nor it’s aggressive towards us.

Sure, it doesn’t mean that I trust them. It doesn’t mean that I support their way of developing this integration (through meetings with ActivityPub luminaries covered by NDAs rather than truly building in the open). It doesn’t mean that I don’t see risks in the future. But I don’t feel like it’s fair to put X and Threads in the same bucket when it comes to their approach towards the Fediverse just because they are both big and both run by very unpleasant human beings.

Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.

The alternative to “users on Threads will only see federated content through Threads” is “users on Threads won’t see anything outside of their bubble at all”. If they see your posts, there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll click on your profile and maybe follow up on your instance. If they don’t see your posts, this chance is much lower.

You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs.

I can’t make a plan that is better than theirs if they have all the content and all the users.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of years trying to convince friends and relatives to do the jump.

The questions I get from them usually aren’t along the lines of “is the protocol/source code open or closed?”, nor “what are the odds of bumping into jerks on that platform?”, nor “how will moderators/admins proactively prevent me from seeing potentially disturbing content?”

No, most of the questions I get are along the lines of “can I still follow this celebrity/politician there?”, or “can I still talk to my relatives and friends from there?”, immediately followed by “how easy is it to use?”

If the answers to all these questions are negative, then we’ve lost a user. It’s a war that we can’t win. If however there is some form of permeability between large corporate platforms and smaller federated platforms, and those who feel that it’s too hard to onboard on the Fediverse have an “easy path” to interact with its content, the offer becomes much more compelling.

But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).

You can’t possibly scrutinize the funding sources of each single corporate entity that decides to join the Fediverse. And, even if you do, you’ll probably find some stinky hedge fund or VC money everywhere.

For as much as I would love a Fedivese that is completely made up of no-profits and volunteers, I know that we’ll never get traction that way. If a business joins the ranks, then we get more attention and more content.

The Flipboard case is a good one. But I could also add Wordpress, Tumblr, and many other companies that recently have either built an integration with the Fediverse, or are working on building it. I personally don’t see how they could threaten the Fediverse either. If the number of jerks on the Fediverse increases when these companies integrate their products, we can just block the jerks. If the number of jerks goes out of control, or if the company proves to be malignant in its intentions, we can block/defederate the domain. But I don’t see how the existence of businesses in our space could threaten our space. Eventually, users and admins have a lot of granular control, and they can decide what they want to see. The existence of businesses who use the ActivityPub protocol to publish their activities isn’t a threat to the Fediverse any more than the presence of businesses who use HTTP over TCP/IP is a threat to anyone who wants to run their own website.

@aud @aral @eatyourglory @greenWhale get your shit together and wash up your mouth with caustic soda before ever attempting to talk to me again. I’m just sticking rational arguments together without ever getting personal. I expect the same level of respect.

I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years. With my own money, with my own time, and even risking my own career and incolumity for people I didn’t even know.

And I’ve done so because I’ve been myself among oppressed minorities, and a target of discrimination for most of my life, and I’ve started from a quite low spot in life too. Just because I don’t constantly show off my trauma, or slam an oppressed minority badge of honor on everybody’s face and ask for everybody’s pity, it doesn’t mean that I’m a privileged white guy who had daddy paying all of his bills, and doesn’t know what it means to be publicly discriminated.

Don’t you even realize that YOU are the fascist jerk here?

You talk so much about protecting oppressed minorities from aggression and prejudice, and yet you are the one who’s dumping a full page of aggressive scatology upon a stranger who has probably gone through more shit and prejudice than you - and all just because I’m trying to have a civilized conversation about the trade-offs between discoverability/connectivity and sealed insulation from any possible source of injury.

You talk so much about preventive defederation, throwing the baby away with the bathwater if that’s the price to pay to make sure that nobody ever interacts with any potentially disturbing content, and you don’t realize that you’re just creating an unscalable and sealed safe bubble that does more harm than good. You probably wouldn’t tell vulnerable people to stay sealed in their houses only with their trusted friends around to avoid any contact or potential conflict with a potential jerk on the bus, at the mall or on the street. Yet that’s exactly what you’re advocating here, telling yourself the unforgivable lie that ascetic digital exclusion from the rest of the world is the best solution to strengthen the oppressed.

You talk so much about diversity, and yet you are the one throwing insults (including the f words) at somebody who is on the same ideological camp as you, but who just so happened to reach a different conclusion than you on a certain problem, and is trying to rationally consider all the trade-offs of a difficult problem. You like diversity only as long as everybody’s conclusions are exactly aligned with yours, and you bark like a rabid dog at anyone who deviates from the only path that you feel it’s righteous, and you’re so busy enjoying the nauseous smell of your ideologically inconsistent farts that you don’t even realize that your aggressivity and your inability to engage into a civilized discussion with someone who disagrees with you on a particular topic makes YOU the true fascist here.

Now just go back and re-read the messages you’ve sent me in this thread. Do you feel proud of them? Does your aggressive language show a good picture of you? Do you feel like your friends and family would be proud of you for showing such an ugly side to a perfect stranger on the Internet who just happened to disagree with you?

If you can answer affirmatively at all of these questions, then please proceed at blocking me before I do that with you. It means that you belong to that extremist minority of the minority that takes pride of its purist ascetism and does more harm than good to the world.

Otherwise, I expect an apology for your motiveless aggression.

@aud @SallyStrange @aral @eatyourglory @greenWhale did I ever suggest that they are worth less? Quite the opposite. I’m saying that, even if you perfectly insultate them from all the assholes on the Internet, they’ll still meet assholes in real life. On the street. On the bus. At the mall. In their office.

Insulating them from the rest of the world to protect them actually harms them. It makes them incapable of handling conflict. It makes them even more vulnerable.

We should encourage them to get out of their shell, not to dig their own grave inside of it.

They should know that they shouldn’t be scared of the sex-deprived incel who lives in his granma’s basements and posts pictures of his guns. They should know that they are better human beings than him. And that escaping in a safe bubble isolated from the world is the best undeserved gift that they could give to such losers.

I’ve gone through more shit in life than equality posers like you can even imagine. Raised in a poor neighbourhood riddled with criminality. Raised in a fundamentalist cult that isolated me from the world for all of my childhood. Bullied in school for my identity when I was a teenager. I’ve migrated several times, and I’ve been subject to racial and social prejudice countless times. I’ve heard “go back to your home” more times than any human being deserves. Just because I don’t show the oppressed minority badge at every chance or I don’t write it in my bio, you have no fucking right of calling me a privileged white dude. Do we agree on this and will you shut the fuck up about your fucking assumptions about my background and alleged privilege from now on?

Yet I’ve walked more distance in life than all the odds that played against me. And that’s NOT because I decided to take shelter in the isolation of my cult. Nor surround myself only with people like me. Nor go and beg for pity for my situation. I got far in life because at some point I understood that the only way to overcome trauma is to deal with it face to face, learn that being afraid of our oppressors is the best gift that we could hand to them, surround yourself with people who would support you, and move on.

I hope that you don’t have kids, because the same line of reasoning applied to parenting would be a guarantee for child development failure. Telling marginalized people “don’t go on mainstream social media and don’t interact with anyone who’s there, because you may be bullied by jerks” is the same as telling your teenage kid “don’t go to the parties of your school friends and don’t play with other kids at the park, because you may be bullied by jerks”. Do you feel like kids raised like this will be more or less prepared to go through all the shit that this world holds for them once they grow up?

Self-confidence and self-awareness only emerges when people confront their offenders and learn that they have nothing to fear from them. Be part of the world, not live in a parallel world.

Your line of reasoning damages vulnerable people because it keeps them prisoners of cages that others built for them. Yours is not anything that resembles activism, because activism happens out there in the real world, openly standing on the side of the oppressed on the open square, barking in the face of the real fascists, humiliating them and showing everyone how insignificant they are as human beings, and how fragile their ideas actually are. Not shooting friendly fire on those who want to solve the same problems as you but propose a different approach, while staying in the cozy comfort of your isolated bubble, and fighting anything that may disturb that false sense of safety.

You are not an activist, nor you are doing any good to the world. You don’t even know what it means to get your own life threatened by real thugs for defending someone you barely know from injustice. You are just a prisoner who is advocating for everybody to be locked in the same prison. A pathetic poser who is more aggressive and narrow minded than the worst fascist out there, and doesn’t even realize it.

@nonlinear @greenWhale @SallyStrange @aud @aral @eatyourglory gosh, the whole human kind must have suddenly become dumb and unable to understand written English.

I’ll try and repeat the concept in simpler words.

Advocating for the empowerment of minorities is exactly the opposite of social darwinism.

Telling your kid “it’s ok to go to your school friends’ party, or play with those of kids at the park, and if someone bullies you stand up for rights and let an adult know” is better than telling them “don’t interact with anyone outside of the safe circle that I’ve picked for you - 95% of the people out there should be mostly ok, but that 5% of risk that you may bump into an asshole is too hard for me to bear”.

Empowerment and self-awareness only emerge when you are part of the world, not when you seclude yourself from it.

And I’m not saying that minorities need more exposure to bigots - I’m saying that bigots need more exposure to minorities. Because many wouldn’t be bigots if they had sufficient exposure to people who don’t look or think like them, and they probably wouldn’t have much ground for dehumanizing them. It’s not a coincidence if far-right movements and prejudice are generally more radicated in sparsely populated rural areas than in culturally diverse and well mixed urban centers. Even the worst jerk in a large city is statistically likely to have at least an acquaintance who was born in a different country, has different sexual orientation or creed. And that makes them more unlikely to manifest prejudice.

Oppression is fed by dehumanization. Dehumanization is fed by prejudice. Prejudice is fed by ignorance. And the best way to defeat ignorance is through exposure. It applies in the real world as well as the digital one.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s not everybody’s task (admins, authorities, other users, and society as a whole) to make real or digital plazas safe for everyone. More regulation needs to be in place to hold large platforms accountable for the abuse that happens on them (such laws are already present in most of the EU countries, but they could be improved). Instance admins and mods have to be ready to act on reports. And users eventually need to have all the tools to granularly filter what they want to see.

Problems of oppression, prejudice, platform governance and moderation are not easy to solve, and it doesn’t mean that we should settle for the easiest solution - throw the baby away with the bathwater and prevent any contacts between an outside world perceived as hostile and a “safe haven” designed to shield us from any unpleasant encounter. This kind of awful simplifications belong to cults, not to healthy societies.

@nonlinear @greenWhale @SallyStrange @aud @aral @eatyourglory read the whole thread. You’ll notice that I’ve repeated the same exact arguments multiple times. And every time my words were intentionally distorted, chopped and pasted in different ways to picture me as someone I’m not, just so I could fit into a readily available stereotype that many of my interlocutors had in mind.

After repeating the same argument 10 times, and getting your own words manipulated all the 10 times, while being undeservely covered by insults by those who allegedly advocate for online safety, and being forcefully stereotyped by those who allegedly fight against prejudice, wouldn’t you show a little bit of frustration?

Now tell me, which one is more offensive? “Gosh, the whole humankind must have suddenly become dumb” after countless attempts of manipulating my words and countless episodes of verbal aggression in response to my calm arguments, or “I hope a bacteria infects you and kills you” / “I hope a dog pisses in your eye”? Just to make sure that we’re using the same scales. At some point continuous provocation and aggression just reap their own deserved fruits.

And btw, did you even bother to read the remaining text, or did you cherrypick that phrase in a sea of words and ignored the rest so I could also fit in one of your readily available prejudices?

@aud @aral @eatyourglory far from it, I want him called accountable for his unethical business practices, for his failures at moderation and for being a sociopath.

It’s just that I don’t think that full defederation of a platform with millions of users, and giving up our chance of finally making the Fediverse more mainstream and stopping using other platforms to communicate with our friends and relatives, is the best solution.

@aral @eatyourglory I’m very well aware of Meta’s challenges with content moderation. And I definitely would like them to be called more accountable for this.

I’m just challenging the idea that full defederation of a platform with millions of people is the right way to respond to these failures, or if more granular measures (blocks/mutes) can be implemented.

Again, if the tree was rotten at its very roots (Gab, poa.st etc.), there would be no doubt about it.

If the head of the platform was actively engaging and promoting hateful ideologies (like Musk), there wouldn’t be any doubt either.

But for now I don’t see any such strong signals from Thread.

@aral @eatyourglory I’m not sure if I agree completely with this statement.

Defederating Gab, poa.st, cum.salon or RapeMeat was really a no-brainer.

Those were instances created by trolls/fascists/homophobic/misogynist admins, and specifically dedicated to people who share the same ideas and the same ways of treating others.

There’s literally no doubt of the ideology of a person who joins one of those instances: if you join Gab or poa.st, then it’s quite easy to identify your ideas as well.

Can we say the same about Threads? Can we say that everybody there is a transphobic, or a Nazi, or a troll? Can we say that the admins explicitly embrace and actively promote these ideologies?

When you have an instance with millions of accounts, you’re always statistically likely to get jerks. The questions that admins have to ask before defederating are:

1. Are jerks a clear majority there?

2. Are the failures at moderation due to the website administration actively promoting jerks (like it’s the case for Musk’s shithole), or are they due to the challenges of scaling up moderation, or to bars that are just set higher than many Fediverse admins?

3. If we defederate it, what are the risks of cutting out a lot of useful traffic (like institutional accounts, or harmless accounts that are followed by many users on our instances)? In other words, does the signal/noise ratio justify sacrificing the signal in order to protect users from the noise?

4. What are our thoughts about striking a balance between protecting our users from abuse vs. giving them a chance to connect to whoever they want to?

I have the impression that for Threads the response to these questions is negative, at least for now.

Of course, I’m monitoring the situation, and I’m ready to pull the drawbridge at the first signs that Threads has a negative net added value for the Fediverse.

But that doesn’t seem the case for now IMHO (I actually see a lot of nice/decent people on Threads that are genuinely curious about the Fediverse), and I’m not sure if I would handpick a few cases of moderation failures to make an argument in favour of defederation (rather than individual blocks/bans/mutes).