Notices by Tim W (admin (and human)) (tim@union.place), page 6

@AnthonyJK I'm pretty sure no one is either talking about or doing any mass censoring. Knock off the FUD.

Who am I to judge who is "right" when a POC says a trans person is being racist, or a trans person says a POC is being transphobic? Especially when those two examples are the same people (or same groups). I can't believe them both. But I also don't really have the life experience, framework, or frankly any RIGHT, to judge either of them.

This usually results in me trying to stay out of it, stand back, be uninvolved. 🧵

Woah that's a CW, eh?

As a cishet white man ("easy mode"), my usual go-to when evaluating claims of racism, transphobia, sexism, etc, is that if a person of less privilege than me (ie: anyone) says they are experiencing discrimination against their class, I believe them.

Recent Fediverse meta has shown that this breaks down when you start getting deep into intersectionality. 🧵

But just standing back goes against the principles of antiracism, which, to my understanding, can be applied to antitransphobia or antisexism just as well (open to feedback on that if folks think I'm wrong!). So being an active ally for all of these groups means... fighting with all of them? Calling all of them out? Boosting all of their voices and not taking a side?

I don't know. That's what I'm struggling with. 🧵

@hrefna I actually pretty strongly disagree with your characterization here (after agreeing with the first post on this thread).

My users expect me to protect them from badly-run servers. Those 95 "good users" on the poorly / unmoderated server aren't false positives. They're collateral damage, but they're not false positives - they're people on a bad server.

@hrefna right, but you're changing the stakes here. We're not talking about classifying harassers. We're talking about classifying poorly moderated servers. Those are completely different problem domains.

@hrefna I feel like this thread of this discussion boils down to "there are, in fact, instances that are too big to block", and I feel like that's a distinct point / discussion from the original one that I'd prefer to see separated from the language of false positives.

@hrefna maybe I'm just arguing pointless semantics, I certainly don't INTEND to be doing so, but maybe I am. I just think the false positives vs collateral damage language difference is, in fact, important in this particular conversation.

@hrefna to me, your example (100 user server, bad/no moderation, 5 bad users, 95 good ones) is not a false positive (or a 95% FP) on a shared blocklist with the intent of "keeping out poorly moderated servers".

Those 95 good users are not false positives there. The server is the entity being listed, and it meets the criteria of the list.

A false positive is if the blocklist includes a server that does not meet its published listing criteria. (cont)

@hrefna one reason for blocking entire servers with bad moderation policies is to influence change, and/or to cause the "good" users to go elsewhere.

I think you're absolutely correct that it's a HORRIBLE tool for this right now with the way Fedi software currently exists and doesn't really make this visible, but it's the tool we have.

And that's only a secondary purpose; the primary one is to prevent more harm. Who's to say there won't be 200 users tomorrow, with 105 of them being bad?

@hrefna And this is a way that shared blocklists with auto-updating are problematic even with "true positives" - if I as a server admin am going to block a server with which my users have meaningful connections, I want to think about it, and do it deliberately, and probably be extra transparent about it - not have an automatic update do it for me.

@feld @fraying there's a very important difference between what's happening here ((alleged) private action by a private corporation) and what you're talking about (government action).

Only one of those has anything to do with the First Amendment. It's not this one.

@fraying Huh. Yeah. I have extremely mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, I get their slippery slope argument. On the other hand, they acknowledge that KF is "almost universally despised" - that makes it a little unfair for their comparison to an attorney general and reproductive rights. That scenario is also government action, which is explicitly different from what HE is (allegedly) doing here...

Yeah, I'm gonna go with you on this, EFF is wrong here. Sad.

@feld the use of the false scarcity ("53 shirts left!" bullshit, you can print as many as you want) tactic seemed below him. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

@AnthonyJK not to mention that literally anyone who is able to buy a US sports team is equally slimy, they just haven't been caught yet.

@feld @drwho Tucows didn't become an ICANN-accredited domain registrar until 1999. Before that they were all about software distribution (and still were afterward, for a while).

Technically competition was allowed as of October 1998, but functionally 1999 is when ICANN actually started accrediting registrars.

Anyone know of any apps for Mastodon or Fediverse in general to help with spreading out posts (particularly boosts?)

I'd love to go through the various hashtags I follow and queue a bunch of stuff to boost out throughout the day rather than boosting stuff in big batches. I'm pretty sure software for this existed/exists for Twitter (though maybe the API lockdown killed it), but does it exist for Masto/Fedi?

CC @feditips

What is the sort order for results to searches on a Mastodon instance? Is it essentially random? Is there some attempt at weighting?

I wish I could sort it by recency but I can't see any obvious way to do that. I just want to find some thing I know I starred in the last couple of days... I guess I can look at my stars, they're in order, but then I can't search them there...

#MastoAdmin

PSA: the admin of mastodon.au has just announced in an apparent temper tantrum that he will be shutting down with only 7 days' notice. :(

Anyone on mastodon.au, like all instances, is welcome here on The Union Place if you have any interest or connection to the international labor movement.

We take our Mastodon Server Covenant commitment seriously and won't shut down without minimum 3 months' notice. And don't have any plans on shutting down at all. Especially over little things.

I am exhausted. Are we there yet? Have we won? Does everyone have a #Union? Is #Capitalism dead? Did we #EatTheRich ?

No? Crap. Guess we'll keep working on it then.

#UnionStrong