Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mstdn.social)

I would bet actual money that I've got some nuance of Mastodon's functionality wrong in there so when you see that please do lmk. I thought about asking instance-running friends to preview it but I've taken up enough of their time this week.

But what is the actual PROBLEM with Mastodon?? Said one hundred dozen people over several months of threads here. So I wrote it up.

It's too long, but we got bad doors, stilt-walking French shepherds, water bugs, a bunch of @shengokai quotations, What The Fuck Is Up With Bluesky, and more.

https://erinkissane.com/the-affordance-loop

I think people think we're exaggerating.

(This was just in the mentions of another person's thread about the Mastodon UI and reply culture being not great—I removed the OP's name to reduce blowback. The replier's timeline makes it clear he's not joking.)

Without shared blocklists, this isn't tenable.

Maybe it's useful to try to turn this into something that looks like a request:

- I think we need shared blocklists ASAP. I know people are working on them, and I'm grateful. If you want to fight in my mentions about whether they should exist, you're going in the sardine can.

- I think the people behaving like this need to be told by other [white dudes in open source or whatever] that their behavior is ridiculous and self-defeating.

- I think people who want to productively disagree about things like Mastodon features should model active listening, should do the discussion in helpful channels and work to make them findable to reduce redundancy (hey blogs), and should yeet these assholes out of the conversation when they arrive.

To be clear, I will be fine! Just maybe less active in this exact place.

But look: I think finding people who are having trouble with your network/platform/protocol of choice and attentively, actively listening to what they need, and then inviting them into collaborative ideation and building (or just boosting their work) involves different skills than jumping to proposed fixes + critiques.

I think most people can build those skills! It just takes practice, and OSS has weird starter norms.

Day two of waking up to people heatedly squabbling over instance security in my mentions from a tangentially related post I made over the weekend.

I have to calibrate by reminding myself that this is the place someone said that my posts are fascist (I’m not paraphrasing) bc I suggest that Mastodon is both weak and strong, which is how Hitler talked about the Jews.

At the moment, unless I swear off talking about tech, muting threads is the only option for not having this shape my whole fedi experience, which isn’t great—ignoring people causes a whole other level of bad feelings—but I’m just not going to engage with the hyperbolic FOSS-fight register.

Heads up, @cfaworkers has made a call for public support of their nascent union, which is facing union-busting tactics.

If you think civic tech workers deserve a union, this is the time to voice it to Code for America's leadership—specific instructions at the bottom of the post:

https://cfaworkersunited.com/stories/2023/07/14/cfa-actions-dont-align-with-values.html

Bluesky had a bad week as a company in relation to its community of users but a thing that is totally alive there rn and really not here is Black journalists and writers and internet people having non-101 conversations about rhetoric and networks at full speed without being hit with hundreds of identical replies about not seeing race or being asked to prove the existence of racism.

I hope fedi people who care about this stuff are paying attention and not just smugly writing them off.

“If you don’t start the years-long conversation over every time a new guy shows up with no interest in getting himself up to speed, you are the real problem!”

(Into the can, my friend.)

I really prefer to be chill and collegial but I think coddling the mass of dudes who can somehow keep up with the minutiae of decades of software disputes but demand that every race and culture conversation grind to a halt while they demand a basic orientation has turned out to be a terrible strategy.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle” re: every exploitative tech thing while the US governing apparatus is stuffing reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, social safety nets, and *child labor laws* back into bottles (and threatening to kill section 230 and ban TikTok) is a master class in preemptive surrender.

Not a huge goods and services person but Eighth Generation is one of maybe five companies I feel intense loyalty to—totally unmatched wool textiles, Indigenous-owned and run, featuring all Indigenous artists—and they are having a big sale this week on summer and back-to-school stuff, so I'm taking that as an excuse to link:

https://eighthgeneration.com

I took a little vacation and came back and the fact that Libs of Tiktok is already ensconced on Threads and we have tech dudes on here explaining that Threads is beside the point/unlikely to be vector for harassment is still making my head explode.

(I'd hoped to find an accessible but technical account how this anti-trans manipulation and harassment plays out across networks, but it seems like there's a gap between v high level summary and hyper-detailed academic analysis of similar networks.)

To me, the critical thing is that if you're an admin with no plan for even temporarily slamming down the gates when a truly gigantic service like Threads rocks up and *inevitably* brings the sophisticated networked abuse it enables into fedi, you're failing in your duty of care.

Anyway! A couple of links that dig into the LoT phenom a bit, tx to folks who replied to my earlier queries:

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/march-libs-tiktok-was-top-twitter-user-amplifying-anti-lgbtq-hate-now-these-attacks-are

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/libs-tiktok-has-used-twitter-target-over-200-individual-teachers-schools-and-districts-2022

https://wapo.st/46McPVm (gift link)

Okay, who has solid references outlining how new-school abuse-distributors (eg Libs of Tiktok) do their targeting and swarming across networks and offline? I’m looking for (original flavor) journalistic tick-tocks on how a single campaign moves across the internet and also accessible academic analysis. Specifically I’d like to see timing/timelines and scale included in the analysis.

Someone has to have done this well!

Boosts appreciated 🙏

when even requested boosts backfire 🤦🏻

I put all my midsummer optimism into this thing about the aliveness of our networks and platforms and tools, and why I think the systems stuff is worth getting right.

https://erinkissane.com/qualities-of-life

"Federating with Meta will be fine, we have no actual plans for *preventing* damage but each instance will totally yeet each individual Threads account involved in the mass-scale brigading instigated by e.g. Libs of TikTok *after* they start terrorizing our users" is gonna be a disaster for very specific groups of users.