Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mstdn.social), page 2

I can see how this maybe makes sense to people who have never been the target of persistent mass abuse for just existing, but if your whole strategy once an Instagram-scale brigade kicks off is to stay reactive, you're planning to use your trans/queer/Black/high-viz users as ablative shielding.

today in masto replies I have “saying honkey in a joke is an unacceptable slur” (stemming from another reply branch I did not start) and “invisibly missing replies is the best part of decentralization, actually”

Hey masto, if you’ve been here for more than a few weeks and you really like your instance and have a minute, could you weigh in here and name it and say why you like it? We have new folks coming in and I never know where to point them for real-talk instance recs.

Would love to know whether your instance is open to new people, whether it strictly moderates abuse (racist, misogynist, anti-LGBT, disability-linked), how aggressive its defed policies are, whether it’s technically stable.

This is more semi-meta, so do what you will with that, but I want to explicitly tie together two conversational threads from yesterday:

1. I think the structure of Mastodon really amps rumors and misinfo because the mechanisms we use elsewhere to pass around and find corrections (visible replies, quote-posts, search) don't work here.

2. Instance admin politics are rarely discussed in a public, easily re-findable place—that, too, fuels the rumor-mill, as we saw re: Meta meeting discussions.

3. Whenever someone talks about structural problems like ^^^ there is a common response, which I'll paraphrase as "people are going to be weird and abusive no matter what, and [tech/design/policy] can't change that."

Yes, people are going to be weird jerks sometimes, but systems and structures are *by far* our best levers for changing behavior, and I think it's bizarre that this gets trotted out even by people who believe that, for instance, anti-viral features (systems!) are very successful.

4. The fediverse, with all its flaws, has really given me hope that we're on the verge of much better systems built from much better structures. I really believe we can make all of these things work better, and I think starting with human behavior and desires is how we get there.

I wrote a lot about that—mostly in less Masto-specific ways—in yesterday's post about all the ways our networks can be more alive, and help us be more alive.

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

@JamesGleick I'm so sorry you're in it.

There's—rightly—a lot of attention to trying to physically protect people from the smoke, but there's a very strong psychological effect as well that seems…much less attended to, especially when it lasts for more than a few days. The primal danger signals inherent in light like that + the climate doom feelings is just a lot.

You only get one "everyone should simply move away from wildfire smoke" before an autoblock.

@damon I've felt a little neutral about QTs because the same dynamics that make them work for this use also make them worth for racist, misogynist troll kings—but if you axed those people right away with good moderation, that wouldn't be an issue. Feels like a system with interconnected parts that all have to work together.

@inherentlee @inthehands @paulkruczynski I do this in some cases, but not in others, bc when I'm widely boosted, it always results in more of the exact same tedious chiding and I don't want to bring that into anyone else's life—so idk, idk.

@inthehands @paulkruczynski Like the first thing they teach you in bystander training is to center the person being targeted, but in a quiet peer way, not a performative confrontational way. It's a signal in the moment that someone has people.

Then there's the maybe separate problem of detoxing the people who caused the trouble to begin with.

A few weeks back some dude came into my replies for like 11 posts about how I was behaving like a child but he cared about me as a person and would teach me how to speak effectively. No one else saw the replies because he was on a tiny instance. It’s relentless and mostly invisible.

ANYWAY. The alternative is it stays a mostly white mostly male space with N European geek norms, which, okay, but you don’t get to also complain about people using other platforms.

@paulkruczynski I don’t do the “boost bad posts to make an example of them” thing but I more people probably should 😬

If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better.

By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.

this what happens when you build things based on a menu of technical capabilities and not a really solid sense of human behaviors

https://mar.archipielago.uno/objects/596b3e81-129a-4b1f-b52d-8529a73aa99d

(this is not a criticism of the person who made the table)

@beep every time I gripe about mastodon all these people show up and they're like LIAR ITS EASY IF UR NOT DUM and I never say "explain unlisted to me then without googling"

but I want to every time

@dahukanna @inthehands Yeah, I’ve been assuming that the bad during during year one and the bad driving after are…not necessarily the same people or kinds of error/carelessness, even.

I was poking around after a few conversations about driving/parking being worse now than pre-covid and it looks like about a quarter of people who’ve had mild covid may be experiencing visuospatial deficits?

Maybe there are problems with this paper that I’m not seeing but this seems potentially relevant to the traffic safety conversation.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01632-5

@inthehands I keep thinking that the terms of the bargain here should be much, much clearer