@FinchHaven@privateger@Mastodon Reminder that $100,000 is an amount of that sounds big on paper, but when you use it on the expenses of running multiple servers that millions of people connect to every day, then split it between two full-time employees, it whittles down to minimum wage type numbers.
@BeAware I'm not referring to whether server staff can handle them, I'm referring to giving users a choice as to whether they are on a server that blocks Threads: some users would rather the Facebook company have zero access to them. That's a legitimate desire, and requires the server to do a full block.
Maybe this is something that needs to be looked into by a group of servers. I will bring it up with some of the other North American tech server staffs.
@BeAware Agreed, but they are legitimate and real instances. The fact that people can't find and move to them makes me second guess the idea that not blocking Threads is giving users options, as they don't seem to have many options to avoid it.
Just the other day, I was looking through the other North American tech servers, and very few are blocking Threads.
@BeAware Interesting... That is far lower than the amount I've been seeing... If that is the case, perhaps it would be good if more servers blocked them, to give more users that option.
@BeAware Something I want to point out, this poll is giving an incomplete picture. The majority of people are on servers that aren't blocking threads, because most of mainstream Fedi isn't blocking threads. The majority of servers, from what I can tell though, are blocking Threads.
This is because the vast majority of the servers which are blocking threads are the smaller more niche servers, the queer/black/female/jewish/muslim hangouts and safe spaces.
This goes down to this concept I keep saying that different instances have different goals and strategies: the instances that set themselves up for massive userbases are the instances that are less likely to block a server the size of Threads.
@aral So, it occurred to me last night that it is possible that the Mastodon Organization cannot block or even encourage a block of Threads for the same reason Twitter can't ban them: it could potentially run afoul of anti-competitive laws. Because of this, legally speaking, the best course of action is to let them federate, then make a big public paper trail of the problems associated with federation, and use that as precedent to start limiting interactions. In short, waiting to block may be legally necessary.
That said, realize that everyone who has made the decision not to block has done so after some clear thoughts about it. We are aware that this is a bad actor, and we are aware that we will likely have a moderation scenario the moment they actually federate, assuming they even do. We have weighed that against the cost of preemptively blocking such a large new entrant, and decided to hold off for the moment, and wait until there is an actual problem.
@AnthonyJK@alex I don't think anyone is arguing with what you are doing on your own instance: you have a responsibility to do whatever you feel is necessary to safeguard that community. I think what this other person is saying is that we get so many duplicate posts on the tag, it would be best to not duplicate when possible.
Personally, when I have a receipt like this that I want to add, I post it as a response to the first person who dropped the tag on that instance.
Also, it feels a bit redundant to post about individual accounts on here, at least until we have seen moderator response on that instance: it's not worth it for mods to investigate someone on another instance if that instance is going to deal with it better than we can in the next few hours, like with this incident. I worry that people are using this tag instead of the report button, which is the best way to inform moderators of an instance that a user is doing something you think they should respond to.
@aral@cferdinandi As someone from family which had members in the Nazi party, I find a lot of the Netanyahu regime's rhetoric, policy, and claims of racial-hegemony extremely disturbing: never forget that Germany was the first country the Nazis took over, our entire economy converted to a killing machine, and what we took part in "for the good of all German people" is something we still live with the collective shame and trauma of.
I'm also disturbed by the rampant shouting-over of all the Jewish people who are also concerned about what's being done to the Palestinians. Every day, I see someone post a story about a holocaust survivor being horrified by the level of violence being thrown at a civilian population on an ethnic basis, yet we still see the narrative of the Israeli government, that they are doing this for "all Jews", and that "all Jews" support this violence, pushed into the mainstream, when all of the Jewish people I know offline are openly appalled by it.
@youronlyone@BlueBee@jerry Thankfully it comes in sparse waves over here, but it's been so complicated and heated that I've just given up on trying to even moderate beyond whether or not people are breaking the serious rules: no posting pictures of violence without a CW, no calls for violence against civilians, no assertions that ALL members of a racial/ethnic/religious group are somehow responsible for or in support of the actions of a few members of that group.
Fortunately, once we cut out enough of the "Netanyahu represents all Jews" and "Hamas represents all Palestinians" bullshit, which are both claims coming from both the radical groups here, it chills down to people mostly talking about how shitty the Netanyahu Regime and Hamas are, which is probably the most productive conversation to be having. (Though I do find the "Genocide Joe" remarks unhelpful)
@erincandescent@ashten Disagree: they could always get new accounts on other social medias. Here, they have to deal with much more vigilant moderators, who are likely to go to greater lengths to get the police involved.
I have access to people's emails and IPs, and I've sent them to the FBI for illegal activity involving minors in the past. I don't even know what I'd do if I caught someone actively grooming.
Just wanted to point out, with the ongoing #spam attack on #fediverse / #misskey / #mastodon, this kind of happens on every social network. The only reason you are hearing about it is because #moderation#staff is normal users who use the normal channels to talk about it, and we actually take it way more seriously than the corporate social networks do.
Like, this represents most of the traffic on #Twitter, and they don't seem to care, so it speaks volumes about the fact that you can see us talking about how we don't want that here.
@cody@Polychrome@noxypaws@chirpbirb@colinstu@coolbean@lettosprey Someone else in the thread posted this link to an old Reddit thread, which I remember reading a while back, which I also think really throws a wrench in the "spaces" standard: being able to set tab sizes is important for accessibility, for people with visual impairments, and people with differently sized displays.
With spaces, 2 might seem large for one person while 8 might seem small, and you're not giving them the option to quickly convert it. This isn't just an aesthetic choice, it's a functional one, which can vary from basic comfort when reading to being able to work around a serious physical or technical issue.
Also, honestly, y'all seriously do not understand how much smoother the workflow of tabs can be than spaces. Tabs people have no idea how you put up with it.
@noxypaws@lettosprey@cody@chirpbirb@colinstu@coolbean So like, I'm not really sure how to explain this to you without saying "Go spend a few days building a big project in tabs, then go convert it to spaces and try to bug fix", but it's basically a matter of you learning little quick movements on the keyboard (professional programmers learn to type very fast), and your cursor getting stuck in between these spaces that your muscle memory expects to be tabs.
When I went to University, I already had a degree in programming. There were a dozen staff there, and I was the most competent programming teacher in the entire school. Note that I didn't work for the school because I didn't have a masters, I taught night classes and did tutoring.
I wasn't being paid to look at this stuff.
When I first started helping students, I would have all this trouble with their space-based code indentation, where I would be trying to quickly flip through it and my cursor would keep getting lost in the indentation or I would have to figure out how many spaces they were using whenever I added a line.
At some point I realized I was spending like 10 minutes extra on the ones who weren't using tabs, so I wrote a script that quickly converted spaces into tabs.
At some point I put it up and started making them use this before they brought it to me.
@freemo@mcnado As someone who was actually crippled by the disease, I do think that you underestimate how serious a situation things were in 2020, especially when you say there was overreaction and panic. There were people in the government literally arguing that we should allow the entire population to be infected so that we could move on as quickly as possible, while doctors were screaming at them that there was no evidence that people couldn't have repeated serious infections, and that we didn't know what the long-term consequences would be.
The people who wanted to let the entire population get infected called the doctors "alarmist".
We now have a dozen variants, 10 to 20% of people who got it have serious long-term consequences, and managed to develop a vaccine to prevents those consequences within months. If it had been taken more seriously until the vaccine was out, as the "alarmist" doctors wanted us to, we would not be where we are now.
@mcnado@freemo Just wanted to point out a potential skew you both might be missing here: Long COVID isn't very thuroughly defined, because it's not yet even understood as anything beyond "symptoms after infection has cleared due to damage."
This could include the type of permanently crippling nervous system damage that I have, but it could, in some studies, include ANY symptom which lingers for more than a couple weeks after infection.
Could it be possible that 80% of patients who test positive and end up in the study haven't fully recovered by a month later? Could it be that the study only includes more severe cases?
Computer Scientist, Media Creator, Programming Teacher, Business Consultant, Psychology Enthusiast, and AI-Safety Warrior.Mastodon fan since last decade!I made this account to talk about my professional and academic interests.MODERATOR DISCLAIMER: This is the personal account of a user who happens to be a moderator. The views expressed by this account do NOT represent official statements by TechHub.Social.