Notices by Jerry on Mastodon (jerry@hear-me.social), page 3

@BeAware Silenced by an individual or an entire instance? What size instance? That should only happen to raving lunatics. You're not a raving lunatic.

@hazelnoot Oliphant is blocked here for spreading misinformation. Nobody should use any Oliphant list. Admins, make your own decisions about who to block.

@compuguy @BeAware Yeah, he is.

@BeAware
It's unethical Admin behavior, in my opinion, to shadow-ban.

I think I'll put a note about this in the "About" section for my instance to describe that Admins and moderators here are forbidden to shadow-ban (limit, silence) any account without notification to the account owner, a policy people should be aware that is not in effect on all instances.

Trust must work both ways to have an open working Fediverse.

I guess my only exception is that Threads accounts are all initially limited by default, and the limit is lifted on a per-Threads-account basis. But, this policy is made clear in my About section as well.

@BeAware Naive me never even considered that the "limit" option could be used by an instance Admin to shadow-ban a user privately.

I find the feature useful and I have used it, perhaps 3 times, to limit a suspected spammer/scammer account until I could have a dialog with the account creator. But, in all cases, I notified them that I limited their account and explained the impact. I'd never limit (silence) an account secretly.

I think it is unethical for an instance owner to do so without notification to the account owner.

I don't know if it's truly happening on .social. I bet though there's a particular woman who does it often on her instance to her local accounts, but I won't mention her name. You know who I mean.

You always raise interesting questions.

@BeAware This is absolutely true. I don't understand why someone would go through all the effort to develop something great and then not want to help people deploy it. And not want to help people save the time of Googling around for information that could have been documented.

This is my number one complaint with FOSS.

Simple step-by-step instructions should always be made available, including preparation.

@BeAware Wasn't sure. So, you do tip waiters, servers, and delivery drivers, just not counter workers?

@BeAware In Massachusetts the minimum wage is $15/hour, but for tipped workers, it's only $6.75/hour. At least here, they need the tips. So, I tip.

Unsure though if counter staff are considered tipped workers or not. It's all confusing and ridiculous.

But, I wish they were paid a living wage and tipping was disallowed, as it is done in Japan. I hate the idea of having to tip people.

@BeAware I just set up a firewall rule in the Cloudflare WAF to block anything incoming from any domain that contains "awakari". They are very annoying!

@BeAware @awakari_discover@universeodon.com Thanks for keeping on top of them. I keep suspending their accounts and domains as well.

@BeAware They did you a favor, in the long term.

@hello
They need someone who is better at math, or maybe they meant to exclude half the sample.

@alainamartin
@BeAware

1. Seems some people have decided that the ActivityPub protocol was created only for the purpose of connecting non-corporate social media together. I never saw evidence that this was a design principle, but they believe it.

2. Fear that advertising will somehow come into the Fediverse.

3. Unwillingness to connect to the people who use Threads because they associate with billionaires and corporations by using their software. Their kind just isn't welcome here.

4. Meta will come for our servers, steal personal information, overwhelm our servers and leave us with a pile of burning hardware. mastodon.social, so far, seems to be doing fine.

BTW, everything in the Fediverse is in clear text, and you don't need to follow people to read their stuff. No doubt Facebook, and other corporates, and governments, have been reading everything already.

Generally, they feel in their heart that supporting Threads is supporting evil. That people who use Threads are therefore supporting evil. I've gotten plenty of nasty responses because I don't block Threads on my server. There's even a list of servers that refuse to block Threads so those fighting the evil can defederate from Threads-connected servers.

You'll find a lot of anger from some when suggesting that people on Threads be followed on the Fediverse.

@alainamartin @BeAware

Servers that use Cloudflare for protection, like mine, have the option to have Cloudflare automatically block all AI bots. I have it enabled.

Cloudflare has written how some AI companies attempt to look like the Google bot, and others, so as to get around the blocks, but that they aren't fooling Cloudflare and they do get blocked.

I don't know what other instances are doing to deal with this.

@BeAware Absolutely a serious issue with the Fediverse. Admins who defederate too quickly, too often. And people who keep demanding Admins suspend other instances and users.

I get reports all the time that ask me to suspend people because if you twist what they say into a pretzel, you can maybe find something that might be offensive, possibly, maybe, under a special agendized lens if you squint and make a hundred assumptions.

The only thing about being an Admin that I don't like.

@BeAware This is disappointing. I expected more from them, by now.

@BeAware Yep. All true.

I set it up just because it sounded like something interesting to do, but I have no illusion that I'm better off for it.

@BeAware Yep. You're right. The only advantage of the PDS is that your PDS keeps both your identity and your data (posts, profile, etc.), and not Bluesky corporate.

I have my own PDS, blue-ocean.social, and I have one other person who is using it to store their identity and data, I assume because they don't want Bluesky to have it. For me. It just feels good to control my data.

I hardly use Bluesky, BTW.

Other than deleting someone's account or disabling it, there is nothing more I can do with my PDS, at least for now.

@BeAware @HarbingerOfSalem
But the suspension doesn't reference the post at all. It references "rude and hurtful" responses to other people.

I don't know, of course. I'm just not able to make a judgement.

@BeAware @HarbingerOfSalem
Has it been appealed? Maybe just one of their many moderators was out of line.

Has @Gargron replied? This is a strong statement to make about Eugene. Are we sure this is all true before we attack him? It doesn't seem to be his character.

Can we see an image of the exact post that got reported?