Someone asked, "Who gets to decide what gets moderated on the Fediverse? And who decides what's seen or unseen?"
You do!
If you don't like someone, block them!
If you don't like an instance, block it!
If you don't like your instance, leave it!
If no instance is to your liking, start your own!
If you don't like other instances, de-federate them!
If you don't like federation itself, turn it off!
Ultimately, the Fediverse gives you the freedom of association—exercise it as you see fit.
On another note, I'm noticing a lot of trolls coming here recently—and they're not happy about being moderated.
I have no doubt some may try methods to skirt moderation.
But I also suspect most will give up and leave.
When trolls find out that I'm generally pro-moderation, they give me a big lecture about free speech and bubbles and silos—and how we should listen to "everyone".
When they go on about this, my natural conclusion is, "Okay, they're not talking about a hypothetical—they *know* they're going to be moderated eventually but are trying to postpone the inevitable."
Trolls, themselves, don't tend to believe in listening to everyone.
They're certainly not looking for debate.
To them, a discussion is not even about uncovering a truth or—more unsubtlely—being right or wrong.
It's about winning or losing.
From a troll's perspective, all interactions are a game with a desired outcome: winning.
In order to deal effectively with trolls, you can't even let them play their game.
As someone else pointed out, trolls might not be strategic in their interactions.
They want to inflict pain and hurt—and will do whatever action enables their pursuit.
This is why I call this a "game".
It may not be a literal game like Monopoly but the effect is the same: a zero sum outcome for which they hope you will lose.
But just because a troll may lack foresight, doesn't mean you have to.
It's worth asking, "When this person talks to me, what's their goal?"
Might as well talk about the most motivated troll I came across on the Fediverse.
First bad interaction, I blocked him.
He came back on another instance.
I blocked that.
Then he said, "I can keep doing this, I have hundreds of accounts."
"Fine," I replied—so I looked up every variation of his username on all instances I could find and blocked them. There were indeed hundreds.
He came back, and seriously requested, "Can you stop doing that? It's costing me a fortune in server costs!"
🤣
That's a funny story. Sounds like you put in a lot of work, though.
Can you tell more about the process you used to find the different variations on his username and how you conducted this search on many different instances?
What is this process going to look like as the fediverse continues to grow and the number of instances multiplies?
But how much work would you need to expend if 20 or 200 trolls expended half as much effort as that one?
My question is about how well this approach will scale.
Thanks.
I suspect that's where we'll all be headed eventually---a world where federation is an earned privilege and not the default. I'm really glad that there is at least some social infrastructure for server administrators to communicate about issues and to start to build a trust network.
And I think it's very important that the fediverse community actively pursues these kinds of conversations *now*.
@dynamic
> a world where federation is an earned privilege and not the default
...is a useful approach for those who want a bounded social network. Some people always do this. Those who want to blast out social media to the widest possible audience will continue to federate openly and block as necessary. As @atomicpoet says, these are among the many options fedi tech gives us for using our freedom of association.
I disagree. In the world I see coming, people who want to blast out social media to the widest possible audience are not going to be able to reach the widest possible audience are going to need to build homes on servers unless they adhere to behavior norms that will earn themselves a place on other servers' white-lists.
This is my prediction for where we are headed, regardless of whether it is how I want things to be.
@dynamic I guess we'll see. But I've been observing these dynamics play out in the 'verse for more than 10 years, over multiple waves of immigrants from DataFarm platforms. So far open federation has remained the norm, with only a minority of servers going for a more cloistered approach. Imagine how much less useful email would be if the standard approach to federation between email servers was opt-in. I think the same is true in the 'verse.
I don't that that backward looks at the history of Mastodon are going to give a picture of how needs are shifting following Musk's purchase of Twitter. It was just earlier this year that folks were wowed that the EU set up Mastodon servers, and then dismayed that the servers were being used for broadcast only.
*Now* there are suddenly mainstream news outlets and public figures broadly using the platform.
These are people and institutions that have incentives to want "the widest possible reach" in ways that I don't think previously existed at all. We had a few microcelebrities, but that was about it. Mastodon is becoming professionalized.
And if a significant fraction of Mastodon users (perhaps not even a majority) are on servers that refuse to federate on the basis of moderation policies, I think it's a safe bet that people who want a genuinely wide reach will set themselves up on servers that conform to those norms.
Chris Trottier
dynamic
Strypey