A thing we (#medium) need to figure out is in what ways, if any, we need to adjust our existing moderation policy to fit in. I don't want to be defederated unnecessarily but it's hard to even define unnecessary.
I think our existing policies are pretty close to mainstream policies, i.e. mastodon.social
Also, our policies pre-date me joining the company and so I have my own personal learning curve here.
For example, looking at mastodon.social and starting at the top.
We do have a healthy sex & erotica community.
If we include them on me.dm, then one rule we could add is that they need to cw their posts?
Ok, we're adults. We know how to scroll past that if, for example, we are at work.
This, btw, is our current Rules as applied to Medium.com.
https://policy.medium.com/medium-rules-30e5502c4eb4
And this addendum for controversial, suspect and extreme content is pretty illuminating.
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018182453-Controversial-Suspect-and-Extreme-Content
Remember, I'm on a learning curve too. So if someone complains directly to me about how these rules have been enforced against them, I generally do look into it.
The people I've looked into have fallen into two camps:
A) Swear that hating on trans people is done out of love.
B) Are anti vax and citing a news story on the website of their local TV news channel as conclusive evidence.
I'm sure we apply the other rules on a day to day basis, but I don't end up hearing about them.
More on figuring out moderation changes between medium.com and me.dm...
Yes to content warning on graphic and adult topics. We should make that a server rule because our main thing will be onboarding mastodon newbies. So the visibility of a rule will help teach a core concept here.
But what about more edge case warnings? Someone suggested on images of food out of sensitivity to people with eating disorders.
That's definitely outside of the level of sensitivity that we currently ask for on Medium.com.
It brings up two questions. One is whether this is a mainstream level of CW? Do most servers put CW on this?
Then two, there must be many other sensitive topics of similar severity and occurrence. What are they? What about lesser sensitivities?
Some of those questions read naive to me because in a lot of ways I am naive.
I think where they head though is to what degree are we responsible for what we put out into the fediverse and to what degree are we responsible for advertising who we are so that some parts of the fediverse can block what we put out?
I do get that being blocked at an instance level and at a user level is a feature here.
We should be blocked by people that don't want to see commercially run instances, by people that don't want to read self promoters (that is what defines the difference between an author and a diarist), etc.
But more than medium.com, a bad actor on me.dm has the potential to bring bad consequences to the other people on me.dm. That cooperative nature begs for tighter moderation.
Getting blocked at server level is more than “people that don’t want to see X”, it’s more complex than that. It’s more about server admins who do not want to see X and do not want to let others (others include everyone with their server addresses and other members of servers that federate with them) see X. The point here is blocking at server level propagates disruption of access to content down the chain of servers that federate with other servers.
This has implications for servers such as Medium as #Medium is NOT just another random server in the #Fediverse given its separate existence elsewhere on the #Web, so Medium on #Fediverse and #Medium on the web (call it ‘Mothership’) is expected to have a level of consonance to allow certain level of access to contents and policies. Each lives off the other and in the best of times respect the usage of each place where it operates.
For example, at this time, many people are exiting Twitter and setting up accounts on various #Fediverse servers such as #Mastodon sites, and if you traverse Mastodon accounts you will sense a tension between Twitter usage and content in #Fediverse. While it is a welcome sign to see Medium set up shop in #Mastodon, note that Medium allows only #Twitter integration with the ‘Mothership’ but users cannot log in to Medium with their #Fediverse credentials.
Besides, Medium IMHO should not blindly copy block lists as well. I hope you have these checks and balances in place @coachtony
@arinbasu1 Thank you.
Yeah, deeper integration coming.
What it looks like to us is that participation here is close but slightly more strict as compared to the "mothership."
Good, encouraging signs. Thank you for this.
While on this, one of the things that Medium on the web has done remarkably well, is long form content authoring that are “spawned” from specific lines and passages of another essay on Medium (highlights). So a highlight leads to a story in itself. That led Medium to be both a ‘blog’ and more than a blog.
The equivalent of that story leading and chaining to another story is ‘quote post’ in #Mastodon, which is a “no-no” for Mastodonians. A space to watch as to how these will be negotiated.
Tony Stubblebine
Arindam Basu