All of the posts on Mastodon about how the Blue Sky team was silly for releasing a social media network in 2023 without blocking and moderation, even in private beta, and that the Blue Sky team should have known what would happen...
...are being written on Mastodon: a social media platform that in 2023, still doesn't take into account that Black users face a disproportionate amount of very specific types of abuse, and is missing key features that would make the Black population safer. 🙂🙃
It really is the social media equivalent of white folks telling Black folks that Boston is less racist than the South, and completely ignoring any Black folk that live in Boston or anywhere else in the US trying to talk about what their real, lived, experiences have been.
Many Mastodon users are just completely convinced of the superiority of their moderation philosophy, and they are as happy to ignore the few Black Fedi users in 2023 as they were in 2017.
@mekkaokereke
Can you explain, please:
1. What is "moderation philosophy"?
2. Are you indicating that black users cannot express themselves on Mastodon as they would like to do?
😘🙏
Philosophy: when Black folk say "Can you add this feature that would greatly reduce racism?" We're told "No! That's how Fedi is supposed to work! Just move!" And then moving loses all your posts.🤡
People get more upset about Black people saying Black joy things to each other without a CW, than they do about Black people receiving abuse because they joined the wrong server.
The resistance to safe default deny lists is a trade-off between Black user safety, and fear of being excluded.
@oliphant and @Are0h are better at maintaining a safe deny list than almost any admin on Fedi will ever be. It should be possible for any admin to just delegate responsibility to them at setup time. The decision not to let people delegate and compose ongoing moderation tasks like deny lists, is a philosophical choice that balances user safety (primarily affecting Black folk) with notions of "openness."
(*Even better, it should be possible for admins to pay them for this, but hey.)
@mcv @[email protected] @oliphant @Raven47 @mekkaokereke A while back, I saw where someone was working on something like a "Federated" blocklist aggregator - IIRC, the concept was, it tracks which servers were blocked by which other servers, and presented the info as a sorta "reverse social graph", so you can see e.g., who's blocked by everybody, who's blocked by just two other servers, etc.
Seemed like a promising concept! Wish I could find it now...
@mekkaokereke @Raven47 @oliphant @Are0h Yeah this basically echoes what I’ve been doing with the blocklists I gave Ollie. FediNuke for a baseline, Tier-0 for a starting point with wiggle room, and the full envs list for something more comprehensive. I didn’t even realize this is what I was trying to accomplish until you put it into words for me, in this thread and elsewhere: it should be possible to “stack” these! A sub-network of instances can agree on a minimal list of bad actors, each instance can draw different lines in the sand and hold those lines more comprehensively, and individual users can supplement those with their own boundaries while finding lists that match with them.
One thing I’ll add: blocklists vary when it comes to which boundaries they set, and how well they maintain those boundaries. Understanding the latter is easy but defining the former is probably going to get really messy if our real-time blocklist subscription projects take off.
Edited to link to the article where I describe them.
@Seirdy @mekkaokereke @Raven47 @oliphant @Are0h
A realtime subscription also has a big advantage over copypasting (which is effectively append-only) in that is makes it possible to federate the removal of servers from a blocklist in the event of a mistake or a temporary problem (after it gets fixed).
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