I've been watching the conversations around whether or not instances set-up should include a (easily-overridden) default of importing a blocklist for known awful instances.
Those against it pattern match for me with a certain libertarian streak that doesn't want humans making decisions.
In economics, it's the gold standard and free markets. In politics, government is inefficient and should be minimised.
It's the idea that a system with human decision-makers could be undermined...
1/n
@sgf Hrm ..... i think, such a functionality should ultimately be a opt-in ... not a opt-out.
Who will actually be responsible for said list? Which political interests are covered?
It's .... complex..... I like the idea of a bad-list. On the other hand, i don't like calling out ppl in public especially if we can be sure to get a fair amount of streisand effect from that...
Mh. ;)
@hackbyte I think there should be a default blocklist because anyone who sets up an instance who doesn't know about moderation and blocklists probably doesn't want to peer with poast.
You can see actual blocklists and who's responsible for them at https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist .
Mastodon already has opinions on what the default acceptable behaviour should be - https://joinmastodon.org/covenant . Extending the recommendation from individuals to instance peering seems pretty reasonable.
@sgf Well ... sadly the standards for distributed lists will always succumb to the basic interests of the people who declare their own to be morally better than whatever they want to block.
And yes, i specially refer to mastodon.social and chaos.social ..... where you actually get a frickin instance block just because you might have a differing opinion to one of their users..
And because these instances have a relatively huge amount of users .... this actually creates problems and enforces recentralisation.
But that's just another completely bonkers aspect of the ongoing mastodontitis.
----
Before you ask. i'm a left leaning german, i dislike what goes on under the "free speech" umbrella, especially if it promotes hateful or even violent behaviour against anyone.
But, you should for example do not _need_ to change your avatar image to a pride flag, just to avoid getting scrutinized.
That's why i'm not for a default opt-out block list.
Make it opt-in for easy access .... ;)
Simon Frankau
hackbyte Antifa (friendica) 13HB1