Adi RobertsonDutifully signing up for my third decentralized and interoperable social network that has zero compatibility with any of the ones before
Waiting for Decentralized Network 3 to add support for Decentralized Network 1 so Decentralized Network 1 can immediately block it at an infrastructure level, the future of social networking is here.
I understand the support for blocking Threads here but I’m not convinced there’s a pragmatic threat large enough to justify making it impossible for anyone to reach their non-Mastodon friends where they are, admittedly because I engage with Mastodon more as a network of people I know from other places than an ideological community. Like man I like Linux too, but I’m happy I have the option to compromise the purity of the movement by installing proprietary codecs.
Steven (but a Goblin) 💚@thedextriarchy Respectfully, what are you talking about?
You're on Mastodon.social, which hasn't blocked Threads.
If Threads ever federates, you'll be able to communicate across both.
The "infrastructure level" is just an open standard. Smaller instances having higher moderation standards doesn't impact you.
@steven I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth and like I said I don’t even think Threads is going to add support anyway; I’m generalizing and it’s fine if you think it’s unfair. But I’ve seen a fair amount of guilt-by-association “servers that care about moderation must defederate any server that associates with Threads,” and that approach (again, hypothetical for Threads right now) definitely affects my ability to reach people on Mastodon!
@steven Probably my deepest disconnect from what I think of as the Mastodon Community Proper is that a lot of people seem to set a much lower bar for flat-out defederation than I do, and it makes my confidence in the idea that I’ll be able to connect with individual people through the protocol feel uncomfortably precarious.
@steven By contrast letting people follow across servers but not having a disfavored instance appear in a server timeline (which IIRC is the compromise some places have done with Social) seems like it lets communities shape their shared presence without cutting off individual association
@thedextriarchy Totally. And I think that's generally the preferred option.
But it doesn't really reflect how, for example, Libs of TikTok works.
If a community bans Libs of TikTok and silences Threads, that doesn't stop their users from facing harassment from the thousands of Libs of TikTok followers being sent to harass them. Instances don't have the tools to deal with all of those users individually.
If Facebook isn't willing to moderate, it's a binary choice. Either you keep the queer and disabled people, or the people who hate them.
@thedextriarchy I think it would make sense to look at this at a higher level, though. If you're coming at this as a reporter.
Defederating from dot social is rare. The only people defederating from Mastodon.social are people who are at especially high risk of harassment or abuse. Queer communities who are literally facing genocide right now. Disabled people who've been left to die for the last three years.
These people need to be part of more insular communities, for their own safety. And the reason they're disproportionately on Mastodon (instead of Twitter/BlueSky/Threads) is because Mastodon has those safety tools.
For these people, the question isn't federation or defereration. It's defederation or even more insular communities, like Discord servers or PHPBB boards or locked subreddits.
@thedextriarchy I think it's tempting to see these niche queer communities are representative of Mastodon as a whole, because they're cool and funny and have distinct sub-communities.
But Mastodon is mostly normies on big instances like dot social.