Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 23, 2025

Could Mastodon improve it's cross-server ability to handle bad actors? What kind of network responsibilities should be involved? These are some of the subjects of a paper by @inquiline :

https://assemblag.es/@inquiline/115255339883075174

I see many similar effects in the efforts of anarchist groups to handle bad-doing within the community. How can we handle these without going to the police?

ghouls for commensality 🧿 (@[email protected])

Oops I did it again... published another paper about #Mastodon through the lens of the asstodon hashtag This one's not very rosy, it's about how a motivated harasser had a lot of room to perpetrate harassment in a decentralized network where big servers were not very inclined to intervene ... https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6644

Assemblag.es
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 23, 2025

Coincidentally, there just was a podcast published featuring anarchist William Gillis that touches on some of these issues. I can't recommend the whole thing but the earlier part of it may be good. It goes through some of the anarchist responses, as a subculture, to bad-doing, in a situation where people can not go to the only structures that society provides for handling these situations and therefore must create their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q387Qd6c898

William Gillis on Radical vs Liberal Abolitionism

YouTube
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 23, 2025
These situations mostly are sanctioned via a form of shunning. (There are other potential outcomes: I note that Gillis didn't seem to mention a four letter acronym beginning with K that does not really mean what it seems to mean.) The harms caused by people acting badly in relation to social media are generally not as severe as those inflicted in person, or especially by our carceral system. Still, I'd like to develop a sort of analogy.
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 23, 2025

"Why don't you go to the police" -> "why don't you go to a centralized social medium like X"?

"The response to bad-doing should start with social shunning" -> "on a decentralized network you can make it so that you don't have contact with the bad account and they are kept completely off your server".

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 23, 2025

In real-life anarchist groups, people struggle with social shunning.

1) the bad-doer does typical DARVO or other attempts to use social capital or friendship networks to prevent it. Their friends don't want to believe, evidence is difficult to come by.

Anarchists have various solutions for this: this is comparatively the easy part.

2) anarchist groups are local. The bad-doer just goes to a different local group within their travel distance. How to communicate reputation?

More difficult.

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

The problem goes: which can do more damage, a bad moderator or a bad user?

Clearly, the answer is the moderator (analogous to the cops). If you go to an actual moderator on X, you will get no help. If you are leftist you may well be banned with no recourse.

But that doesn't mean the bad user can't do damage. Somehow you have to do something about bad users without giving the moderators enough power so that they can solve problems by just using that power.

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025
I should mention at this juncture that I have the kind of personality for which, even though I never do any of the known bad things (for instance, I pride myself on never making multiple accounts, use my real name, never try to evade blocks etc.) I've gotten banned from a large number of fora over the years. I have seen every kind of moderation fail (in my opinion, of course). Volunteer, professional, individual, group, whatever.
Aaron EbelingSep 24, 2025
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝

I suggest that this kind of experience happening to many people,, rather than FOSS ideology in particular, may be behind a lot of Mastodon's design and design problems. Even now, Bluesky (which remains a largely centralized system) is banning people for "living in Mississippi" or "being Palestinian".

For this reason decentralized social media designs become more similar to anarchist ones, with the ability to make central decisions limited.

Sep 24, 2025 at 12:15amWeb
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

I am now going to do the most annoying thing possible: to write a long thread and then say that this is an unsolved problem and that I don't have any immediate suggestions for how to improve it.

It's basically a problem of subcultures.

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025
A subculture can not really take over a societal role that its parent culture provides a bad solution for. No matter how much an anarchist group tries to find a solution for certain problems, *as long as it is a small subculture* it is going to find that to be very difficult. The larger society will actively undermine its solutions with actual force, with legal arrangements, and by inculcating people from early childhood with contrary expectations.
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

So, I suspect that the solutions for decentralized social media are going to fall into a similar zone.

/fin for now

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

PS: Another way of looking at this kind of problem is about the limits of enforcement resources. Gillis in the linked podcast, for instance, mentions how much work it is to get a crew together for e events to tell someone they can't be there.

From a Bluesky post:

https://bsky.app/profile/forbiddenflrsh.bsky.social/post/3lzbjo64w4s27

halogen 🔜 furpoc 🧡 (@forbiddenflrsh.bsky.social)

until we see concrete evidence that bsky’s tiny ass moderation team has the manpower to enforce those new content guidelines, posting CAN and SHOULD continue completely unchanged until proven otherwise, it’s empty words. call their bluff

Bluesky Social
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

Moderation styles on Mastodon predictably fall into one of 3 main paths:

1) The server is so large that they only going to moderate for the most obvious things, they don't have the resources to do anything else.

2) "I'm going to moderate this small server well!!" (server ends in 2 years due to burnout)

3) moderator / server owner started the server in the first place as a power play and they live off of Fedi drama. Server blocks most other servers.

Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Sep 24, 2025

The paper linked at the top of this thread refers to reluctance to recommend Mastodon. I do not like the style of argument for democracy "it's the worst possible system except for all the others": Mastodon should be improved. Still, at the moment:

1) I can't recommend that people should be on any social medium

2) Of the existing ones, Mastodon seems to me to be the best (I haven't tried Blacksky)

3) I prefer King Log to King Stork. So I recommend mastodon.social..