Janet VWhy did I have to find an Indonesian who is ignorant dan potentially doing harrassment towards women on Mastodon?
Very disappointing.
Very disappointing.
Michael Savich@janet_val Unfortunately distributed systems are like honey to trolls. Ever logged onto Usenet? 🤢
@janet_val no it's like a post-apocalypse on there. Last time I was on it was made up of people complaining Obama was black and bots selling weird medications.
@janet_val the problem with Mastodon is you can never really ban jerks, they can just spin up their own instance. Best case you can defederalize judiciously to isolate troll-friendly nodes, but whether you use blacklists or white lists, the amount of moderation required scales as more users and instances come online.
@msavich not sure how you could defederalise. So there is actually a way to isolate these trolls?
I'd love to see that happening, really.
I'd love to see that happening, really.
@janet_val hopefully I'm not about to explain stuff you already know, but
Mastodon is federated, meaning that it is a coalition of servers subscribed to one another. Generally the contracts between servers are formed organically via user activity. But admins can block servers, thus removing them from their federated network…
In theory banning trolls from instances makes them move to servers with no rules, which admins can then dissolve their federated link with.
@janet_val Of course this "let the trolls create their own paradise we never have to interact with" theory could prove ineffective in practice. It also risks breaking Mastodon into tiny chunks and silencing respectable users who happen to be on a server deemed troll infested.