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Top-level
 Is there more frequent or more intense harassment on the Fediverse compared to, say, Twitter/X? I don't know. Has anybody researched that? (I'd love to see a pointer). But: are there people who have shared their lived experience that they have been harrassed more often or more intensely in the Fediverse than elsewhere? I certainly have seen that, repeatedly. So for at least some, that seems to be true. Is that acceptable? Of course not. (cont'd) 16 comments
So while we are on the subject of things that are worse in the Fediverse than on today's major walled-garden commercial social media platforms, there are many other things that are worse, and if one made a list, it would not be short. Picking a few at random: * on the Fediverse, sometimes -- too often -- instance operators simply kill off their servers, with no warning and no mitigation for their users. That's clearly bad and doesn't happen in that way in the commercial universe. (cont'd) Continued bad things: * On the Fediverse, moderation is uneven in a very major way. Each instance is different, most moderators have little training or experience, many instances are understaffed, and some instances are intentionally racist etc. etc. Not true for commercial systems. (cont'd) Continued bad things: * Not even the comment trees or Likes are consistent across instances. You might think nobody commented on a post, but there might be 100 comments on that post on some other instance that simply haven't been forwarded. Not good in my view. (cont'd) However, the Fediverse also has some really major positive features, again picking some from a long list, randomly: * No ads! No surveillance! That's a major plus in my book compared to the commercial platforms. (cont'd) More good things: * The freedom to innovate! Anybody can write some code and connect it to the Fediverse, and we have already seen an incredible explosion of creativity that all the billions invested in the commercial social media are not matching. * Many users also report that they have felt more accepted, less harassed, and more at home in the fediverse than they ever have anywhere else online. I have no reason to doubt them. (cont'd) So ... is the Fediverse better or worse than commercial social media platforms? Well, clearly, it is better in some ways and worse in some others. Our friends in the math department will tell us: you are trying to compare two things that cannot be compared, neither is better than the other, just like you can't compare vectors or complex numbers directly, you cannot compare systems that have more than one feature directly! (cont'd) Except, of course, we can compare and we do compare systems with many features all the time. We trade off good and bad against each other, and we can do the same thing for the Fediverse and commercial social media platforms. The result is necessarily subjective, but I for one am perfectly willing to go through some extra hoops to understand comments on other servers, if that means I'm not commercially surveilled. Your tradeoffs may be different. So on balance, I believe the Fediverse is better. I think most people here agree (otherwise why would you be here?). Even if some parts are bad. Maybe even realllly bad. Do we have work to do? Ohhh yesssss ... on reducing harassment and many other things. Let's focus our energies on that, and -- note this advantage of the Fediverse: we can actually do the work we think needs doing, unlike with commercial social media where we just can complain and generally get ignored -- let's go! (end) ... and before somebody nitpicks, that means that for some users, and their particular experiences and tradeoffs, the fediverse is objectively worse than commercial social media. That may include some/many/... black users. Yes of course!  @J12t sir, you are being intellectually dishonest with intention. Delusional. We are literally discussing and exposing issues being had in this space and you ignored them to continue this paid advertisement. Very violent, dishonest, and why people of color continue to leave this space. There will be no confusion about this.  @J12t I'm not convinced that mastodon.social isn't keeping any of my activity in log files that are insecure, that's just the cost of using someone else's computer.  @J12t we've a lot of resources for moderators over on https://connect.iftas.org Like guides on lots of stuff!  @J12t So you don't think that all those experiments Black people did on different social media platforms count as research? @stephanie I intended my use of the word "research" in the way a scientist / academic would use it. |
Gregory's Server
Are there death threats in the Fediverse? I have not seen that. But I have seen people reporting that they received some, and I have no reason to doubt that. So yes, very likely.
Is that acceptable? Ahem. NO!
(cont'd)