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Top-level
 @jerry Sadly, I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that a "wild west libertarian self-organizing environment" (the dream of the early-90s Internet) will devolve into a Nazi troll farm 100% of the time with absolute certainty. It's a wonderful idea, but doomed. The barrier to the accept-list could be low (eg, do they have a halfway decent TOS/CoC), but I don't think we have an alternative. cf: https://peakd.com/community/@crell/why-you-can-t-just-ignore-them 25 comments
@teknogrot @jerry "The culture of an organization is defined as the worst behavior its leadership is willing to tolerate." No amount of federation will change that dynamic. @Crell I think it does change it, but not for the better. As @jerry pointed out, the nature of the fediverse can hide the behaviour from some people resulting in a de-facto tolerance of behaviour worse than the leadership (in this case again @jerry) would actually accept, while denying them the tools to do something about it. Federation may actually not be a good idea at all for social media.  @teknogrot @Crell @jerry  @Crell @jerry speaking of the birdsite, before the API got locked down, I spent a fair amount of effort building network analysis tools to proactively identify and block bigots. Turns out assholes like to follow each other. It was deeply satisfying when news about me came out and a bunch of people who had never interacted with me and weren't on any shared blocklists were complaining about being blocked by me. @Crell @ryanc @jerry is it possible to ‘fight fire with fire’ in that when someone identifies that they are receiving harassment a group of individuals- obviously a prearranged group- can be contacted who will respond overwhelmingly to the harassing individual to call them out? Sounds childish when said out loud and may make them dig in further but …..  @ryanc @jerry The spam analogy is very apt, I think, given Fediverse is often analogized to email. And the wild-west-anyone-runs-anything approach is largely a failure there, too. I also used to run a personal mail server. It only worked if I proxied every message through my ISP's mail server. A similar network-of-trust seems the only option here, give or take details. @ryanc @jerry In the abstract sense, we're dealing with the scaling problems of the tit-for-tat experiment dynamics. Reputation-building approaches to social behavior only work when the # of actors is small enough that repeated interactions can build reputation. The Internet is vastly too big for that, just like society at large. @Crell @jerry I do think keyword/regex filters as a quarantine/alert admin thing would be helpful, but as mentioned up thread, part of the problem is people unkowingly joining instances that don't protect their users from harassment and not understanding why that's a problem. The guides saying "instance doesn't matter much" don't help. @ryanc @jerry Yeah, the onboarding experience is definitely still a sore point. Like, I'd like to get my brother or the NFP I work with onto Mastodon, but I don't know what server to send them to. Mine isn't appropriate for them, mastodon.social isn't a good answer, and the alternative is... *citation needed* @Crell @jerry Yeah, I've absolutely no idea what "general but friendly to members of frequently harassed groups" instances exist. This instance is really nice, as I've always been a hacker first and foremost. Yes, I'm queer on several dimensions and open about it, but most of the time I don't want to focus on that.  same same here. run small email server. while i can sympathize with consumer email providers that block-specific only doesn't scale nearly as well as block-all/allow-only-specific, we hit what you say. how do i prove i'm "clean" if i can't send to you. i do think we need to have these discussions, possibly be willing to give up some cherished ideals, but most critically, we need to get those most at risk of abuse involved at every stage in discussion/design/test/deploy. @Crell @jerry I wonder, isn't "creating an instance" a barrier? In the sense that a new troll instance, after some time, should be blocked by most other instances and blocklists. Then they have to set up a new one, and so on, and so on. Also, I guess new people either know people on Mastodon they trust or they go to joinmastodon.org and pick a server. That's kind of an accept-list, no? The barrier to get there is relatively low: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant |
Gregory's Server
@Crell @jerry I think the idea that an otherwise terrible person had like 20 years ago holds up pretty well: paying for initial access results in you having an investment in a service that encourages you to follow the rules to protect that investment. You can see this with how Something Awful has turned into a stable and mature forum with varied subforums and at least one thread for anything you can think of.
Of course the downside to that is that if the person setting the rules is terrible then the culture will be terrible and require a coup to fix, but... that seems to be a universal part of the human condition.
@Crell @jerry I think the idea that an otherwise terrible person had like 20 years ago holds up pretty well: paying for initial access results in you having an investment in a service that encourages you to follow the rules to protect that investment. You can see this with how Something Awful has turned into a stable and mature forum with varied subforums and at least one thread for anything you can think of.