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dansup

ActivityPub is a protocol.

You can't police who can or cannot participate

Instead, we need to build services and tools to ensure we can provide moderation and safety tools accordingly

You might hate Meta, but you have to admit their presence here will likely lead to improvements in privacy and safety across implementations either directly or indirectly

The fediverse is for everyone, but at the same time, you don't have to expect the status quo

We can do better, so keep that feedback coming!

12 comments
Andrea Grandi 🦕

@dansup are we talking about the same Meta who manages Instagram, to which I *daily report: harassment, doxing, offences, violent posts, unsafe food challenges etc... and which regularly reply with "We didn't remove the post you reported because it doesn't violate our rules". Are we really talking about the same company? They can definitely do better, yes. I don't care if they join Activity Pub, but let's not take them as a moderation example, please.

dansup

@andreagrandi Do you think it's fair to compare a platform with billions of users to the fediverse with less than 20 million?

I'm sure any fediverse platform would run into several issues at that level of scale, but guess what, Instagram isn't federated, Threads is.

But back to the topic, I have yet to see Meta/Threads handle a fediverse moderation issue improperly, if you have, please send it my way.

No point in discussing non-fedi entities, like DNS, should .com be cancelled due to its biz?

Andrea Grandi 🦕

@dansup I'm not comparing "apples" with "trees", I'm just saying that I do not trust nor like how Meta handle moderation.

I'm not even talking about proactive moderation (catching certain content before I see it) but the fact that even when you point them to something specific, they state that episodes of food challenges or clear doxing and offences do not violate their policy.

I've seen fediverse instances with almost zero resources to handle this content correctly.

Andrea Grandi 🦕

@dansup if Meta is "too big" to handle moderation, maybe they should rethink the whole thing.

About your last point, I genuinely do not understand it (I may be missing some context or knowledge). Happy to answer if you can elaborate it a bit more. Thanks

Andrew

@dansup @andreagrandi I think it's fair, yes. People keep saying stuff like this as if these platforms are just uwu smol bean fedi admins who were trying to run chill little communities when suddenly billions of users signed up overnight and now they're doing their best to moderate it all but really struggling to find the time what with work and childcare. They're not, they're groups of grown adults who sat around a conference table one day and deliberately chose to allow libsoftiktok to stay on their platforms because they'd make very slightly more money that way and that's more important to them than keeping vulnerable people safe. If your goals for fedi are anything more noble than "make network big" then surely Meta are almost by definition your enemy?

@dansup @andreagrandi I think it's fair, yes. People keep saying stuff like this as if these platforms are just uwu smol bean fedi admins who were trying to run chill little communities when suddenly billions of users signed up overnight and now they're doing their best to moderate it all but really struggling to find the time what with work and childcare. They're not, they're groups of grown adults who sat around a conference table one day and deliberately chose to allow libsoftiktok to stay on...

dansup

@andrewt @andreagrandi That's a great point, and when it comes down to it, the progress I can make is to write better safety and moderation tools into Pixelfed and gather feedback from the community on how to improve them.

I can't do anything about accounts on Threads or other platforms, but what I can do is give our users better safety guards and tools to improve their experience

Andrew

@dansup @andreagrandi Yeah, I think that's all we can do really. Nobody can *stop* Meta or X implementing ActivityPub, that's kind of one of its strengths. We just have to be clear with ourselves about what we're building and how, and make sure we do it responsibly. (I've not been following your projects all that closely so I'm just going to assume you're doing that.)

Andrea Grandi 🦕

@dansup @andrewt and I think you (Dan) are doing a lot on this subject. If people at Meta had even 1/10 of your concerns and care, even their platform would be much better.

To be clear, I'm not against federation with them, but I strongly think they have a lot to learn from the fediverse about moderation, not the other way around.

Aral Balkan

@dansup Are you serious, Dan? Is this satire?

How did Meta/Facebook become a trillion-dollar corporation? By violating your privacy en masse.

ar.al/2022/02/07/everyone-hate

What SWF is doing is giving Facebook legitimacy; enabling it to launder its reputation using *your* legitimacy.

Let me put it plainly: in Mark’s eyes Pixelfed—however small—is a competitor and a potential future threat. He’s not going to help you hurt him. He will, however, embrace, extend and extinguish you.

@dansup Are you serious, Dan? Is this satire?

How did Meta/Facebook become a trillion-dollar corporation? By violating your privacy en masse.

ar.al/2022/02/07/everyone-hate

What SWF is doing is giving Facebook legitimacy; enabling it to launder its reputation using *your* legitimacy.

Claudius

@dansup I respect your work. In the most respectful way possible, I wish to voice my concerns that you might be wrong about this. Why and how would Meta have good intentions about this when there is not a shred of positive precedent for this?

Rince

@dansup ActivityPub is - like SMTP - a protocol, I agree. But as we can see with SMTP, Tech Giants like to shape or enhance these protocols to their liking, and not for the best of the (common) users but their best. So I would stay vigilant and would like to make sure that all add-ons or enhancements have to be public and useful for _all_ participants, not only the centalized giant ones.

Cris

@dansup I mean... They literally facilitated horrifying genocide in Myanmar because it gave them a dominant position in a developing market 😅 their money and resources are valuable to to the fediverse, but I have more trust that tomorrow the sun will be green than I do that meta will put people over profits. If they see a way to exploit this space, they will, and to be perfectly blunt they may have already found one, and are just working their way there.

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