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Funny how @Gargron was so concerned about popular opinion and "optics" when he delisted us... Now the thread on reddit discussing this is already more popular than any other thread this month and will likely hit an all time high.

Shame about the bad optics...

reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments

@freemo

The only problem with this, as with all things, is human nature. Like people in all positions of power, they will not admit when wrong. This is especially true in a situation like this. He caved to the few, based off of lies. To reverse that mistake would be admitting he is wrong and would open other decisions made in the past and future up to more scrutiny. In his mind, consciously or subconsciously, it would be better to ignore this. With this mentality its always easy to take action on an issue, but reversing the action nearly never happens.

Politicians, CEOs, and other people in power will make decisions to fix a problem, real or not, but when is the last time you have ever seen a person in this type of position REVERSE a decision. Almost never. I say almost because there might be an occasion I don't know about, but I can't think of any.

Reversing his action won't happen, because its an admission he made the wrong choice, and that takes courage.

As always, my opinion doesn't mean shit, and I hope I'm wrong.

@Gargron

@freemo @Gargron
I think its time for you two to get locked into a room, hash it out, kiss and make up.

@bit0fun

All that was asked for at first was a discussion, he refused to grant even that.. if he had the delisting wouldnt be so bad because at least there would be a record of the reasons and he could be judges more directly.

@ligthert @Gargron

@freemo

There is a well known phenomenon typically associated with the Right.

Moral Panic

It happens on the Left too, as we are seeing. Members of the community are primed to react in prescribed ways to certain triggers, and spread the to others they are networked with.

And no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. are operating out of either ignorance or fear.

.org

@EubieDrew sounds like an accurate description.

Just earlier someone said it was all justified because someone who said something antisemetic a week ago said a compliment to me and I said “thank you” (not knowing anything about their anti-semetic disposition)… which apparently makes it all justified… go figure

@freemo @Gargron He's the CEO of #Mastodon GMBH and is the sole "decider". Better salute him. lol
@freemo @Gargron "Their tactic was to post hate speech on QOTO, then immediately report it across several of the progressive instances around the fediverse in an attempt to make us seem like a pro-nazi forum." Similar tactics have been sued to eliminate individuals, and as a bludgeon to protect warmongering, which is routine on most #Mastodon instances, more so than Twitter. You will basically slava ukraine or get the fuck out. This needs to stop. the war IS against us, and will only favor JP Morgan at the expense of the Ukrainian people.
@freemo Just between you and me, this Eugen is more full of shit than your average Silicon Valley vulture capitalist. How many of them have an "atomic poet" to kiss their ass continuously?

@indyradio @freemo imho the problem is that mastodon/eugen is funded by the EU and the german government. stuff like this warps your brain. public broadcasting is broken for the same reason.

@bonifartius @freemo do you know that with certainty? I do know he has a tax except limited liability corporation, which is somewhat different than US choices for incorporation, but it seems he is the sole voice of that GMBH, and makes the decisions. You can read his declarations from 5 years ago. There is no disagreement. I'd like to have detail, not speculation.

@indyradio @freemo e.g. blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/

someone must have paid that, and it's pretty irrelevant if it's a gGmbH or not if he decides his own pay in the end.

the goals are cery questionable from an ethical point, it's the usual technocratic solution the fasc.. erm progressives push in response to social problems:

> Find who a piece of text originally comes from and how it changed as it travelled to your home feed through the information cascade

> See when a post is using highly emotive language through sentiment analysis

> At a glance, see potentially important information about the post author, such as account age

> See whether other users have flagged the post as untrustworthy, and vote yourself

NB: sorry if i come over aggressive, you are totally right to question what i say. i'm just pissed at the world in general ;)

@bonifartius @freemo there are gaps in your message, so I can't follow completely, but by law, he can take up to one third of all income from the GMBH as his salary. We have no data. There is zero transparency.
@bonifartius @freemo one of their side projects is funded by Austrian Public radio, and they received both public and private funding. so it's a wash. someone can have significant influence on the project by donating to "public radio" in a timely manner. we don't know very much more, and it's been more than 6 years

@indyradio @freemo Wait, that's who that guy was? I got in an argument with him about his making shit up about Microsoft the other day and he made a dig about QOTO and then blocked me. If he's tight with Eugen, that latter part suddenly makes more sense.

@freemo Why are you boosting Russian propaganda talking points like this?

@bjarne Huh? Can you be more specific about how this related to russia?

@freemo You boosted the claim that "the war IS against us, and will only favor JP Morgan at the expense of the Ukrainian people."

@bjarne I may have misunderstood the post. I dont think its far fetched to say russia is against us and that this is a proxy war between the USA and russia... thats actually been fairly accepted.

The part abotu JP morgan i really dont understand what he was on about though.

@bjarne I unboosted it in case he was making some sort of point I didnt follow and didnt want to promote unknowingly.

@freemo In the thread you mention a number, around 160, of instances blocking qoto. I'm curious how such a list is obtained; are you doing it the hard way, finding out by various means and adding to it by hand?

@pieist There are a few sources one can use, unfortunately they are highly incomplete and show some biased information, and in some cases unethical. So we generally dont share the lists that are floating around.

In one case the list is made by kiwifarms so is considering unethical by association.

In the other case it is compiled by some radicals on the opposite end of the spectrum, so highly biases reporting on only certain instances. Moreover it doesnt weight for user count and is highly polluted with single-user instances.

@freemo Yeah, as to that last I did suppose that any list would have a heavy preponderance of tiny instances. (I'm always reminded of what someone once said about jabber: "the ratio of server operators to users is nearly 1:1") Still a list of non-trivial, non-crazy instances would be useful; it's be nice to know if there are large, nonswampy continents of users whom I won't see or vice-versa.

@pieist

the issue with the latter list isnt just htat its mostly one-user instances, but also that it doesnt report instances that block them that are outside of their ideological bubble. In fact they are often marked as being blocked rather than doing the blocking (particularly when the block is mutual).

So the list basically is skewed to ignore all the bhlocks that are incoming for the "bubble" of people from instances that maintain those lists.. They will outright reject updates to the numbers when the block goes the other way.

You have two ways to look at it.. you have instances that heavily block, and they tend to block instances that dont block what they block. A lot of these instances dont publish their block lists because it winds up being massive.

You join them youll pretty much be stuck in a bubble of radicalized people, and you will have a very limited view of the fediverse.

On the other hand you can join instances that dont block and while they may have more instances blocking them, in the end they have a much larger footprint in the fediverse.

In fact in the past when we measured the conceitedness of QOTO (how many servers we federate with) we had one of the biggest footprints in the fediverse, despite a decent number of small instances blocking us. You can also measure this by insularity, and as I recall we had a pretty high ranking in that case too (low insularity).

@freemo Yeah, it's hobson's choice, really: join an instance that doesn't block, and be blocked, or join one that does and have your decisions made for you invisibly. The former is the only tolerable choice and this seems the only significant instance that does the right thing: moderate the utterly indefensible but otherwise treat your users like rational adults.

@pieist Yea sadly we are one of very few with federation we leave up to our users.

The bullying of instances that block seems to be a growing problem.

I hope ?I can get UFoI soon and bring some sanity to all this.

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