@freemo @louis This I feel is much worse "No "hate speech", speech that nefariously expresses a form of prejudice or threatens a people of a protected characteristic (such as age, disability, ethnicity, gender, pregnancy, religion, sex or sexuality - unpopular opinions voiced respectfully is fine)." How do you determine that something is nefarious? What is a protected characteristic? How can we have any conversation about these things if the conversation is already shut down because of "hate speech". How do you decide what is a threat? If we are talking about violence, that is already mentioned in another point and is forbidden, rightly so, regardless of the target.

@yisraeldov

Again feel free to suggest a better wording if you want, these rules are up for debate and modification so just jump in and suggest better wording

@louis@emacs.ch

@freemo @louis While I appreciate what you are trying to do here, I think one of the beauties of the "fediverse" is that instances are self moderating. And there is no central authority deciding what is allowed and what isn't.

I think what you are trying to do is a bit of premature optimization. I think that small instances are the best way to go and keep mastodon safe and friendly organically.

@yisraeldov

That hasnt changed... most instances who join the UFoI will already have rules that are compatible with the ethics.. no one tells them how to moderate, they just continue doing what they are doing.

The protection is that **if** someone accuses your instance of being a bad-actor instead of gossip and random block lists blocking you you will have a chance to defend yourself and show you are, in fact, a good actor... you also have the option not to defend yourself and simply leave, in which case the case is dropped.

Moreover instances are free to moderate themselves by whatever additional rules they want anyway.

I strongly disagree with the "premature optimization" aspect, there is a **huge** issue on the fediverse that needs a solution, one many instances have been the victim of countless times. We are trying to address that, it is just ordinary optimization, a problem was identified, we are trying to fix it.

@louis@emacs.ch

> While I appreciate what you are trying to do here, I think one of the beauties of the "fediverse" is that instances are self moderating.

UFoI doesn't take over moderation for instances.

> I think that small instances are the best way to go and keep mastodon safe and friendly organically.

Reality is that neither you or I can’t force all instances to be small instances. I can say that the value of UFoI is massive to small instances.

As a small instance operator, I can tell you that smaller instances are constantly at threat of being defederated by larger instances if we don't do what they say. If one of them labels us as anything; who do other instances trust more? The 10-person instance or the instance with 10,000 people?

If the larger instance says that an instance has some hugely offensive problem, and you choose to not block that instance, well now it looks like you're in support of that thing. That instance now says you're that thing too because you didn't defederate and they're going to defederate you too.

Now, perhaps some of these are true, and some of these are just personal gripes between people. What the UFoI helps us establish is a set of minimal standards to adhere to for federation that most of the Western world can at least work within (I would expect very restrictive regimes would have problems with it). It establishes evidence requirements so that instances can’t be just defederated over personal issues if they’re a UFoI member.

For larger instances, this sort of thing also helps against inter large-instance issues for similar reasons, but also having a clear process and standard to work within reduces the amount of headache trying to just maintain a service.

@yisraeldov @freemo @louis@emacs.ch Rather than being premature optimization, this is late in coming. You might not be aware of this, but in the absence of a central authority, self-moderating instances have joined together to build domain blocklists that are shared widely and based on nothing more than the say-so of one or two people.

While mastodon does have plenty of tools we can use to block content that we don't want to see, many instance admins choose to really aggressively block entire instances without any due process or evidence or opportunity for counter-evidence. I've seen QOTO described as having "no moderation at all," something I know to be factually false. I've seen entire instances blocked because of the actions of one non-admin user, which is the right of any server admin, but doesn't bode well for federation. I've seen entire instances blocked *not* because of something anyone said or did, but because the instances were insufficiently aggressive in promising to seek out and block other bad instances. It's mind-boggling, and scary for anyone thinking about running an instance of their own.

Primarily at this point, the UFoI is about a guarantee of due process, which is currently lacking in the fediverse. It might not cause the super-aggressive blockers to change their approach, but it will at least guarantee that smaller instances won't be completely isolated from everyone on the whim of someone at a big server having a grumpy day.

If mastodon were as safe and friendly as you say it is, the UFoI wouldn't exist, and the hashtag for BlackMastodon wouldn't be filled with people saying that they're seeing worse treatment on Mastodon than the bird site. I'm glad your personal experience has been positive, but that is not the case for everyone.

> How do you determine that something is nefarious?

If you seriously want to learn in depth about how, I'd recommend looking up actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.

> What is a protected characteristic?

This is something used throughout Europe that came into being through both independently in some countries through local laws and others through ECHR recognition, you could look at the British equality act or the Irish variant for English worded explainations on it. This is something that is already imposed by law in numerous European countries and there is a significant amount of literature readily accessible. I personally just go with the British common law equality act approach.

> How can we have any conversation about these things if the conversation is already shut down because of "hate speech".

Navigating the line between criticism and hate speech when protected groups are involved can be cumbersome. The reality is that these types of conversations are not 'safe spaces' and will have some oversight. Particularly instances either hosted or operated by someone in Europe in numerous European countries are obligated to handle it.

@yisraeldov

> Glad that you replied. The circumventing bans is completely reasonable, but you already have that listed separately to the harassment.

Indeed we do, but while there is overlap this isnt the same.. harassment is when someone explicitly tells you to disengage and you continually engage them, or make calls to dogpile someone who has been left alone. In short if it is very clear that you were **explicitly** told contact is unwelcome, yet you intentionally and repeatidly engage the person anyway, this would be harassment.

> Mastodon has plenty of tools that we can use to block content that we don't want to see, so having a policy against harassment, is kind of pointless.

How do block calls to dogpile, you cant, you would have to block each person one by one and only **after** you are harassed. Keep in mind the rules are only against **explicit** calls to dogpile

> As a moderator I've seen way too many times people claim harassment as a way to just shut down an opinion they don't like.

You are right, this is a concern for me also. This is why harassment is very explicitly defined and not just someone being annoyed you contacted them. That said, please, if you think there is better wording just go make a merge request, everything is up for debate.

@louis@emacs.ch