Klye @khird@qoto.org
Mod
Joined Sep 2018
mental health
@freemo Note also that the mod originally involved has since made threats of suicide, but it is not known if those threats were carried out.
I believe the following have occurred, based on skimming the relevant threads:
- sunbeam's hosting provider warned them about doxing
- the instance admin demoted the mod for this and other reasons
- the instance admin expressed an intent to leave the server
- discussions have begun to determine whether sunbeam will continue under new management or pull the plug
I suggest delaying a decision on defederating until the new management, if any, makes its position known.
@snow There used to be via regex filtering but I believe that option was removed.
@freemo @design_RG admin is a step up from mod, right? Has anyone tried getting in touch with the actual admin and getting him to clamp down on his rogue mod?
Keep in mind that gab is known to tolerate some forms of doxing and defederating from them will likely be interpreted as a political manoeuvre.
For the sake of correctness, I'll note that it's "sunbeam.city" rather than "sunbeamcity.com".
@freemo Are quarantine/defederate synonyms for silence/suspend?
@snow
Some ideas:
- Try posting at different times of day. Not everyone is in the same timezone as you.
- Post about STEM subjects, or go to an instance tailored to what you want to discuss.
- Look at which hashtags are popular to see what topics might be interesting to a wider audience.
- Go back and delete your "if you like X, don't talk to me" posts.
- Participate in other threads to advertise your presence so others know to follow you.
Seconding @design_RG, good luck!
@design_RG Yeah we sure have had an increase in posts formatted like this, which tend not to spark conversation. Very much low-effort content.
Title of Blog Post
As an acronym, it stands for "science, technology, engineering, math" and is a category of fields of study.
The actual signs when you enter the state say, "Virginia is for lovers," which I think is hilariously appropriate here.
Fortunately, reading through that, he seems to be rather more level-headed than the instigators of the complaint.
> Why don't all the Nazis just make a Nazi instance and go there so we can block it?
They want to maximise eyeballs reached, even if they aren't friendly eyeballs. Favourable responses seed them with further hostility, slogans, etc., and provide reinforcement of a sort. But even unfavourable responses just strengthen their persecution complex and make them that much more fanatical. Their audience is larger when people find it difficult to block them or refrain from doing so to avoid collateral damage.
I think this is the reason for the scorched-earth approach other instances are taking. Just like fire needs fuel and air, ideologues need both a stage and an audience. To stop the marketplace of ideas from burning down, you can remove one ingredient or the other to disrupt the conflagration. Local mods can deprive bad actors of a stage, but if they don't, remote instances will deny them an audience.
@Ajz@mastodon.nl Some parents tell their children the "sandman" does the same, and the dried rheum they find in their eyes in the morning is actually the sand he leaves there. It is a bit like telling young children that babies arrive by stork - people will generally be familiar with the trope although it is less common than it once was.
Actually, this looks like a good argument for a new feature - when a mod closes a report, give him a checkbox that says, "This post has been fully examined and found to comply with our terms; reject future reports against it." Then the complainants can continue to file reports but they are silently dropped before landing in the queue.
@hrisskar it's a scheme to attack the credibility of science and education.
He wants people to debate & challenge him - he will refuse in the face of all evidence to concede that the Earth is round, and he will belittle and insult his opponent who claims it is. Eventually his opponent finds something to do that's more fun than talking in circles while being constantly insulted, and the flat-earther will claim victory when his opponent no longer contests the issue.
Now that he's "won" his debate, the flat-earther can attack his opponent in other ways. There's a number of methods by which he can go about doing so:
- he might imply his opponent's education was worthless since he "lost" the debate
- he might seize on simplifications, take comments out of context, or otherwise draw quotes from the debate in bad faith
- he might simply leave his opponent unwilling to challenge him on other subjects of greater controversy.
The flat-earthers tend to be aligned with the political right. Their end goal is often discrediting fields associated with the political left: race and gender study, climate science, evolutionary biology, etc. Sometimes the scheme more broadly targets higher education in general, which is seen as left-aligned in North America.
Similar strategy is employed by religious (Ken Ham, known for debating Bill Nye on creationism) and political (Steven Crowder, known for his "change my mind" sign) advocates in debate. The way to evade this particular trap is to refuse to allow your opponent to frame the debate such that they "win" if they don't concede.
@snow ... is a lot less than the 100,000 a dentist performs over his lifetime.
It also still gives a *tiny* cumulative dose.
@snow @freemo An x-ray every year or so (dose to a patient) is harmless. An x-ray every hour over a career (dose to an unshielded dentist) much less so.
@mngrif @freemo eh, I'm sure they think the same of us: "probably not worth the effort to engage with if they don't even mute gab" or something along those lines. It would be nice if admins didn't erect these kinds of barriers, but there are still people worth following on the other side.
If we're blocked, something is weird about it - you can still search individuals on that instance and view their profiles. So why doesn't the subscribe feature work to pull that in to the home timeline?
@freemo I know this is old, but to follow up: their block list is now published and qoto does in fact feature on it: https://social.libre.fi/about
Still unclear whether it's a suspend or silence, but notably even the new subscribe feature doesn't catch posts originating there (I'd hoped that would be a workaround).
🇳🇱