I've been watching the conversations around whether or not instances set-up should include a (easily-overridden) default of importing a blocklist for known awful instances.
Those against it pattern match for me with a certain libertarian streak that doesn't want humans making decisions.
In economics, it's the gold standard and free markets. In politics, government is inefficient and should be minimised.
It's the idea that a system with human decision-makers could be undermined...
1/n
and thus humans should be out of the system. (Not unlike crypto, I guess.)
Thing is... systems with humans work better. They're more resilient and flexible if they actually adjust in a meaningful way. Government, done competently, is pretty amazing and achieves things we wouldn't do otherwise.
Yes, human-based systems can go wrong, but that's a reason to build them well, not give up and make something worse. And if they go wrong, try to fix them rather than destroy them.
2/n
When it comes to default blocklists, the concerns are often pretty hypothetical, while the blocklists and hideous blockable instances are very concrete. Maybe the concerns are forward-looking - what if it goes wrong? - but again rarely in a way that either allows for mitigations or acknowledges that the core devs pretty much have this power anyway, Better to discuss how power is managed than to pretend we're safe from abuse of power...
3/n
Do you know if it's easy to enact a default-but-overrideable blocklist or mutelist in vanilla Mastodon?
