Really curious to see if anyone actually follows me on here. It feels like the Muskocalypse might be the thing to actually make mastodon happen.
Looking forward to referring to this as a “hellsite” rather than a quirky open source experiment.
@glyph my hope is that it might become a niche corner where people only tell at each other about tabs-vs-spaces or their favorite Little Pony. If this ever goes mainstream, we’ll learn what a *real* hellsite is…
@hynek @glyph Maybe. But at the same time, there is no algorithm that *drives* folks to contentious stuff in order to get the clicks and engagement. So I am sure there will be bad kerfluffles, but I think it won't spill over as badly.
But, we need to see. I do, however, think most instances' admins are more invested to take reports seriously.
@hynek @asmodai Yeah the big open question for me is the ways in which instance admins will interact to negotiate some consensus about moderation. I think it will be a rocky process and I will not be surprised no matter what: it might flame out in dramatic fashion, or it might end up being a much healthier process than unilateral and arbitrary billionaire vibes
@glyph @asmodai I mean Armin (mastodon.cloud) and Paul (qoto.org) are both on instances that are blocked by Hachyderm and that block list has no reasoning over why (they even used to block fosstodon: https://github.com/hachyderm/hack/commit/f930a7d4b6e597a109aeaca44e9db7440c1c5668).
@hynek @asmodai @glyph this set up is more prone to acrimony than Twitter. Twitter has one moderation policy, whether you agree with it or not, carried out by “anonymous” Twitter staff. Here, the moderators are public and all do their own thing. This can only lead to more fracturing.
The model here will make social media bubbles a lot worse for those who choose overtly political servers who block any server with a different political view
I only interact with Python/programming people both on Twitter and here, so never had issues as they’re very friendly communities everywhere. But those who use these platforms for other topics will become more isolated from other views, not less
@s_gruppetta @asmodai @glyph the past years have shown that there's no upsides to be flooded by dunks on the Stupid Others™️, so I'm entirely comfortable with the concept of safe spaces & blocking should be every server's prerogative, if not even feature.
The problem is the lack of transparency when ppl copy-paste uncommented block lists & instances getting too powerful such that we get an oligopoly like with email. This is not shade on anyone in specific, but a call for transparency in general.
@hynek @s_gruppetta @asmodai very much agreed with that. I have strong and very complex feelings about the concepts of “echo chambers” and “bubbles” which I can summarize as “they’re good, actually”, but written and documented standards for what is happening and why are important for forming norms
@hynek @s_gruppetta @asmodai @glyph Having some kind of Blocklist Ombudsman would be a positive step.
Allow people who are being blocked the ability to raise a concern, the person who did the blocking the ability to cite a reason, and a third party who can say: "Yep, that checks out. A hosts nazis and B is a server with no-nazi policy." or pointing out mistakes that can be corrected if the admins wish to.
@s_gruppetta @hynek @asmodai @glyph we will see communities for sure. We will also see that servers with problematic behaviour will be isolated as more and more people are joining. The current situation reminds be a bit of the email blocklists in the late 90s and early 2000s. I believe that federation and smaller servers can heal this.