I see an ongoing culture clash between the Old Mastodon and the Newbies fleeing Twitter. The Old believe in heavy self-moderation by way of using Content Warnings for a lot of things, using "unlisted" posts to keep the timeline clean, silencing other servers to avoid even a chance of witnessing interactions of users of that server with users of yet another one that we disapprove of. Heavy self-moderation.

1/3

#mastodon #culture #moderation

The newbies are chaos incarnate. Let our feed be everything from food I ate through tips on getting a promotion to onlyfans bait. One feed, nothing is sacred.

I'm sitting here in the middle and wonder if there could be a middle way. A compromise that beats both extremes. Let people post whatever. But let them LABEL what it is. Not "warn", label. Then let my client mute messages by label. Food? Boring, never show it to me. Onlyfans? Sorry, I have this tab open all day and I work at home.

2/3

But the label wouldn't hide messages by default because this makes some interactions pretty annoying. "stuff about cars"? Sounds fine, why even cw? Clickety click. "uspol". Yeah, what is it? Clickety click. "About twitter". Did it burn down yet? Clickety click...

But that's not all. If labels could be applied to posts by others POST FACTUM, this would allow the community to moderate itself even if the original author didn't think to do it.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.

3/3

@ambv For starters, hashtags already act as labels. It is possible to filter out content by hashtag, so it serves your purpose well.

That said, sounds like your on the wrong side of the fediverse. You tend to have three types of servers... The extreme left, very liberal, but also very quick to block/silence over silly things like not CWing, and this is where you see the heavy pressures to CW.

Then you have the extreme right wing, they wont ban for anything and generally a lot of their users go around harassing people or at least being very confrontational and rude. They will never CW anything except maybe nudity. They are in many ways the opposite of course.

Then you have a rare few instances, like QOTO, that are very neutral... We generally like to encourage people to speak freely, even about unpopular opinions, we talk to people instaed of banning them most of the time, though we will ban if someone is a bad enough actor. We only really CW things that are not safe for work.

Long story short, CWuing everything is not really something that is the norm ont he fediverse outside of a few very restrictive communities.

@freemo @ambv it seems like some can choose (possibly inadvertently) to silo themselves a lot more than others based on choice of servers. Those who silo themselves a lot will of course, by definition, have a skewed sense of what goes on. I’ve not been here long enough to know which servers are which with clarity, but I’m pleased I switched to qoto early on

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.