Blocks due to lack of incompatibility with Mastodon and its culture may happen; CW: long (3,750 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, user blocking meta, instance blocking meta
Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects?
So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance.
The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse; see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that.
What does the admin do? Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance.
Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented.
The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff.
Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface.
Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels.
Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient.
Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #MastoAdmin. Should reach lots of admins, right?
Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag? Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them.
Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet?
Anyways, the warning with the #MastoAdmin hashtag doesn't reach them either.
So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user.
Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports.
We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance.
*Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that; a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere.
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@jupiter_rowland and this is exactly why we need to focus on empowering users and not admins, so that users can shape their own experiences without relying on that complicated dance of admins that may never really result in a satisfactory outcome.
Empower users.
So that they don't have to rely on all of these other structures to shape their experiences for them.
You could say it's why so many of us left the big platforms in the first place.
"Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots."
Not really. Here's the deal...
If you post kiddie porn and it arrives on my site, I can delete it from my site. I can also refuse to share it with my followers or anybody else on my site. Of course I can, because I can go to jail if I don't delete it. I don't care who posted it. This is common sense and applies to all fediverse software.
I can't delete something you own from your own site. Only you or your site admin can do that.
@jupiter_rowland oh it's even "worse" than @mikedev indicates.
A basic design choice of the Fediverse protocol is that ANY content that leaves the origin instance goes into a wild west where nobody has technical ownership of the content, period.
As Mike said, you can delete content from your own instance, no matter where the content came from, but you have no way to require anyone else to delete the content from theirs.
So even if you start a thread, don't like how it's going, and then decide to delete it, you have no way to enforce the deletion. The thread is free to continue on other instances.
Basically, you can send out a deletion request, but nobody else has to respect the request.
And BTW this gets even worse when considering that the privacy control is similarly just a request. A key element of the protocol is that nobody has to respect post privacy controls.
And BTW this gets even worse when considering that the privacy control is similarly just a request. A key element of the protocol is that nobody has to respect post privacy controls.
If "the protocol" refers to ActivityPub, maybe.
If it refers to Zot, nope. If it refers to Nomad, even less.
When it comes to privacy control, Zot could do things when first implemented in 2012 that Mastodon users can't even imagine in 2024.
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@jupiter_rowland yeah, I was referring to ActivityPub since (as far as I can tell) for better or worse, that's what people around here are referring to with the term Fediverse.
I think nobody on Mastodon knows this, but these three projects have a Facebook-like/Tumblr-like/blog-like one-post-many-comments thread structure as opposed to Mastodon's Twitter-like many-single-posts-tied-together thread structure.
This means the thread starter owns the whole thread. This also means the thread starter can moderate their own thread and even delete comments from their own thread. Even if they weren't appointed moderators by the admin. AFAIK, the deletion is actually forwarded to the source.
So a Mastodon user may e.g. troll around in a thread started on Hubzilla or attack the thread starter. A bit later, that Mastodon user will discover that their toots in reply to that Hubzilla posts are gone. Maybe the thread starter even mentions they've moderated their own thread and deleted comments.
The short form: Regular users of Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) can delete Mastodon toots. In fact, posts from anywhere. Only toots/posts in reply to their own posts, but yes, they can. And they could before Mastodon even existed.
If this started happening often enough, and word started spreading around especially Mastodon, it'd be perceived as invasive and disruptive by many. It might cause such a big uproar that even more Mastodon users would call for defederating Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) completely.
As for actual, traditional moderation, I'm not saying it's bad per se.
I'm saying that many Mastodon admins really don't know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon.
They think everything else that does *blogging is basically Mastodon with a different UI. Like an alternative mobile app for Mastodon itself. Or it's Mastodon + feature x on top. But otherwise like Mastodon.
And then they act accordingly. They try to interact with Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) admins the same way as they interact with other Mastodon admins. And they neither know nor realise that these three projects are too different from Mastodon for these methods to even work!
Again:
You can't report a Hubzilla user to a Hubzilla admin using the report system because Hubzilla does not have Mastodon's report system!
You can't expect Hubzilla admins to follow hashtags for Mastodon instance admins either. Not only because they aren't Mastodon admins, and they probably don't even know that hashtag. But because you can't follow hashtags on Hubzilla!
And so forth.
So what appears to be a Hubzilla admin's laziness or carelessness or ignorance are actually technical differences between Mastodon and Hubzilla that Mastodon admins are unaware of.
This has nothing to with moderation by admins/mods only being bad. This has everything to do with Hubzilla being vastly different from Mastodon. And with Mastodon admins/mods not knowing jack shit about Hubzilla.
(Good thing this is so long that nobody will read it. Otherwise it'll empower those who say that Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) must be redesigned to be exactly like Mastodon or face full defederation otherwise for being too different.)
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