@Moon
A lot of people on the "dark fedi" side stay because even though it isn't as fun, fedi stills offers them something to say. Unlike mastodon which offers you nothing at all to spend your time, not even talk and top of that it attacks you over the most petty and silly things.

Mastodon hates you having fun
@tomey @McMongoose @Moon A lot of these people are really going to have to make a decision at this point: Accept free speech and block/mute people yourself like an adult, or be forced to eat your vegetable in the SJW Internet or be stuck on big tech forever

@coolboymew

Seems most of the fediverse have dug their feet in on that already. Sadly the freespeech instances have done everything in their power to convince people not to adopt that side of the fence.

@McMongoose @Moon @tomey

@freemo @coolboymew @McMongoose @tomey I am not responsible for idiots being against free speech, a historically illiterate position.

@Moon

Ideas like fault is pointless. Its not about who is to blame and who is to not.

The fact of the matter is the freespeech section of the fediverse has went out of their way to attack and abuse people who federate with them to the point that it is very hard to take a freespeech stance and still be appealing to most people.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey the people that came here in the last few years came here already against it. They defederated niue.cat and blob.cat. unless you completely capitulate to them they will defederate you.
@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey stop acting like these people are normal people. why do you exert so much effort to be nice to people that will never, ever be nice to you.

@Moon

I run QOTO, an instance that strongly leans towards open federation, but locally doesnt allow free speech (our users will be banned for certain forms of speech, though we are rather forgiving in this regard).

While we do sometimes have valuable interactions from free speech instances the issue is the overwhelming majority of interaction is from them dog piling and trolling with overtly racist and aggressive attacks. It is often so bad you cant even use the service without blocking most free speech instances...

Blame who you want but even an instance like QOTO that wants to remain open is struggling to do so because it just makes the service unusable.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey I feel like you are blaming us for them hating you when they came here already hating people like you before they ever even met us.
Follow

@Moon

Like i said before I am not "blamming" anyone.. Fault is a rather pointless concept... I am mearly stating that free speech is an idea I support but supporting is starting to become technically difficult causing people to adopt a non-free speech approach as its the only option that allows the fediverse to be usable for most people.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey do you mean blocking servers or do you mean restrictive rules on their own servers? I am sorry I came into this conversation late.

@Moon

I am talking about blocking other servers, not the rules internal to your own instance.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey I don't consider it a free speech thing to block other servers, you have a culture and you want to keep your culture intact on your server. people blocking wide swaths of the fediverse based on bad reasons is a different problem. I have mixed feelings about the term free speech server. we don't allow some things here. can any server really be free speech? I am trying to make us not be a vector for harassment but the line is very fuzzy.

@Moon

SureI do agree there are levels to this and blocking can be quite excessive.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey i appreciate that you have treated us fairly and if you have problems you can DM me. But I am expressing that I think you are making a mistake by accepting the frame of, basically, highly-online politically aggressive people.

@Moon

I mean, there is a reason you guys are still federated with... but as I said it is getting closer and closer to being impossible to maintain a nearly-open federation policy from a purely usability standpoint... we arent there yet though.

That said i am working on technological solutions.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey ok to make my position clear, if you defederate another server because it's incompatible with yours, that is sensible. if you defederate another server because you think it will satisfy a third server that wants to defederate from you, you are probably throwing the first server under the bus because it is almost always a strongarm tactic.

@Moon

On that point I wholly agree. We have never caved to third party pressure in that regard.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @Moon @McMongoose @tomey yet, you recommend the fediblock blocklist in your pinned statuses

Curious

@coolboymew

Yes I do, because while I dont think servers should force a block list on a user I do think the user should have the option to block and an easy path to do so if thats what they want. If there is a user that wants low-moderated instances blocked they should have that choice and easy access to a block list to accomplish it.

I myself dont use the block list, but I do understand its need for some users.

It is also an attempt to address the usability issue I mentioned earlier while not needing to block at the instance level... a possible middle ground solution.

@McMongoose @Moon @tomey

@freemo @coolboymew @McMongoose @tomey individuals subscribing to blocklists is more or less okay, you don't see it from the fediblock people because it's as much about punishment as about safety.
@Moon @freemo @McMongoose @tomey the issue is such blocking is that we've seen it from day one, bad actors adding to it and everyone else believing them

I've seen it on twitter, etc

@coolboymew

Thats a huge problem in fediverse blocklists too... I get it there are a lot of blocklists that are fairly abusive in how aggressive they are.

@McMongoose @Moon @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @Moon @tomey then why recommend it at all?

You're saying stuff but then the actions doesn't match

@coolboymew

By not recommending one of the block lists that are abusive.. I can also always change my recomendation as needed if a better block list comes along.

@McMongoose @Moon @tomey

@Moon

I also tried to recommend a block list that wasnt too aggressive or ideological... just the instances that obviously are more or less unmoderated.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey ultimately blocking doesn't make you any safer from harassment so neither type of blocklist actually works but they probably think that the social sanction of server defederation will cause bad actors to leave. I think this has been proven untrue.

@Moon

I have found blocking unmoderated instances do a pretty good job at significantly reducing the amount of harassment one experiences.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey I mean like, they can still read your public posts and do bad things like doxing. I agree with some of the mastodon people that blocking doesn't completely solve abuse.

@Moon

Sure... blocking is not a measure that will completely protect you from bad actors.. but it does go a long way to reduce most of the more casual harassment and thus make ones experience here more usable.

@McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey

@Moon individual blocklists are actually worse, speaking from experience with twitter blocktogether lists. i'd rather have server blocklists because that can be seen as a matter of policy, while the individual approach enables weirdos with social capital to be far more insidious about ostracizing people they don't like
@a I am familiar with it but I don't see a huge difference but I am interested to hear more.
@a I mean, individuals can subscribe to blocklists, not indivuduals running blocklists but I am not sure what you mean.
@Moon i think the most sensible way to do it is to have something similar to twitter's "quality filter" from some years ago, that lets you opt into or out of seeing accounts deemed "low quality" (which is pretty analogous to a silence in mastodon's terms)
@a I don't have a problem with it as long as users can choose to override it and the algorothm is transparent
What I love about the Fedi is that there's basically a market for moderation policies. Admins can make whatever policies they prefer and users will move to whatever instances work the best.

Also, I think it can be shown mathematically that everything will eventually converge on almost completely free speech, so maintaining an authoritarian echo-chamber is basically an exercise in futility.
@cjd @McMongoose @freemo @Moon @coolboymew @tomey having sex with kids is not covered under free speech and everyone is okay with it being excluded from that too.
watch who is afraid of that.
Also, there are no "influencers", which is a standard furnishing of echo-chambers.
@FourOh-LLC @McMongoose @cjd @freemo @Moon @tomey I do like my videos and such, but the last 7-8 years definitively have taught that ecelebs are most definitively cancer. I believe a bunch of them have been caught getting money for astroturfing too
One reason that everything seems to be politicized lately is because the influencers and their political correctness.

Some are more tolerable than others, but from the small to the large all the way to Joe Rogan and the Babylon Bee they are repulsive to me, and maybe to a lot of others too.

A few are downright pathological, like Whoopie. Goodness gracious she is a moron!
@cjd @McMongoose @freemo @coolboymew @tomey for all the problems people that want to know what's going on come to these places because information has to compete here for prominence while on their servers it can just be suffocated by one admin.
@Moon @freemo @McMongoose @coolboymew @tomey I like the idea of SPC as more of a "come as you are" server. The point of the server is less about politics and more about just bringing what you have to the conversation, but there isn't any gatekeeping over politics, either.

Of course Twitterbrained canceldonners will continue to lie their asses off. They need a boogeyman. It was Trump, then Musk, now it's... us?
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Qoto Mastodon

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