Rather than talk in the abstract about whether consensus blocklists are good or bad, let's consider a specific example.
Let's suppose Georgia Tech wants to join the Fediverse. They want to start an instance at social.gatech.edu. ♥️
Georgia Tech has a student body of about 47K students. This includes the largest number of women engineering students in the US, and one of the largest Black engineering student bodies on Earth.
How does GT protect their students without consensus block lists?
1/N
Like most universities, Georgia Tech is under budget constraints. They have a limited number of student volunteers that they can use to help with moderation. Most of the full-time academic computing resources will go just to technical administration of the instance.
My question isn't cynical or rhetorical. Good answers will go into recommendations.
I'm not saying that consensus block lists are the only way. But I'm genuinely curious about what solutions others would have for this problem.
2/N
I should be clear that no official from Georgia Tech has asked me this question! A few of their alumni that are curious about Mastodon, don't speak for the university in any official capacity.
3/N
@mekkaokereke Matter of expectations, I guess. Mastodon default's posture is pretty much that everybody publishes to "the world", except for the part of the world that is carved out in "block lists" -- and that's kind of the Red Queen version of security. You are on a thread mill to always add the newest offenders to the list. Plus, you are almost guaranteed to overblock. Might be better to set the default mode to "followers only", and lets students make conscious choices to "go public".
@huitema @mekkaokereke sounds quite reasonable to me. I wonder if anyone has counter arguments
