Has anyone seen this organized anti-trans campaign? I've been seeing a bunch of posts with:
- An anime girl avatar
- A short, violently anti-trans message
- A huge list of unrelated hashtags (which is why I'm seeing them)
- A video
I block the instances as I see them, but that doesn't help much as each seems to come from a new instance.
What defense does Mastodon have against such an attack? The only tactic I can think of is pre-screening instances before federating with them, which would be a problem for all small instances.
@peterdrake Compare: https://mastodon.social/tags/newhere and https://qoto.org/tags/newhere
Some sites have solved the problem. Yours has simply chosen to push that work onto you.
@gamehawk I'm aware that qoto adopts a fairly extreme federate-with-everyone policy. The rules *within* qoto are much less tolerant of abuse, and it hasn't been a problem within the instance.
The contrast between the two pages you link to is striking. If I were trans, Black, Jewish, etc. and saw this, I would not feel safe joining qoto, knowing that I'd have to see these attacks and defend myself after seeing them.
I originally joined qoto because it was a STEM instance. I haven't left yet (mostly out of laziness), but the momentum to do so is certainly building.
The fact that this organized campaign of harassment is not an issue on other servers suggests that it's not, as I feared, a case of each message coming from a new server, which would be very hard to stop.
🇳🇱
Also keep in mind our policy of letting users decide what to see was specifically done at the insistance of our LGBTQ+ community years ago (and something they repeat every time it comes up).
Users didnt want their hands tied and forced to see what some admin told them they could see, the reason was safety. We have a LGBTQ community here who uses the open-federation policy as a means to monitor violent or racist;/sexist accounts across the fediverse. We are the only server that protects them and are inclusive locally (as you pointed out) that doesnt curtail their freedom to choose for themselves what they can or cant see. So we are the only place they really can go.
So every time we talk about defederating and changing our policy their voices are heard and we ultimately decide not to for their safety.
In short I wont put actual LGBTQ and minorities at risk simply because some white people with white guilt are offended that they can see bad people on the internet. Block the bad servers, import the block list, problem solved.. but unless you are a minority I will differ to our actual minorities here when it comes to what makes them feel safe.
For the record I have reiterated this many times in the past.
@peterdrake
On that we agree, right now we are doing the best we can with limited technological solutions.. As you said there is a lot of room for improvement, but its a big time investment too.
I am actively looking to find developers who are willing to get paid to write open-source code (code that will be offered back up to vanilla mastodon).
@gamehawk @trinsec