JK-Darkside

JKDarkside

@JK-Darkside

bleach fan here for life send help

Big nerd who likes weird games and anime, writes for Hardcore Gaming 101

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JK-Darkside
@JK-Darkside
the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
website-league
@website-league

Introducing the Website League

The Website League is a new social media project, built with the goals of providing its users a safe, healthy, and resilient place to share their thoughts, ideas, and art. With avoidance of dark patterns (as pioneered by Cohost; we believe they drive unhealthy engagement with social media), a centralized decisionmaking body, and a shared set of community guidelines, our core aim is to provide a system that is enjoyable to use, and free of discrimination, bigotry, and harrassment of all kinds.
JK-Darkside
@JK-Darkside

Good luck to you all but this just seems like Mastadon 2, but with some not thought out problems. I'm particularly worried by the council of moderators idea due to me having once been a forum mod and admin. I know from experience how fast small groups can fall apart (especially because I saw one forum fall apart when one of the mods became a gamergater right at the start of that shitstorm) - I can't imagine this being a better situation with a larger userbase and staff. If anything, the infighting and drama problems of Mastadon seem worse here, because if they hit the council, that could have knock-on effects for everyone

I understand trying to solve the issue of Cohost's weak moderation, but the only answer for that, really, is having more money to hire more moderators. As much as Mastadon has its problems, everything being in its own space at least makes sure a staff meltdown only affects a small part of it and people can go elsewhere. You need a lot of checks and balances to make this work, and the more people are in the council, the harder that becomes.

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in reply to @website-league's post:

lapisnev
@lapisnev

I've noticed a lot of fedi operators will run Matrix homeservers as well, that's probably the "most correct" option for an IM platform to go with the archipelago but I'm sure someone's mentioned it by now.

I'll be watching that RSS feed and I might join later on! This is a really interesting project!

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exerian
@exerian

i was just listening to someone talk about matrix. i'm thinking we should actually take a good look at it because in principle, it fits the model. we're only on discord atm because of the extremely low barrier of entry.

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deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

imo keep the discord, even if you do eventually start a matrix. just make it very limited scope. the discord solely exists to help people navigate the process stuff and, find an instance, and get on.

you wanna talk about something else? website's right over there buddy.

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exerian
@exerian

now that i think about it. i'll be pushing to find someone willing to maintain mod stuff in the discord server even if we end up using something else for most of the admin stuff. i'm sure there are plenty of people already in the admin group who are still going to be using discord on a daily basis anyway so why not?

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deafhobbit
@deafhobbit

Are you okay with people sharing this on other sites (bsky, mastodon, etc) so other people looking for a new internet home post cohost can see it? or do you not want all that visibility right now?

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exerian
@exerian

i think we want to stick with cohostians for the bootstrapping phase so that we know we have people coming from a common culture because that culture is so different from everywhere else. eventually we will want to open it up to more.

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srxl
@srxl

I'm personally not opposed to talking about the project between a group of a few friends, etc., but yeah we probably don't want this making the rounds on other platforms just yet. Once things are a little more established, we can start thinking about sharing with a wider audience imo

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ctmatthews
@ctmatthews

sorry if this is a silly question, but will this have a twitter/mastodon-style interface with publicly visible likes and followers and numbers etc or is it more of a cohost-style "blogs with shares and comments and a few social features" thing? i don't know enough about activitypub to know if all of those publicly-visible numbers are an unavoidable part of the protocol or if that's specifically just how mastodon chooses how to do things. i know the post says it has "avoidance of dark patterns" but i can't see anything more specific than that.

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srxl
@srxl

in the discord server, there is an accepted proposal listed that defines this - far too long to put in a cohost comment section verbatim unfortunately but to summarise:

membership is voluntary and open to anyone meeting any of the following conditions:

  • anyone planning to admin/moderate a node
  • anyone who can bring relevant experience/specialised knowledge to the League

after formalization (tbd on what constitutes "formalization"), conditions change to:

  • anyone who admined/moderated a node at formalization
  • anyone currently accepted by the body to admin/moderate a node
  • anyone who can bring relevant experience/specialised knowledge to the League
  • anyone else agreed by consensus of the body to join the body
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lori
@lori

Why a rule against having a federated timeline? Either I don't understand the thought behind this or there's a misunderstanding about what that means

Edit: also I run gotosocial for my self hosted account and definitely recommend it for new folks, it's still very early software but it's infinitely easier to install and deal with for a small instance especially if you're just hosting yourself.

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trilobite
@trilobite

I think it’s an effort to not recreate The Cohost Global Feed. I know the mastodon local and global feeds are the originals but . Admittedly I could not express the distinctions between the two offhand.

That’s good to hear about gotosocial! The very techy nature of this project has been. Very intimidating to me to be honest!

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atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

My theory is that a huge part of Mastodon/Fediverse social volatility comes from the fact that instances are force-connected in an inorganic fashion that arises from the structure of the network instead of from user interaction. cohost having to make the entire tag system less powerful to stop harassment stemming from the global feed tag adds a bunch of data points.

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lori
@lori

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the other half of the structure then because if it's all allowlist only setup and an island where the members are following each other, then the federated feed would only ever be the other people on the island network, which...seems like a pretty good thing to have!

Unless you just mean that that federated feed shouldn't be viewable by logged out users? Or maybe the structure is less of a true island than I understood?

Edit to add: If the problem is people INSIDE the network are using the feed to harass people, I would hope the rules around this project would require them to do something about that from a moderation standpoint and that none of the member instances would be at too big of a scale that this moderation wouldn't be feasible. I actually think it'd be a good idea to have some sort of user cap for member instances because the worst thing a fedi instance can do is get big.

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in reply to @JK-Darkside's post:

atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

We are working on a decisionmaking process with safeguards for this sort of thing. Moderators are only responsible for their own, small instances, and the council is there only for things that involve the network as a whole, or user problems that need escalation - for example, if an instance mod is being weird about minorities. You are welcome to join our Discord and see what we're working on in that department.

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