Nire Bryce

the fediverse seems like it's done a real bad job of eradicating hierarchy. it just made a thousand little ones that are kind of hidden and interact in unpredictable ways

eliminating hierarchy was never it's goal, no matter how many anarchists tried to recruit me to it from 2018-2021 not bothering to realize I already had been there and left due to feudalism.

I'm on it now, with an instance I talk with, and I follow people. But since you can't post to the local timeline without posting to the federated timeline, I still get random people jumping in to badly refute points I've already clarified, one at a time, like henchmen in an Akira Kurosawa samurai movie.

A large collection of leftist devs may have been trying to deploy it to reduce hierarchy, or thought they could through their work, but they all burnt themselves out fighting the rest of it, it seems. Not that it seems like it could even work within the mastodon spec.

We need some form of p2p social networking that has ways of managing spam, reputation, blocks based on those reputation systems, etc -- and it needs to be pseudonymous and changable. I don't know the way forward past that -- there's a lot of attempts but they've all got that newborn deer shaky legs stuff going on and are all like 8 people total working on them. But as long as accounts have to be on servers, instead of accounts hanging out in any servers they choose like they're locations, it won't do it.

If your mastodon account is homed on hachyderm because you're a queer technologist but sometimes want to hang out in the woof.group leatherbar's local feed, you can't with mastodon. That's the biggest indictment of it, to me. In a lot of cases on mastodon, admins and moderators aren't moderating spaces, they're moderating your access to the social graph

As a moderator, I don't want to be dealing with all of this drama! I just want a community of people that can talk with other people!

My POV is skewed by being a moderator¹ on a medium-sized instance run by a bunch of transfemme (or otherwise queer) SREs (among other jobs) with a fairly permissive federation policy. Of course, we've gotten #fediblocked / defederated for some absolutely ??? reasons, that we can only chalk up to "mastodon culture"…²

It's exhausting at times, to just discover that you're defederated from an instance via a user saying that they can't talk with their [relationship]. This is also "mastodon culture" – resorting to violence that tears inter-community links apart (defederation) instead of making an effort to communicate!

And then there's the third rail of "drama" from last year. That's not my story to tell, though.³

But since you can't post to the local timeline without posting to the federated timeline[…]

This is actually a feature that Claire's glitch fork adds! Unfortunately, this will never get added to mainline Mastodon… because… reasons… cough.⁴

Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I have committed to not participating in mainline Mastodon development: features useful for mitigating abuse and harassment… just get rejected, mysteriously.

1. 1312, including moderators. As a moderator that's trying to be a good moderator, I try to minimize the amount of BOFH I inflict on others.⁵

2. Or as others have put it: "whiteness".

3. Harms not limited to cuts on the social graph, but ones that we can consider "tangible", even if they might not always be visible.

4. Claire is amazing, and is the mastodon developer that we don't deserve.

5. Yeah, irony.