like the joker but chicano
- they/it
they/them, sometimes nsfw, my name’s duen
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in reply to @clip's post:
Hi, okay, genuine question :o We keep seeing other beings talk about the horrors of Mastodon. And, like, gosh, what happened???
just endless cycles of Terminally Online discourse about things that genuinely don't matter mixed with people too afraid to confront their own biases because having biases would make them A Bad Person :tm:
what if the culture of twitter was worse and there was a social hierarchy modeled after the feudal system
Wait, social hierarchy? We hope this isn't annoying, but do you mind going a little more in depth into it? We are -fascinated-
Mastodon is a decentralized network of servers running the same or similar compatible software. Every server has its own unique community guidelines and its own moderators, generally however has enough money, time, and knowledge to run a server in their spare time for free. There is not centralized authority over moderation. Community moderation is entirely decentralized with each user deciding who they want their moderators to be and joining their server, generally each server is its own subcommunity or social clique. The mods inherently become respected community leaders even though their qualifications are only being a wealthy systems administrator. Since every server has its own rules, users on different servers will violate rules that other servers have but not their own, but everyone can see and interact with each other regardless. In cases like this, the mods can block those users from their server but not their home server or anyone on any other server. Furthermore, if you're banned from someone else's server, nothing stops you from getting around that ban by making a new account on another server again.
Because of this, mods across different servers end up having to talk to each other and like, negotiate treaties and shit deciding on common rules and expectations and all these cross server rules violations become diplomatic incidents that affect everyone because if the mods decide that their community norms are fundamentally irreconcilable then they "defederate" effectively banning every single user on each other's servers, they cut all communications off, and if users from those two servers still want to follow each other they have to make new accounts on other servers resulting in everyone having like five alt accounts on five different servers.
Oh also there is a more complex hierarchy because admins are the server owners and mods are underneath them and each server has their own system of governance and you end up with like four strata of user who have sworn allegiance to their lord and participate in network wide discourse about every single little incident
Jeesh. Wow. Wow okay wow that's. A lot to take in. We were aware of the federated nature of Mastodon, but not once had we heard or considered the culture wars it could spawn. And yeah no that sounds. It sounds painful if you end up defederated, or seeing your friends defederated.
Thank you for the info!
See the worst part is that if you refuse to defederate because of the issues it creates you end up with issues that are just as bad or worse from having two countries constant interacting with fundamentally incompatible rules and norms who hate each other and refuse to moderate each other normally so there's just constant drama and no good moderation
excited to see many more repeat cycles of "why doesn't [x] instance have the same cw tagging conduct as us? can we get them defederated?" in the future
Trans people going into Mastodon after buying the hype, passing trans people being ejected from Mastodon after all their disposable labor has been wrung out of them like a sponge.
the joys of being told by someone I need to move instances because someone else decided a mod on my instance was problematic and then losing like half my contacts in the process
covered in long detail to a friend who's still on there why I'm not thrilled about the idea of going back and just got back a "wow, I've never dealt with any of this" and just, had no idea how to respond