it feels like a lot of white folks, when confronted with a conflict between people who are annoying and racists, want to pick the racists every time.
Anyway, some links
- he/they villainx
- flickr.com/photos/kukkurovaca
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objectively too many tv/anime/manga screencaps
photography, especially infrared
- no nazis, no terfs, no yimbies
Alt: The Cohost Daily Tag
cohost.org/TagOfTheDayPhotoblog
www.nickshere.com/Landing Page
kukkurovaca.com/Obsidian Vault / Psuedoblog
plaintextadventure.com/Combined RSS Feed
kukkurovaca.com/rss.xmlYou must log in to comment.
in reply to @kukkurovaca's post:
mind if I add a link to this post to mine for coverage of another side of things? my point wasn't "these people are in the right," more that I think the fediverse is a structurally fucked nightmare.
the only concrete fact I can glean from any of this came from checking the list myself. a friend of mine, a trans woman with a single user instance, is on the bad space list for "spamming" with action "defederate," but she's done nothing that could qualify as "spamming." apparently there are a number of other trans people with single-user instances that have experienced this as well, and have been unable to get themselves removed from the list. I'm not sure whether that's because the people running it have refused, or because the fact that they're on the list inherently cuts them off from communication with the people running it.
Feel free to link.
re: the bad space, I'm not an advocate for it in particular (at the very least, in its current form, I do not find it useful / ready for prime time), but a lot of racists on the fediverse seized it as a cause celebre, and much criticism of it makes no effort to avoid getting entangled in that.
Fundamentally all it's doing is aggregating the instance blocks of several instances which the maintainer identified as "trusted sources", basically the same as Oliphant (which for some reason never got the same level of attention).
Both tools sort instances into groups based on how much consensus there is in the trusted source group. (Bad Space refers to "heat levels" and Oliphant refers to "tiers") The potential audience of users of either tool is actually not that large, to be honest, because many instance admins would not necessarily trust those "trusted sources". And I think even among strong advocates for them, as far as I know no one would suggest uncritically copying their whole lists, especially for the lower "tiers"/"heat levels".
Is your friends instance listed as blocked by just one source, or by many?
link added.
friend's instance, aria.dog, is listed as suspended by 1 instance, silenced by 2.
In this case, it looks like the suspend is from mastodon.art, and I can immediately see two possible reasons why:
- She's got a whole account just posting AI art, and mastodon.art /welshpixie takes a hard line against AI-generated art
- Hardline accusation of intentional transophobia against the bad space, which .art / welshpixie considers a racist smear campaign
There may be other reasons as well but both of those would certainly be consistent with .art's moderation record. (Note: I'm not endorsing it.) So, I feel like it's not mysterious in this case. If I had to guess it would be the former in this case since it's tagged as spam rather than racism.
I could be entirely wrong, of course. The fact that Oliphant intentionally excludes receipts and bad space doesn't yet have them for the majority of instances makes them poor tools for figuring out why something is blocked, and the lack of full text search on mastodon means it's not easy to go through #fediblock and find why decisions were made.
Ah, my previous post was probably wrong, I checked my instance and the block reason is more specific: "single user fediblock spam"
Was she trolling the fediblock tag? That periodically comes into vogue for some posters for some reason, and many instance admins take it very poorly.
and by structurally fucked I mean that conflicts like this seem to inevitably lead to the favored solution being what amounts to collective punishment. every user on an instance, including those who have done nothing, gets their online social connections sliced apart, for the sole reason of "chose the wrong website to use the fediverse through," with no ability to prevent or forsee it in most cases unless they keep a religious watch on inter-instance conflict.
i experienced this; i signed up for snouts.online because the url was fun, it seemed well-moderated, and some friends were on there. that blew up violently and took my entire social graph on Mastodon with it. it turned me off of Mastodon for five years and off of the idea of federated social media permanently. these days I'm tentatively using it to follow friends and for occasional reach reasons, and only because a friend runs an instance with like 30 people on it that's unlikely to be subject to any of this
it seems like a major, massive problem, and nobody has offered solutions except bluesky, whose solutions don't seem like much of a solution to anything and which is fucked other ways
I think the question re: bluesky will largely come down to how well or poorly the flagship instance is run. To a large extent that was also what went wrong with Mastodon; Eugen is not actually good at running an instance or setting standards for community safety, and that led to self-appointed community leaders taking up the safety gauntlet and running with it, sometimes in opposite directions. It has also placed the financial, labor, and mental burdens of running better instances on largely uncompensated community members.
To that extent, looking at the people behind bluesky, there's every reason to be pessimistic, but I have no idea how it will actually shake out.
given the fact that bluesky's development seems entirely technical-first, with seemingly all thought about how people are going to interact socially on there being reactive, It's Not Looking Good
also: I asked before linking because I have some decent amount of reach on here, and being on Twitter too long has made me wary of blowing up anyone else's spot with that when it comes to potentially contentious issues