Blocklists as they exist on the fediverse are essentially a form of mutual aid, backed by a whisper network. Instance admins (many of whom are marginalized people, and none of whom as far as I know make noticeable amounts of money from their work) collaborate to identify bad actors and risks to their communities and to ease the extremely high labor cost of moderating a decentralized network. The point isn't to name and shame, it's to keep people safe.
These community safety practices have a PR problem and, perhaps, a PROBLEM problem, because it's inherently awkward to have a whisper network with publicized results. BUT sharing anything at all about instance blocks already creates personal safety risks for admins, because lots of bad actors are constantly namesearching. Whisper networks exist for reasons, and one of those reasons is that it's literally dangerous to name names out loud. So, it's hard to say that folks participating in them have an obligation to switch to all public channels when that will expose them to risk.
There is also a broader conversation to be had about the concept of "receipts", and when claims should or must be substantiated by evidence, and when it's appropriate to ask someone for "receipts." Public vagueposting backed by private backchannel detail sharing seems to be normalized on Mastodon and creates a lot of resentment from casuals, justifiably or not. Reactions to this often break down differently between users and admins, as admins have usually spent a lot of time on this and know which other admins they trust, while users are upset because they can't tell at a glance whether a particular fediblock post is legit or no. As a result, I think that for a user-facing tool, "receipts" are extremely important, and the fact that most blocklists are not well receipted is one of the big reasons why I, a user, do not find tools like Oliphant or Bad Space useful. BUT the need for such user-facing tools is questionable to begin with, because blocklists are not a jury trial to determine guilt or innocence, they're a safety tool for mitigating harm to communities.
NOW a lot of folks have problems with some of the players in the particular whisper network (or, if you prefer, "THE CABAL") which informs the data sets used by tools like Oliphant and The Bad Space. The whisper network also seems, from what I can tell, to have internal problems partly owing to trying to be too big, which seems to have led to the collapse of the main backchannel for instance admin communication. I think a reasonable takeaway from all that would be that the concept of "trusted sources" needs to be seriously unpacked -- which applies to all related tools and practices. (My naive take would be that admins need tools that let them filter and group blocklists by source so they can make their own decisions about how to act on information therefrom. This is basically what all admins are doing already, manually.)
Another takeaway might simply be that other whisper networks need to be created for other communities!
Now, to those folks who perceive this all as THE CABAL having "TOO MUCH POWER", and who basically consider whisper networks inherently harmful, I would say:
- People who don't believe in whisper networks at all generally are very secure and insulated from the consequences of things they might say, meaning, they are the beneficiaries of structural power and oppression. If they can't imagine what it's like to be at personal risk for saying true things, they should cultivate empathy until they can
- The powerful also often do not need to whisper because they frequently do not need to coordinate at all. They simply continue to act in their shared interest
- Harmful whisper networks do exist, for sure (like the transphobic reporter mailing list), and should be exposed wherever possible. If you genuinely think that a few admins of Mastodon servers blocking folks for possibly bad reasons is on that level, well, go with god I guess.
