Alcun Atirutan BBS

i’m starting to have a lot of doubts about the continued viability of a globally open fediverse.

between having to squash bigot-run instances on a daily basis, determining if new instances are run by known threat actors, and being defederated by so called “allies” because our candid conversations rubbed their white tendencies the wrong way, i just don’t see how safe participation in the fediverse for marginalized communities is sustainable.

and that’s sad. it’s sad because whiteness has ruined yet another idea with great potential.

an instance defederated us today with “poor moderation” as the reason.

we have a 24x7 oncall rotation for moderation, with a less than 5 minute resolution time for most reports, typically leading in appropriate action taken against the account.

we receive very few reports from outside instances, and when we do, they are taken seriously.

folks, this is an instance run by marginalized tech workers. when you defederate us without even trying to gain clarity on our policies or practices, we are left pondering whether it is due to whiteness. or because we discuss openly how we should understand potential threats to our community.

mastodon has problems with whiteness as a project, but so do many of the instance admins.

@ariadne I don't know the details but I think most of us agree instances doing this are jokes and the people trying to use those instances will quickly get fed up with having their followers and follows taken from them because the admins are assholes.

so when you consider the huge resource lift we’ve put into moderation for our community and how that extends to its mastodon presence, we can only assume “poor moderation” means “you made moderation decisions i find disagreeable.”

which requires communication: maybe we made a wrong call, but if you feel that way, we can’t reconsider it unless you talk to us.

and if you’re unwilling to talk to us, then we are going to assume that we offended your whiteness. because without any other context, given how we apply our principles when moderating, that is the logical conclusion.

@dalias i don’t know. there are numerous people who have reported these incidents to me. it is tiring. i don’t think it is right that admins casually disconnect people from their friends.

i’m considering switching to allowlist mode and only federating with instances that will provide a usable backchannel for concerns to be discussed, or directly participate in our information sharing program. i’m tired of playing whackamole with nazis and dealing with people who don’t understand the actual role of community moderation (which, actually, isn’t just banning the people you don’t like, but instead finding the truth of the situation and applying community principles accordingly) saying we suck at it, even though we have built a good mod team.

@ariadne There is utterly no way any reasonable instance should ever defederate without either egregious instances of unhandled abuse, a repeated pattern of not handling abuse, or obvious signs that it's a bad-faith instance.

@dalias it probably seems odd that i would choose to switch to allowlist mode, but by doing so, it helps us to appropriately scope what we can actually guarantee. and it ensures that there are communication tools in place to discuss problems.

for example, if hachyderm has issues with our community, instead of defederating us, kris is going to blow up my phone. i can’t guarantee that issues will get resolved positively with random instances.

@dalias i suspect as other instances realize they can manage expectations more effectively by managing an allowlist, they will switch to this model, and we will have something akin to the IRC model where different communities have overlap but there are also clear network borders as well.

@ariadne I absolutely agree with all of this, but if true I think it paints a pretty stark picture of the feasibility of moderating global-yet-decentralized social media, due to unavoidable system dynamics.

It's the vicious end of economies-of-scale, where every instance of 1-10 staff has the work of a whole twitter (legions of full-time content mods and lawyers and policy experts). Centralization came with the ability to fund those positions, and expectations of less personalized moderation.

@kazriko I joked to someone yesterday that in a world of fragmentation, one's political bent may be predetermined by the mastodon server their father was on.