The Raspberry Pi social media (Mastodon) brouhaha from last week was bugging me, so I worked out some thoughts over on Medium.
Thanks to @jeffjarvis for the original link.
@jmproffitt @jeffjarvis I’m afraid I can’t agree with the reasoning at the end.
Instances have/form cultures. Behaviours model cultures compatible or inimical with those instance’s own. Moderators are both protectors and arbitrators of those cultures.
Whether blocking Rasberry Pi was because of bad behaviour in response to critical feedback (of which there was plenty of both) or a policy decision based on their embrace of state surveillance, it expresses culture
@jeffjarvis @jmproffitt Your argument is left arguing that moderators are obliged to expose their members to misbehaving activity or actors (not just these Raspberry Pi actions and actors) because… something?
There is no obligation to listen to commercial brands and good reason to quiet instances misbehaving by the standards of a community/instance.
Finally, a small reminder- Mastodon is a global, not US network. The “woke” culture war is not a universal frame.
@Tupp_ed @jeffjarvis @jmproffitt Not "because... something".
Because users can choose to block it themselves. Server-to-server blocks are the nuclear option and should be reserved for egregiously bad conduct. Anything short of that is just curation, and users are capable of handling that for themselves.
@jeffjarvis @LouisIngenthron @jmproffitt Unless they prefer not to, and that’s the sort of instance culture they’ve joined.
@Tupp_ed @jeffjarvis @jmproffitt Then that sounds an awful lot like a culture that never should have federated in the first place. 🤷♂️
@LouisIngenthron Agreed. But to be clear, I'm fine if a Mastodon admin wants to have an aggressive filtering approach, they just need to be up-front about that.
And the lists of blocked instances, posted in the Mastodon interface, are good, but (a) don't explain the philosophy clearly, and (b) will rapidly scale way beyond our ability as humans to parse what is going on.
@jmproffitt If you want a more concrete example of that, look up what's happening with my server, QOTO, Fediblock, and UFoI.
We got put on the block list because of easily-disproven lies, but despite the protestations of our instance admin, have been unable to reason with blocking servers.
My admin, freemo, then tried to start the "United Federation of Instances", which was meant to be a non-block pact with a set of rules and internal arbitration for violators. Unfortunately, it has so far backfired, with the same instances that bought the lies before claiming that it's a trojan horse. Now, any instance that showed interest in UFoI is getting added to Fediblock.
It's pretty nuts.
@LouisIngenthron This is absolutely fascinating. Have you written about this anywhere else?
@jmproffitt I haven't, but others have.
Search the #UFoI hashtag to see chatter about it.
Or check out Freemo's blog post here outlining the start of the story:
https://jeffreyfreeman.me/eugen-rochko-ceo-of-mastodon-found-to-support-nazis-agenda/
And here's a follow-up: https://jeffreyfreeman.me/more-lies-from-the-fediverse/
I haven't tagged him here because I didn't want to drag him into the conversation unnecessarily, but if you tag freemo @ qoto.org, he's usually pretty happy to talk about all this stuff too.
There's a lot of crazy in the story. For example, at least one instance blocked our server because, when asked if this server blocks CSAM, the answer was "the issue hasn't come up" instead of an unequivocal "no". (The unequivocal no was added to the server rules the next day)
@LouisIngenthron Wow. I knew federation + moderation would have complications, but this is beyond what i would have anticipated.
How are new Mastodon admins or even experienced ones that are volunteers supposed to navigate all this?
I guess this is what happens when millions of Twitter users decamp to a new platform. It's hard enough for monolithic operators to deal with moderation. Federated moderators are... kinda screwed.
@jmproffitt True, but the one advantage they have over the monolithics is scale.
My instance has 25,000 users, compared to Twitter's 450,000,000.
So, moderating users becomes much easier. Moderating instances, not so much, especially for those without the time to do proper research.
My thought was that this needed to be solved with a solution like email's RBL. Take the server-level block lists from the biggest servers and average them together to form a high-level blocklist.
@LouisIngenthron Yep. I think of firewalls. You can't track all "bad" websites out there, so you subscribe to a service that hands you broad categories of sites you can choose to block. Porn, gambling, malware, marijuana, abortion, guns, hate speech... you pick the broad categories and decide what to do with them. Mastodon is going to have to evolve to support services like that, to support scale and reduce admin load.
@jmproffitt And here's the actual site for the UFoI (scroll down a bit for links to their constitution/bylaws).
https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution
https://ufoi.org/
Freemo recently stepped down as temporary chairman since he's such a "controversial" figure, to try to lend the movement more credibility.