New rule: when somebody's being an ass to me in my replies, I will reply to them with "Oh look, one of theses" and boost that reply.
I need y'all to see these so I stop feeling so gaslit about this place.
Some of you are gonna disagree with me on my interpretation, I bet. And that's OK.
But thanks to the Magic of Federation, you might not see these replies.
And also thanks to the Magic of Federation, even if you want to find these replies you'll have to look through dozens because I have so many followers.
I'm considering it my mission at this point to make these issues more visible. And the "look, one of these" boosts will serve as a content warning.
Peace.
@TechConnectify The "Magic of Federation" line stuck in my head, so I had to try and illustrate this problem.
This plot shows how on many instances, more than half of the replies to your post are just not visible.
@Kudusch @TechConnectify In the way of anecdata, I saw one of the "Oh look, one of these" posts, and wanted to see what was being responded to. Because my instance (infosec.exchange) has blocked/defederated/muted the other dofus's instance, it was just a beautiful leaf fallen from a wretched branch.
Following back to mas.to, I could see the what generated the "hey look", and realized that I hadn't actually missed anything.
I dunno what to do with that. It feels like there are only varying degrees of bad solutions to a fundamentally interesting problem.
@drsbaitso @Kudusch yep.
And to me, even assuming the problem actually is that mas.to federates with more instances of ill repute, the responses that I should switch to a different instance seems to ignore the fundamental nature of the problem.
And if we are to continue viewing "just block problematic instances" as the solution, does that not lead to consolidation eventually? People will flock to "safe" instances and asking folks to manage their own is just too much.
@drsbaitso @Kudusch I'm increasingly of the mind that the decentralization here, while a cool concept, doesn't actually solve many issues with social media. In fact, it makes the social parts *much* harder because, functionally, interactions are closer to peer-to-peer than they are public.
I think too many folks are hanging their hat on it being some sort of panacea and aren't meaningfully engaging with the core problems it presents.
@TechConnectify Decentralization was meant to solve the problem of one entity owning the network, and doing whatever they want with it(as with twitter). I also think Mastodon did it in a shit way(AFAIK likes/favorites aren't federated, and now this comments thing), which makes using it so much harder(like seeing something that is def a comment but the above posts wont load).
A different problem of social media is filtering and moderation, only now money isn't being made and servers are not trying to make profits(again, AFAIK), so it becomes less an option for someone to be paid to moderate it, and moderating have no explicit guidelines(because, every instance is on its own and can decide what it wants), meaning something that you might be ok with is not fine for someone else(and vice versa). As of filtering, you no longer must have an algorithm, since you don't need to keep people hooked for longer(also people are usually against it here for some reason), which means everything is thrown at you unless you act(i agree, it sucks)...
Anyway, shit sucks
