I am Victor Venema. I was born in #Groningen, The Netherlands, and studied physics there. My PhD was about measuring cloud structure. I currently work on the #homogenization of climate station data in #Bonn, Germany, and on @GrassrootsReview.
#ClimateScientist
I am also one of the admins of #Fediscience. We would like to create a friendly place to talk about science, but feel free to talk about anything. Please notify Frank Sonntag @admin or me early of unfriendly behaviour.
🇳🇱
Sounds like the same mission as QOTO, (I am the founder), great to have you as part of the fediverse scientific community! I am sure our respective users will get along nicely as you grow and I look forward to that.
If you need anything reach out anytime. Even if I cant help we have about 16K STEM professionals many of whom are PhDs and I am sure me or one of my community can help if you need anything. Always great to have another instance to collaborate with.
Best of luck!
@freemo @VictorVenema @admin Thanks for contacting. I think I have seen posts by QOTO before, but had not realized it was a STEM server.
It is good to have some options. Sounds like we moderate/block stronger to keep FediScience a friendly place where as much people as possible feels welcome.
Some of the additional QOTO features are once that would also be useful for us (equations, longer posts). How do you do this? Especially how are these features maintained each time Mastodon is updated?
> It is good to have some options. Sounds like we moderate/block stronger to keep FediScience a friendly place where as much people as possible feels welcome.
Probably not, but I would need some examples to really judge. We have a fairly large LGBT community here and take pride in that and have no issue blocking someone if it is justified. We dont tolerate hate speech and have very little if any biggotry around here thankfully. We do however allow for a freedom of opinions outside of hate-speech and encourage people of all ends of the political, social, racial, and sexual spectrum to share theirs without fear of a ban hammer, again so long as they arent resorting to hate.
We also make sure we talk it out with users before banning with borderline situations. Generally we find it is important our users not need to be fearful of how they experss themselves and know when they make a mistake it will be addressed with an open-dialogue and not an outright ban.
I encourage you to look through the timeline, youll find most of our users are very accepting and I think the strong LGBT presence here is a reflection of that.
> Some of the additional QOTO features are once that would also be useful for us (equations, longer posts). How do you do this? Especially how are these features maintained each time Mastodon is updated?
Well, I modified the mastodon source code myself and continue to modify and improve it. Most of the features I've had to add personally over time. Some were partially or fully contributed by others and just integrated by me, others I developed from scratch. At the base we are mastodon though.
@freemo I was going by your own description as a free speech server which does not block other instances. I guess in practice the differences will be small, within science people tend to behave. We are still small, but I have not had to do any moderation of our own people.
So you re-implement your additional features regularly in new Mastodon versions?
In WordPress you have "hooks": Parts in the code where you can tell the program to call additional functions via a settings file.
> I was going by your own description as a free speech server which does not block other instances. I guess in practice the differences will be small, within science people tend to behave. We are still small, but I have not had to do any moderation of our own people.
You would be correct in stating we almost never block other instances. But the reason for that actually comes from our LGBT community and the say they had early on when the topic was being discussed (I think 2 years ago at this point maybe, whenever it was GAB came to the fediverse).
Most LGBT-friendly servers at the time were blocking not just gab but massively blocking other servers. While some in the LGBT community were ok with this there were many who felt this put their safety and lives at risk. Many such users routinely monitored GAB accounts for mention of anything that may put their lives or community at risk, for example Milo doxxing someone, and when they saw this would disseminate it throughout the community and would allow them to take precautionary measures. Since defederating didnt improve their privacy in the other direction (A public post is still viewable by users of a server you defederate with outside of vanilla mastodon) it only served to put their lives at risk without protecting them in any way. Those users who wished to simply not see the content due to its vile nature could simply click a few buttons and block the domain at the account level, so no harm there either.
Anyway, as a result of this view there was a mass exodus at the time of LGBT users flooding in from other servers that were more oppressive of their own users freedom (defederation only limits their own local users and doesnt limit the users on the offending servers). Since QOTO was one of very very few servers that were welcoming to the LGBT community but federated with all servers this is where many of them wound up. It was a huge source of our early growth and why we are one of the larger servers around today.
> So you re-implement your additional features regularly in new Mastodon versions?
I'm not sure "re-implement" is the right word. We do pull in the upstream from mastodon vanilla when there are changes. Generally I have kept the code clean enough that even despite having significant code edits the merge process isnt too bad. Each new version does usually take me a day or sometimes more to integrate, but often its just a few hours of effort.
> In WordPress you have "hooks": Parts in the code where you can tell the program to call additional functions via a settings file.
Sadly mastodon has nothing like hooks and isnt even very configurable when it comes to core features (like toot size you have to physically edit the code). Gargron is a very opinionated developer and as such he wants to discourage people doing exactly what I did, he was mastodon servers to have some conformity to it and follow his opinionated idea of what is a good application. Therefore it very much is like maintaining a fork and is a proper development effort to maintain QOTO with all the code changes I have made.
See I would say you have the idea of "blocking" as a group correct, but have the application backwards.
The scenario you describe, of an instance blocking servers is basically "lets all share a block list, but also you are **required** to use my block list by simply being here", you arent blocking what the baddies, you are blocking your own users freedom on who they are allowed to see.
There is an inverse of this however that achieves exactly what you describe without the violation of your own users freedom. That is "An instance is a collection of users all held to the same local standard (the instances TOS). As such users can block baddies easily and enmasse by blocking a small handful of instances rather than large numbers of users". Since an instance has a specific set of moderation policies all an individual user has to do to block baddies is on their personal account is block a small handful of instances, the ones that allow baddies, and they have effectively blocked all the baddies with minimal effort. Same effect of keeping the baddies out with minimal effort, no need to violate users control or freedom to see owhat they want.
@freemo As climate scientist I also get my fair bit of hate on Twitter. Was a happy user of BlockTogether, where you could block people in groups. That made Twitter much friendlier for me and improved the signal to noise ratio.
Then the trolls do not get to harass everyone once before they are blocked. With thousands of trolls, that it is otherwise still a lot of harassment. So personally I appreciate instances blocking baddies as a service. #BBAAS