🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

I posted this as a main post here, going to repeat it here because it is relevant:

https://qoto.org/@freemo/102720620029876902

I had an idea and a proposal for an anti-censorship cooperative among the free speech instances. It is just an idea, not sure if i support it yet. but would be curious to hear any feedback.. the idea goes something like this.

Any instance can get into the cooperative so long as they pledge to a few rules

1) personal suspensions and silencing is permitted.

2) Ban circumvention will not be allowed and enforced. If a person from one instance blocks someone and makes it clear they do not wish to be contacted, and a user creates another account to circumvent this personal block then that user will be banned.

3) no instance is allowed to suspend any other instance within the cooperative.

4) any server that suspends/blocks any instance inside the cooperative must be blocked/suspended by all other members of the cooperative in response.

5) any instance not following these rules will be kicked out of the cooperative.

The purpose here would be to ensure that any instance which has a policy of frivolously blocking other instances without due process or cause will be punished by loosing their voice throughout the larger federated community.

#fediverse #mastodon #mastoadmin

I had an idea and a proposal for an anti-censorship cooperative among the free speech instances. It is just an idea, not sure if i support it yet. but would be curious to hear any feedback.. the idea goes something like this.

Any instance can get into the cooperative so long as they pledge to a few rules

1) personal suspensions and silencing is permitted.

2) Ban circumvention will not be allowed and enforced. If a person from one instance blocks someone and makes it clear they do not wish to be contacted, and a user creates another account to circumvent this personal block then that user will be banned.

3) no instance is allowed to suspend any other instance within the cooperative.

4) any server that suspends/blocks any instance inside the cooperative must be blocked/suspended by all other members of the cooperative in response.

5) any instance not following these rules will be kicked out of the cooperative.

The purpose here would be to ensure that any instance which has a policy of frivilously blocking other instances without due process or cause will be punished by loosing their voice throughout the larger federated community.

#fediverse #mastodon #mastoadmin

Shortly after posting this I had this pop up in my feed on an unrelated thread. Fitting!

@Gargron Hi, a donator to #QOTO who just has donated several thousand euros to our fund asked me if you take donation requests for specific features. If so he, and myself, might be interested in donating some of the QOTO's donated funds over to you for feature requests.

This is aside from personal donations which i am happy to make unconditionally for all the hard work you do.

How the Liberal Left created the Conservative Right and extremism in the fediverse:

As someone who cares greatly about equality, and recognizes minorities and underprivileged groups deal with some unique and difficult struggles I realize the title to this post would seem a bit inflammatory. But that is not my intention, my intention is to address a very real problem.

As anyone on the fediverse knows there are generally two major groups of instances. Those that wont ban anything of any kind, no rules it's the wild west (red instances). Then there are those that ban anyone who shares any opinion that disagrees with their politics, even if you criticise both the left and the right in the same breath you will likely quickly find the instance or yourself banned.

However the unfortunate consequence of this pattern of behavior is to promote ever increasing support for red instances and to drive grey instances (instances that take a middle ground) into being red instances. Should be obvious why...

You basically have a spectrum of behavior with red on one side and blue on the other. With everyone crammed into the 0.1% of either end of this spectrum that means most new instances will start off, most likely, somewhere in the grey area, even if their just marginally shy of being red or blue in its full extreme.

The experience for an admin of such an instance is to quickly be overwhelmed with people from blue instances blocking and banning for things like criticising a democratic politician or something rather minor. By the end of the first few months a blue/left leaning instance will quickly find itself on dozens of suspend or ban instances as a result and find they only have a voice among the 99% red instances and the 1% grey instances out there.

Since this means they naturally wont have a voice among blue instances, and most people are on social media because they want to be social, this means their only incentive is to appeal to red instances (since that's where all their boosts and likes come from). Along with building animosity for how blue instances treat them and with the acceptance of red instances you will find all the incentive for the instances to move to be an extremist red instance with extremist no-rule policies quickly develop.

As such we see exactly what we are seeing now on the fediverse, an ever increasing number of red instances very quickly overwhelming and overtaking the blue instances.

Of course this is made worse by the fact that those ont he blue instances can only see other blue instances. so they will be under the mistaken impression that the red instances don't exist and that the blue instances are thriving and growing and dominating over the red instances. This ignorance just ensures the red instances grow unchecked and unchallenged.

As someone who's personal policy is anti-extremism, and with this pattern being one that generates extremism it is very VERY concerning to me.

#mastodon #fediverse #uspol #extremism #mastoadmin

If you listen to your instincts, and they are usually right, that is nothing to be proud of. It just means you probably have such crippling confirmation bias you dont see it when you are wrong.

Made a simple all-in-one docker container for running a test instance of Mastodon during development. Basically if you have a directory with the mastodon/QOTO source code in it you can issue a single command to run the container. It will then compile the source, setup redis and a database in memory (fresh every start), and bring up a local instance.

I designed it so as to make my life easier when modifying the qoto source code. It achieves the same thing as the Vagrant file Mastodon provides except that it is a container instead of a VM so uses fewer resources. It also fixed a few bugs that were in the Vagrant container.

https://git.qoto.org/qoto/qoto-test-docker

@Gargron feel free to steal this if it is useful for you.

#mastodon #fediverse

@peterfinkle Hey, welcome to #QOTO, nice to have you here. Send me a message any time if I can be of any help or even if you just want to chat.

Woot, the #QOTO user bot is working! Can't wait to see the graph grow over time.

https://qoto.org/@users/102713673982240065

Is it just me or is the fediverse a lot less active today than it was during the week? Is everyone out partying except me?