Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

@ancient_catbus wait, nazis use anime over there? Ugh! They should stop… existing.

@BrunoMcGee @kingsley The city in which I live requires at least a Bachelor's degree for all police they hire, and whether that helps or not isn't clear. There aren't many issues here, but that could have as much to do with socioeconomics as the education requirement. And still this suburb is not completely without issues, according to people who look more like Kingsley than I do.

I guess I think it might *help*, but the phrase "necessary but insufficient" comes to mind.

@davew

So on my server my previous post has some italics for emphasis because I used asterisks.

https://qoto.org/@pwinn/109773576636725769

But on your server, it doesn't. And couldn't, even if your server wanted to support markdown. Because the asterisks were removed while federating.

https://mastodon.social/@pwinn@qoto.org/109773586566937136

@davew

Yeah, I can understand servers stripping out HTML for sure. I guess the thing that annoys me is that if I use asterisks to *emphasize* a thing, I don't think those asterisks should be removed. The entire point of markdown is that if you don't render the markdown, it's still legible. So maybe I post on a server that renders markdown, and people here see the emphasis as I intend it. And maybe some servers render markdown and see it as I see it, while others don't and just see bare asterisks. But mastodon *strips out* the asterisks themselves! So there's nothing left even for other servers that want to render markdown!

That's what annoys me.

@oliphant The irony is that I think he maintains a somewhat strict *personal* domain blocklist, and encourages others to download and use it as well! 😆

Anyway, the vibe in my "Local" page here is pretty great. I'm surrounded by nerdery and educators and generally-liberal politics and more nerdery. Having browsed a number of other Local pages, I'm not sure any other site fits me more, and now that I've got ~650 posts that won't follow me if I go somewhere else, I just hope my admin can stop, um, talking. 😂

@davew

I 100% agree! There should be no limit, or 64K like my server does.

Unfortunately, Mastodon's core code is ultimately controlled by one person whose opinions on things are possibly as strong as yours, and he seems convinced this "compromise" solution is great. I don't understand it, but it annoys me less than his choice to STRIP OUT existing markdown formatting. 🤷‍♂️

@oliphant Agreed, Jeff draws a hard line between moderation (which seems to be very strong), and defederation (which he is unwilling to do even in extreme cases), and it's... difficult. Sometimes I see threads and think, man, literally using three different words could have caused that whole thing to go much better, dude!

He flatly disagrees that federation gives bad actors a safe harbor, since he's quick to moderate them off qoto itself. I... don't know how I feel about that. I kinda get the appeal of "keep my own house spotless and ignore the neighborhood," but enough people (like you) seem to be sure it creates issues. I just don't know what those issues are.

@bryantd When people spend all of their time and effort building up a mythos that cops are unappreciated besieged soldiers fighting impossible odds, an elite force of military strength, we cannot be surprised when they act as if they're unappreciated besieged soldiers fighting impossible odds, an elite force of military strength.

Rather than, you know, undertrained bullies given the weapons of trained soldiers and a mandate to protect each other.

@oliphant I very much appreciate your efforts to maintain domain blocklists. There are a surprising (to me) number of servers that seem to have as their primary purpose to hurt others, and having a shared resource to block them all rather than having to encounter them one at a time is amazing. Thank you!

The only thing that makes me nervous at all is that I'm on a large server that seems to be mis-identified as a bad actor every now and then, and most people committed to defederation as a first resort are very much in the "defederate first and never ask or answer questions later" camp. I've developed a knee-jerk response to people praising defederation because of that, which, to be fair, is almost certainly the same impulse motivating those who use defederation itself as a tool to hurt others.

So my nightmare scenario is that someone with write access to a widely-used shared blocklist decides they don't like the admin of my instance personally, or whatever, and boom, we're all cut off, 25K users blocked from basically the entire Mastodon chunk of the fediverse, with no recourse for appeal.

There's a tension there, where "known bad actors" seems really obvious in most cases, but apparently some people "know" things that just aren't true.

@Jdreben @Tattooed_mummy @davew The problem with that theory is that world exists today, and apps don't cut them off. There isn't a character limit in the ActivityPub protocol, nor in Mastodon's federation code. Long posts end up with a "Read more" button in the main feed to expand the post, and that's it. It doesn't break things, it's not a problem. If you don't want to read more, then you don't click the toggle.

@Tattooed_mummy @davew

@davew Of the five limits you listed, one does not seem to actually be a limit, while the rest are firmly in the "even worse than it appears" category.

Masto can handle posts with more than 500 characters. That limit appears to only be imposed at the UI. I've written posts on my server that are well more than 500 characters, and they end up on other servers intact. Well, they've had all markdown styles removed (grrr), but the length is there. Most servers seem to put a "Read more" button in the UI, but it's all there. For example, here's a post I wrote on QOTO (which allows 64K-char posts) but visible on IndieWeb.social: https://indieweb.social/@pwinn@qoto.org/109757076022561495

So even the least-common denominator can apparently *receive* and *display* large posts, but won't let you compose them. Even some mobile clients won't let you compose them, which is really dumb.

What's really terrible is that Masto actually *removes* Markdown formatting while syndicating/federating posts. It doesn't just leave it alone or refuse to render it, it actively strips it out. Incredibly frustrating!

@imklg @stux I hope that, with the judicious application of moderation, this remains the sort of place we all want it to be. I’ve seen already things that make me concerned, and the reports from BlackMastodon aren’t consistently encouraging, but time will tell.

I guess I’ll believe it’s working when the “traditional” targets of hate say it’s working. I want to believe!