Post by @serge@babka.social

I've come to the sad conclusion that the amount of hate speech and moderation failures on Mastodon and the Fediverse at large is not an accident but a choice.

This is based having been on the Fediverse since 2018, having run two instances, a single-user and a multi-user instance, having gone to a Fediverse conference, given talks with technical proposals on mitigation techniques, and having worked with the primary author of the ActivityPub protocol specification.

These issues have been known about for more than a decade and yet the major platforms don't take them seriously. At some point, when a bug exists for a very long time and has multiple suggestions for addressing, failure to do so is a deliberate choice.

#Fediverse #Mastodon

#mastodon #fediverse

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ראַף :jewish_anarchism:

@raf@babka.social 2 hr. ago

@serge

A system is what it does. Something many are happy to say about racist institutions in society, but rarely about the spaces they themselves set up here.

HubertManne

@HubertManne@piefed.social 5 hr. ago

I agree but I look at it as a good thing. I often champion that the software be made to give user control as much as possible. The user can banish hate by blocking and its quite effective. Pretty soon after I started I recognized a similarity to an mmo chat. You just need to remove the worst elements and suddenly its a very nice experience. I don’t view moderation as something I want at all. What I want is tools that allow me to curate my experience without taking to much effort. I think trust cafe has the right basic idea. Be able to rank everything 0-100 where 0 is blocked and 100 is subscribed and everything defaults to a score of 50 till ranked. instances, communities, users, posts, replies, everything can be ranked. Have an algorithm that only takes my personal user experiences to curate my feed on what is important and not with some agenda to increase my interaction on the platform. Give me control to say how far to take it. I can tell it to not use the algorithm or just with my preferences or allow ranks from other users I rank highly to influence the feed. I actually feel nostr too has a good idea for how login and user configs are kept but it right now just seems to be based on a mastadon like thing and I prefer the forum like setup.

Serge from Babka

@serge@babka.social 3 hr. ago

@HubertManne

If you see coordinated disinformation and harassment campaigns to be a good thing, then I can only conclude that your moral compass is deeply broken.

HubertManne

@HubertManne@piefed.social 33 min. ago

if that is your take away I don’t think you really got what I had to say.

Serge from Babka

@serge@babka.social 6 min. ago

@HubertManne

You're saying "User control is what's important.", which has several huge flaws.

The first is that it places the onus on the victim. We see this all the time on Babka. An attacker attacks people on our server either directly by creating a bunch of harassing accounts, or through disinformation campaigns spread across the network.

Such coordinated attacks aren't addressable with the "block button".

The second is that it furthers the victimization by forcing persecuted minorities into the digital ghetto. I've seen this as well. We complain to another server about the abusive behavior of one of their users and the admin's response is "If you don't want to be harassed, de-federate."

Imagine if you called the police about being beaten up on the street and the police said "If you don't like it, don't leave your house."

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Caleb :jewish_pride_flag: כלב

@kolev@babka.social 5 hr. ago

@serge Does this mean we all have to go back to centralized systems?

Serge from Babka

@serge@babka.social 5 hr. ago

@kolev

It's a bit of a false dichotomy to say "Centralized" or "Decentralized".

The Fediverse is ultimately neither fully centralized nor decentralized. Most systems aren't.

There are real, significant things that could be done to improve the hate speech situation on the Fediverse, but they are generally not done. The question is "Why?". The answer is complex and multi-faceted. But in the case of the Fediverse, it's not even a question of having tried and failed, it's never having tried at all.