Fediverse

Not even just trolls, I have yet to come across a clearly-bad post that wasn't already downvoted to oblivion, or a clearly-good post that had a negative total. And the csam response? Straight up world-class defense system faster than any megacorp could've scrambled together.

Lemmy users are anything but passive when it comes to trash showing up in the feed.

Make it impossible for people to use it?

Wherever there are people, there will be nastiness. No matter the reason, some are jerks just because they can.

Keeping society enjoyable/safe/functional/etc is hard work by design. That's just the way humanity is. Sucks it has to be this way, but we're fundamentally flawed.

You patch one hole in your defenses against destabilization and another one will spring up eventually. It's always a work in progress.

I'll get to that in a followon post, but one straightforward way to make progress is to change some of the defaults

Nothing is ultimately safe, life is uncertainty. That doesn't mean one should not care about privacy, but it's apparently very difficult to tell people to use human sense and that pink mass between their ears. If I wanna use a wood planer, I should first learn at least the basics. They all want something "that just works". Newsflash, nothing "just works", paleolithic people knew that already.

I really don't know where this notion of the Internet is safe and you get privacy came from. I was taught 25 years ago that neither of those were true.

In my opinion, every router on the world should have instances running (and tunneled to not dox themselves) so people are not dependent on big instances.

That would be a security and moderation nightmare. Moderating an instance is a tough job, and not everybody wants to take on that job.

As I say in the article:

Despite these problems, many people on well-moderated instances have very positive experiences in today's fediverse. Especially for small-to-medium-size instances, for experienced moderators even Mastodon's tools can be good enough.

However, many instances aren't well-moderated. So many people have very negative experiences in today's fediverse.

If you're looking for more of a technical deep dive, check out Threat modeling Meta, the fediverse, and privacy

I’m not understanding why blocking is ineffective…?

As I understand it, because it requires harm to be experienced before the negating action is taken.

A parallel might be having malware infect a system before it can be identified and removed (harm experienced -> future harm negated), vs proactively preventing malware from infecting the system in the first place (no harm experienced before negation).

At some level you're not missing anything: there are obvious solutions, and they're largely ignored. Blocking is effective, and it's a key part of why some instances actually do provide good experiences; and an allow-list approach works well. But, those aren't the default; so new instances don't start out blocking anybody. And, most instances only block the worst-of-the-worst; there's a lot of stuff that comes from large open-registration instances like .social and .world that relatively few instances block or even limit.

This is the first time I’ve seen this one. Best result I saw from 30 seconds of googling:

In 2020, the National Runaway Safeline (NRS) began using LGBTQIA2S+ to recognize those who identify as “Two-Spirit.” This phrase refers to people who identify as having both a masculine and feminine spirit, and is used by some Indigenous and Native communities.

“Two-Spirit” describes the cultural-specific understanding for the diverse gender traditions of Indigenous and Native people. Historically, Two-Spirit people were among the most respected in their communities, often serving as community healers, ceremonial leaders or caregivers to the elderly or orphaned children. This is consistent across many cultures who experienced extreme oppression and intergenerational trauma through periods of colonization. Today, young people who identify as Two-Spirit may suffer from inequalities perpetuated by a legacy of discriminatory laws and policies.
Source: National Runaway Safeline

From the article:

I'm using LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender, two-sprit, and others (including non-binary people) who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative. Julia Serrano's trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, and discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like "gender and sexual minorities". OACAS Library Guides' Two-spirit identities page goes into more detail on this often-overlooked intersectional aspect of non-cis identity.

A terrible idea by the LGBT community to expand the definition, when they thought they already "won" the battle and wanted to expand their scope, completely ignoring how marginalized the trans community was at that point, and how much was still left to fight for LGB rights. People quickly objected and most threw away the dumb acronym.

If you read the article and follow the links you'll find plenty of evidence. The Whiteness of Mastodon, A breaking point for the queer community, and Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy are three places to start.

That's great! And a lot of trans people I've talked with on Mastodon say similar things, which is also great. But a lot don't. It depends a lot on the instance you wind up choosing. So the people who stay wind up as a self-selecting sample.

Thanks, glad you liked it. Agreed that blocklists (while currently necessary) have big problems, it would really be great if we had other good tools and they were much more of a last resort ... I'll talk more about that in a later installment.