This is what I love about the fediverse. On the Lemmy side we’ve seen it in action with lemmygrad. Private platforms need moderators to do that, which let’s be real, doesn’t generate enough profit to be worth their time…
Hmm, Twitter used to at least try before. Advertisers don’t like Eat Fresh! Running below a nazi tweet. There are at least some market forces keeping them at bay, which is why their social platforms keep failing.
Nothing Beats communities that are willing to oust bad elements, though
Advertisers didn’t like their ads running next to a nazi tweet until they saw how much money they could make off nazis after one of them was made potus.
Nope, they still don’t. Except pillow guy. Hence why the nazi networks keep falling and why x is failing.
Pillow guy declared bankruptcy recently.
Good. I hope he gets fucked up on the streets and ends up getting some empathy for the marginalized.
Don’t you love capitalism? And big fat lawsuits taking out bad actors?
Without it they wouldn’t be in power in the first place
Yup. Instead you get corrupt officials, and good luck dislodging them with a lawsuit like this.
It’s a reason Twitter is failing, but it’s not the reason. Even without the nazis they’d be struggling because their owner just keeps making bad financial and business decisions like not paying rent, trying to rebrand, and illegal firings
Eh. He doesn’t pay rent to cut costs, he fires to cut costs. All of this is because he wants to run twitter as a nazi platform that doesn’t have advertising backing. Advertising is the only reason a free service like Twitter can exist, and the nazis are the reason that the advertisers left.
It’s also because he overpaid for it. It’d be in bad but recoverable shape without this behavior and his desire to run it as a Nazi platform. But all of it is connected. He wouldn’t’ve made the hasty decisions to purchase if he didn’t want to run it as a Nazi platform and struggle with impulse control, but also had he found himself in the position of owning it with the massive loss in value from purchase price caused by his waiving of due diligence at the worst possible time he still could’ve hunkered down and treated it like a company he owns and wants to be profitable. From there he could cut costs at reasonable pace, listened to management as to how to minimize headcount, and done market research to maximize value to shareholders. But most notably he could’ve done reasonable cost cutting and made it a Nazi platform. It was gonna hemorrhage money either way. He just decided to be an idiot about it.
So what’s the problem with it? Elon. Not one single facet of him, though his impulse control is likely high up there, but all of him. At every point he’s making the decisions that ordinary people can see are financially unwise against all advice of experts and professionals. Decisions he should know better than to make.
He didn’t even want to buy it, he was trying to pump and dump, the court made him go through with the purchase.
He’s also the only shareholder now AFAIK, though that’s based on loans, so those lenders can do a takeover of sorts (maybe? I’ve only read some headlines claiming that)
platforms driven by user created content like the nazis, and other extreme right ideologues, because the audience for them consumes that content like religious zealots going to services, getting in their daily requirements of indoctrination. This inflates user engagement. However, the businesses advertising their services, and products, on those platforms do not like their company being associated with these people.
It’s nice when the primary goal of the owners and mods and aligns with the users.
Chasing profit is the worst mechanism in so many cases. One of those cases is when competition is by nature very limited. Social media kind of fails unless you have very few places to go. And you’re locked in if your friends are all on the same offering.
“Zombie Nazis: Eat Flesh!”
Lemmy world just removed their non-discrimination clause and one of the admins is (poorly) justifying it in a thread about it. I wouldn’t cheer quite yet.
This is only a problem because lemmy.world has become one of the centralized hubs for Lemmy, which means that jettisoning them has a larger impact. The failing of lemmy.world is a reminder that we should be intentionally spreading out to smaller instances, that way a bad admin/instance can be cut off without losing much value. Additionally, by lemmy.world/lemmy.ml/etc having such a grip on the core of Lemmy, they are emboldened to make bad changes without fearing consequences.
Totally. I would love to stand up an instance but it’s a little above my tech knowledge and, frankly, I don’t want to have to think about the legal aspects of what happens on it.
If I ever somehow did it, I would probably not allow photos/videos. Disable downvotes. Things like that.
The more users spread out into smaller, more easily censored instances, the more the remaining fragmented bits of the Lemmy ecosystem still talking to each other will turn into echo chambers full of groupthink. This low threshold for defederation is the Fediverse’s greatest weakness. Sure, it’s possible to work around it—but how many separate Lemmy accounts are users expected to create? Even if you have accounts on every instance of note you’d need to manually cross-post messages to each balkanized server and their comment sections wouldn’t be shared—exactly the sort of thing federation was meant to avoid.
Email, another federated system, has this same weakness. It’s why it’s increasingly difficult to run your own (outgoing) email server which other systems will accept messages from without going through a well-known third party like Google. Especially when trying to push content to a large audience (e.g. mailing lists), which happens to be Lemmy’s core function.
Bluesky is using content addressing to deal with this, although currently it is only built around feeds and not forums. Your profile is truly portable and posts can optionally be retrieved from “mirrors” (one of the CDN-like servers called BGS) so you don’t need to rely on your current hosting server (the account hosts called PDS) to federate with everybody.
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I’m not the All-Keeper of Receipts on this matter and I don’t have a Lemmy.World account, this is just what I’ve gleaned from various posts coming across my timeline. My comment you’re replying to was also meant more to emphasize the strength of decentralization against this kind of behavior, both reactive and proactive, instead of being a shot at Lemmy.World directly.
That said, from my understanding, there’s a few things they’ve done recently that users are questioning. They’ve changed their TOS/Code of Conduct, dropping some explicit protections for the usual protected classes i.e. gender identity/ethnicity/disability/etc and generally making the rules more unclear than before. The thread here is a brief look into that, and I especially appreciate the post by fiat_lux within it. Note the admin Xilly has responded within and said they would look into adding these things back, but obviously the conspicuous removal of them caused a lot of eyebrow-raising. A couple extra threads about this are here and here
A user was also recently banned for questioning the TOS, which they report here, and provide an archive.org link to their comments here, since the L.W team wiped their account out when banning them. Their comment seems like a very fair criticism, which the L.W admins supposedly invoked users to provide. This clearly seems like a power-tripping admin taking personal offense and deliberately permabanning and wiping out their account in direct response to the user’s concerns of this exact thing happening, giving the impression of immaturity and laissez-faire enforcement of the rules. Additionally, wiping out a user’s content while banning them is a good way to cover your tracks on the actual ban reason. It’s a good thing archive.org was available to catch this one.
Speaking of archive.org, L.W has also recently started banning archive.org links and any posts that question that decision, which is discussed here.
I’m really not invested into this saga so if someone else has more receipts or insight on these situations feel free to add on.
Banning the Internet Archive??? What on earth is happening over there???
Agreed. In order to keep a upvote/downvote based platform from becoming toxic, a lot of good moderation is required. Lemmy.world is definitely not doing that.
Bluesky has federation running in a sandbox network and is built to support 3rd party moderation tools both server side, client side, and in the custom feeds. Currently all users are on the main server which isn’t yet federating, though.
BTW one neat thing about those 3rd party mod tools is that you won’t need to wait for the server owner to act
PREPARE FOR DEFEDERATION
EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!!
So if I build my instance upstairs I’m good?
😱
Depends on the instance. Some have the BlueSky response. Some have the Xitter response.
Don’t believe me, ask a black Mastodon user.
Yes, but those instances are normally the ones that get blocked by half of the web.
No I mean instances like mastodon.world who do ok moderating their own users, but are very poor at moderating the instances that federate with them. So any minority users who joins mastodon.world can still be (and is, I’ve seen it) subject to the worst bigotry on the fediverse.
I’m just so tired of watching green mods make the same mistakes. “It’s not my job to weigh in on debates or tell people what to think.” No, but it’s your job to reduce disruption in a community. If someone comes in going “being gay is a choice if you ask me,” they have about 30 seconds to clarify their position or they’re gone from my discord server and generally that won’t do it. We have a lot of LGBT folks who have NO desire to deal with those people in a the little corner of friends we’ve created. That person is not entitled to their time and attention. It is our job to look out for the best interests of all our users, yet we categorically see mods get bogged down by a handful of incredibly disruptive attention seekers/combative personalities that make it shitty for everyone else. It’s so predictable at this point.
We banned someone a few months ago from our discord who had some of the best insights about gaming I’ve ever seen. The dude was remarkable. But my god he was such a jerk! He kept being such an ass to people who disagreed with him. “That’s just a brain dead take.” “People who like that have no taste so frankly I don’t care what you or they think.” Just constant antagonism that halted all conversation and made people feel like crap. So we booted him! We asked him to stop, he didn’t, and his disruptions just became unwelcome. We didn’t play rules lawyer with him or debate things. We said stop, he didn’t, that was the end of it, and while I miss his insights the community is noticeably better without him.
Most mods aren’t clueless. They know bigotry is occurring in their communities. Yet they too often just won’t be proactive about it because the behavior doesn’t overtly violate the rules. Don’t let bad actors weaponize your own rules against you!
Another thing is that some people are loud specifically to drown out other’s voices.
That’s why true free speech can not be a free-for-all, you must put a dampener on those people and it doesn’t matter how closely they technically follow the rules if they do not follow the spirit and cause the quality and mood to degrade with their presence.
Absolutely!
I’ve always thought that people should be able to hotly debate ideas all they want, but as soon as they leave the ideas out and begin disparaging people, good-bye.
Sure but some communities simply don’t want to be debating all the time and some people refuse to accept that lol like my LGBT friends constantly talk about how exhausting it is. Sometimes they just want to talk about a tv show.
They basically are tired of constantly justifying their existence, even if the questions are genuine/good faith.
Absolutely. Not everyplace is an appropriate forum for every topic under the sun.
Yeah that’s kind of what I’m driving at. Some folks truly believe all debate must be allowed everywhere “as long as it’s nice.”
That’s great but the talk in this thread isn’t about some communities, the demand is that mastodon.world should defederate more.
I find these opinions kind of antithetical to the whole fediverse idea, if you want a small gated community do your thing, but why should the biggest fediverse instance merrily defederate everything left and rightdeleted by creator
Some people are very good at saying the most despicable things in the nicest tone. It’s difficult
That’s one of the current weaknesses of the fediverse right now. Devs are working on more comprehensive moderation tools, but it’s all under development.
I think so many admins - many of which are the folks who would/could be helping improve the tools - are focused on keeping the car from breaking down that we won’t see any meaningful development of mod tools for quite some time unfortunately. Outside of mastodon, the fediverse just isn’t ready for prime time yet. Won’t stop me from using it though!
I’ve recently been added to the mastodon.world mod team. The amount of spam that gets posted makes it much harder than Lemmy to weed out the bigots. But it’s improving. And like on Lemmy.World we request Mastodon.World users to keep reporting…
Hey, sorry missed this reply. That’s good, the key issue is the bigot instances that boost a post to their own instance and then there’s a pile on, on that instance. I don’t know if that’s visible to mods, but it’s certainly visible to the user who is being abused. StillIRise1963@mastodon.world cops A LOT of abuse.
This is why, in the case of Mastodon, it’s best to join a smaller instance so it can be more easily moderated.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen blue sky at least hire one Trust & Safety professional to coordinate baseline standards for content.
I’m not. Jack Dorsey is a piece of shit.
They do have a mod team, but they haven’t said much publicly around the hiring of dedicated T&S staff other than that they have positions open
Really? I have never seen a position on their website. TIL
The team has talked about it when people has asked
There’s a fuck ton of cryptofash on mastodon, and you’ll get absolutely flooded with them if you say the wrong thing. Moderation is quick to snuff out those who overtly act hateful but is completely useless to those who mask their bigotry behind liberal politics.
Is there a way to see which instances a Mastodon instance has defederated with? For lemmy instances, for example, you can go to
/instancesto see a list of other connected and blocked instances.you can go to /instances to see a list of other connected and blocked instances.
I just did, and noticed a bunch of supposedly-federated mastodon instances, but in reality I’ve never seen them in my ‘all’ stream.
Are they not supposed to show up there?
Lemmy uses a feature called “groups” to denote the community a post is in. Mastodon doesn’t support groups yet. Once it does, I would think those posts may federate with Lemmy.
My understanding is that the ‘all’ feed only shows posts that come from accounts followed by people on your instance. You can follow anyone from any federated instance; and when you do, their posts will appear in your personal feed, and also in the ‘all’ feed for everyone on your instance. People are aren’t followed by anyone on your instance won’t show up in the ‘all’ section.
I’ve believe I’ve seen something like that stated before, but we’re talking *zero* mastodon content showing up in ALL. Which happens to be the same instance as yours, btw, with Lemm.ee being the third largest instance in the Lemmysphere. You’d expect at least a little mastodon content showing up, but there’s just nothing.
So far the two resources just don’t seem to be mixing, so perhaps what the other person was saying is correct. Right now in order to search mastodon, I’m using this tool.
Thank you for sharing Fediverse Explorer, super useful!
That list shows all instances that your instance is kinda sorta maybe aware of.
For example, if I searched the profile link for someone or some group from a Masto instance and didn’t do anything with it, that instance would still get on that list because it asked the Lemmy instance about info on that profile/community.
Oof, pardon this tragically late reply.
So… TBH I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
From my POV, I’m envisioning a way where Mastodon content could populate the ALL feed of Fediverse users, for example us lemmings. Do you reckon that’s possible?
Note: I already know how to search mastodon content btw, via tools like this
On desktop there should be a small “about” link in the bottom left, from which there is a “moderated servers” dropdown menu where you can see defederated servers. I don’t see anywhere to view the servers you ARE federated with, but if it’s listed at
Mastodon’s official website(whoops, I actually meant this)it’s probably in.I don’t see anything on the official Masto app, but that app is just missing a ton of functionality in general.
the servers you ARE federated with
iirc, that’s all down to what accounts your server’s users follow. If any users on server A follow users on server B, and neither A nor B block the other, then A is federated with B.
But how would a user on A find anyone on B before federation? I know Lemmy can initiate federation through the search function just in case you’re the first to look for something on another instance, but I don’t see how that would work on Masto.
It’s done through a similar mechanism, you can paste the URL of a user on a different Mastodon search which triggers the same style of search as it does on Lemmy. Mastodon has relays (an admin needs to add/subscribe to one, and the relay has to confirm/accept) however which can also help “kickstart” Federation so to speak as well - which is like blasting a firehose at an instance.
In addition, I believe that there might be a “viral” component to federation; if users on server A follow users on server B, and users on server B follow users on server C, then server C’s popular posts can show up on server A’s explore page. Is that correct?
If someone on server B were to boost that posts from server C, then yes they’d show up on server A as far as I know - but only if they’re boosted. The federation aspect works a lot like Lemmy’s, so while my instance my federates with lemmy.world (and vice versa), my instance doesn’t know about the communities on LW unless someone on my instance subscribes to that community in particular (and vice-versa for a community on my instance not showing up on LW until someone over there subscribes). At least, that’s how I understand it - to be honest I still don’t have my head completely wrapped around Mastodon’s federation aspect but since both Mastodon and Lemmy use ActivityPub I’d reckon that they’re very similar.
That’s exactly the same as lemmy.
FYI the official website is https://joinmastodon.org/servers, not whatever you linked to
Only one I found so far was https://fba.ryona.agency/
The caveat is that it was made by kiwifarms
I’ve used it to quickly check defederated instances but, yeah, kiwifarms is a problem.
Also, look at the GitGud repo
They literally licensed it under an AGPLV3+[n-word] license
There’s defed.xyz as an alternative, but it only tracks defederations between lemmy instances for now.
cool! I’ll check that one out
@charlie_root @0x2d @sure We know irish man, we know.
@charlie_root @0x2d @sure Thank you good sir
@mint@ryona.agency have you read this thread on the remote instance? pure cancer induced by soy milk
@mint@ryona.agency @0x2d@lemmy.ml a conviction in the international criminal court
It is pretty fucking cool tbh
Hexbear: click bang
Hell yeah
soundHey there’s a Naz- BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
also if you look at the main thread not on hexbear, you can see them complaining about lemmygrad being nazis ☠ im glad we have filtered idiots out of this instance
To those that know me, I’m a notorious emotional masochist (i.e. I spend a lot of time on dogshit), but even I wouldn’t go out of my way to see what defederated instances say about us under a throwaway post.
i love torturing myself
??? Hexbear is defederated left and right because you guys won’t stop the Nazis.
Can you show any evidence of hexbear harboring or not doing enough to stop Nazis? Where did you get this information?
We can’t see you from the hexbear side by the way.
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Is mastodon good? I use lemmy but as I never used twitter I also never use mastodon so idk if im losing something. I never understood the appeal of twitter.
Just commenting to say I feel the exact same way. I am curious if mastodon is something worth getting into?
I think reddit/lemmy are good if you enjoy following communities. Twitter/mastodon are good if you prefer following specific people.
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It looks like Twitter, feels like Tumblr. Since its not very big, people will post the most raw, vulnerable moments in their life, both good and bad. My feed ping pongs between people learning to use Godot to make their first game ever and proudly sharing their work, to a anarchist TTRPG dev struggling with medical bills in the USian Healthcare hellscape. I love it. I am not looking forward to whenever it blows up in popularity.
i feel like it may never. i think lemmy has the highest probability of getting ‘big’ due to its community centered aspect.
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I would describe it as “what if Tumblr decided to have the layout of Twitter?” The interface looks and feels like Twitter, but since there’s no algorithm people will post the most raw shit. My feed is one part guinea pig videos, one part OSR Dnd memes, one part people learning to code and sharing their early janky work with pride, and one part entirely from one queer anarchist TTRPG dev struggling with medical bills and the fucked USian Healthcare system.
The most trouble you’ll have is deciding which instance to settle down in. Self-hosting is really not reasonable for Mastodon, since the local feed is pretty important.
Masto doesn’t have outright nazis they just have neoliberal fascists, and let me tell you, it has a LOT of them.
How do I know if an instance is “clean” before I join it?
One indication is that it isn’t blocked by many other instances. You can see that (and other info) on this page: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
Oh I didn’t even notice my instance had made it onto the “All” section there, that’s pretty cool!
According to the list, it must be awesome!
I’d say why not ask here?
I am still in the beginning of using Mastodon. How does it detect Nazi like speech and what does it consider Nazi like speech?
Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.
At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.
Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.
Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.
So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.
Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.
Thank you. This was very informational.
It’s pretty easy. Nazis have a hard time sticking to real facts, and in the test of time, can’t resist reposting blatantly false information in progressively more and more JPGified memes.
I appreciate the effort but I was leaning towards technologies and methods.
Step 1. Find a Nazi
Step 2. Report the Nazi
Step 3. If Nazi content is not remove, make a fediverse announcement and coordinate defederization
Mastodon is a very feels good sanitized version of what is going on in the world right now.
I find Mastodon to be just as toxic as Twitter before X.
It basically depends who you follow. If you are following toxic people, that is your own fault with mastodon. On Twitter, the algorithm pushes it to you no matter what.
I have only followed a few people and they are from the suggested list. I picked Rochki, it’s FOSS, ars technica, and nixCraft. I just went to the search tab in Mastodon and the first two messages are about blocking people and nazis. Not sure how that’s my fault.
Ah, I mean it’s about punching Nazis. Some would argue that is wholesome 😅
Make the app for Mastodon similar to Jerboa.
I recommend Tusky for Android
I use Husky
I have a husky
FWGS(original developer of fork)
Unfortunately, none of the Mastodon applications have a separate button for private messages. Formally, the “Direct messages” button is available in several applications. However, this is a standard input field for all messages where you need to mark with a special icon that you want to send a personal message that only the recipient can view. This is inconvenient and during intensive correspondence you may forget to mark “Only for the addressee” when sending the next message.
I want a simpler and clearer interface like in the Jerboa or Infinity for Reddit applications. However, no one is engaged in such development. All Mastodon applications are similar to one another to one degree or another.
I dont particularly care for the format. I never liked using Twitter(xitter).
I feel weird talking into a void. But I try to use the federated clones of Twitter because I want them to do well.
Wish this was true
Means are not at “your discretion”. That’s not how the phrase works.
For all intensive purposes it’s the same difference as “at you’re disposal”. Kinda a mute point, per say.
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It’s a moo point.
sigh … “intents and”
I thought they did it wrong on porpoise.
THAT is the mistake you noticed??
Whoosh
