If you're for speech that clearly makes some people feel unsafe/uncomfortable coming out of the #CampusProtests, like "from the river to the sea..." or "fuck zionists" etc, please don't say we should defederate from servers here cause they host people that also antagonize but in other directions. Intentional harassment should not be acceptable in either situation, but many here want to go beyond that to shield folks from stumbling on views they don't like or facts they dispute. #fediblockmeta
are any mods on other Instances seeing a small wave of spam-like behaviour in the past few hours, coming from multiple Instances? Sugary stock photos and inspirational posts being posted with pro-Israel political hashtags. #FediBlockMeta
So many #replyguys in this thread lol. OP is not even explicitly saying here that he supports #Threads, he's just pointing out how the #UX of #Mastodon (and frankly the rest of the #fediverse as well) sucks when it comes to communicating clearly to users about instances suspensions. :reimu_sigh:
After Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza, the US says it has not found any incidents of Israel violating international humanitarian law in the past six months. An Al Jazeera probe concluded the World Central Kitchen vehicles were deliberately hit.
an offensive instance, even if it has been posted about (a lot) before (just maybe check if the last 5 posts under the hashtag are not already about that instance)
an instance (currently) spamming (maybe indicate, that a limit is better, than a suspend in this case)
a general useful tip about fighting spam or trolls or whatever (think about whether it doesn’t fit better under #FediBlockMeta)
recommendations to unblock an instance that is e.g. no longer spamming
Fediblock isn’t so you can sic the authorities on people who say stuff you don’t like, cop.
If we grow, there will always be a ton of people able to make a decent argument that something is racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. it will be endless battles between mods over what justifies action or else face defederation. and also tons of individuals having no idea they are silenced by entire servers. I get strict rules internally but servers blocking/silencing servers or individuals must require a higher bar and be done more transparently. #fediblockmeta
@wjmaggos@Gargron If the two links I provided in the original post do not meet your bar for defederation then there’s something wrong with your bar. It also tells me your instance is not a safe space for vulnerable groups. And if your instance happens to be the flagship one and you’re fine with this, it tells me you’re legitimising this behaviour on the greater network.
i can tell you, i personally know Ashten. she is a very kind and caring person who does everything she can to fight bigotry and you try to get different fedi instance admins to work together to try to provide a safer and more fun fediverse for everyone. i know this as im one of the many people who help her with these goals
i don't talk about this much, but im half cuban and a trans woman. i work with many people from many different backgrounds under Ashten's leadership. this includes BIPOC such as people from Japan and even Bangladesh. every one of us have been whitewashed at some point by some bigot who has decided they don't like queer people. especially queer people who stand up for themselves and each other. in that, not all of us are queer, just the fediverse is heavily queer, so this tends to be more common
the point is we exist all across the fediverse and work hard to make the place safer for everyone. it sucks that a small group of people try their hardest to make the place hostile for us and to try to isolate us and drive us into hiding. thankfully we have a lot of support from a lot of different people and we will continue to do everything we can to make this place as safe as possible from bigotry and harassment
if you want to help us protect the fediverse, let us know. we run the Sincerity Alliance and invite people after we have vetted them to be willing and decent people with a genuine interest in protecting the fediverse
Big convo going down among people who prioritize a safer fedi. I don't agree but I'm glad people are talking about it. Sadly, choices will have to be made. I hope that a future larger conversation will be had that also includes people who prioritize other stuff. And if this can be done with decentralized social media, why not also have a separate safer web? Would the internet be what it is today if the kinda choices they want made today, were made back then? #fediverse#socialweb#fediblockmeta
#FediBlockMeta
A humble request: If possible, when using the FediBlock hashtag, please include context/receipts. That will make it easier to judge whether the FediBlock suggestion has merit. Thank you 😊
Support for war is a worse thing to post on social media than racist, sexist or transphobic language. And we have to allow it if we want this place to serve as an honest public square. What we don't have to allow, and shouldn't, is advocacy of violence or shitty language etc in such a way that serves to harass people. That works against the goal of having a public square, by pressuring people not to participate (especially marginalized groups). #fediblockmeta
The #fediverse has a serious problem if accounts like @LALegault and @RustyBertrand can get shadow banned from huge servers. They never harass afaik but do post controversial opinions. I don't get why this would ever require server level action to deal with. Or why they shouldn't be notified or listened to when they discover and dispute it. Important voices will never survive pressure campaigns here if we don't establish new norms.
If someone compares Jews to Nazis, the group that killed half the Jews in the world, that is Nazi Inversion, and it's antisemitic. Invoking the Nazis or the Holocaust as so called "rhetorical speech" to talk about the actions of Jews is antisemitic.
It's very clear, it's very simple, and it's not stopping anyone from criticizing anything, because the same argument could be made without Nazi Inversion, and if it couldn't be, then it's not criticism at all, but simply words used to attack, intimidate or in some other way harm Jews.
I'm happy to see that other instances are starting to take Nazi Inversion seriously and act on it when their users engage in hate speech. I strongly encourage all instances who want to stop antisemitism to do the same.
The appropriate response to concerns about #disinfo is more critical thinking education, better funding of quality journalism without paywalls and decentralization such that ads and algorithms outside of user control are unworkable. Top down solutions will only lead to a worse informed public due to bias and unavoidable human error by those who try to run those systems in good faith, or eventual capture by those seeking power and profit. #disinformation#censorship#moderation#fediblockmeta
Excessive/confusing moderation policy threatens the growth of the #fediverse. In turn, this threatens the potential for the network to let the public decide what gets attention and how culture evolves, eliminating the stranglehold of big tech, corporate media and the influence of money via advertising. I'm starting to fear this might be intentional.
Server relationships need to be transparent and limitations based on harm to the network, not claims of misinfo or bad opinions. #fediblockmeta
These servers have been silenced as they are still sending spam despite there being a new version to at least allow some protections against this and moderators should have cleaned servers by now.
I will revisit all my silenced servers including below end of the month. Any servers still sending spam will be considered unmoderated/unmaintained and will be permanently blocked. Any new servers spamming March 1st and beyond will suffer the same fate.
The project known as "The Bad Space", connected with the Nivenly Foundation, is still trying to get other servers to block our server. kolektiva.social is listed as having a 60% "heat rating" indicating that 60% of their sites have silenced or suspended it, and is listed as having "Moderation issues, Poor moderation, abusive/harrassment behaviour". The sites that create The Bad Space list are:
So earlier today I posted that I wake up to more spam I had to deal with. I use the FediBlock tag, which probably helps shouldn’t have but oh well. Anyway, I get replies from people blasting me for spamming the hashtag. Now I’ve had a busy day so I couldn’t get to the replies and reply back so it gets better. They report me to my instance, to which I’m a co-admin of, to which I’ll get the report.
So did they do their research and see who I am and actually just try to (1/3)
The lack of urgency on the spam attacks from @Gargron is really shocking. We’ve been asking for better moderation tooling and ways to plugin spam filters and more for years. Now there’s actual issues most of us are experiencing on smaller servers and they STILL don’t seem to prioritize it at @MastodonEngineering#Fediblockmeta#MastodonAdmin
I am strongly considering moving away from Mastodon in the medium to long term future because of Eugen's absolutely abysmal handling of the spam situation and lack of prioritization of proper mod tooling.
This instance handles, on average, 6.5 reports of antisemitism a day.
Why is that significant? It's significant because Babka already suspends individual accounts, and Limits entire instances.
Despite this, we deal with ~6.5 new antisemitic accounts per day.
And yet, if we look at the graphs from Fediverse Observer, the number of active users on the Fediverse has gone down!
So what exactly does that mean, if the number of antisemitic accounts continues to grow and the number of active users continues to shrink?
It means that the number of antisemites on the Fediverse is quite large, and what we're seeing isn't new antisemites as much as it is antisemitism being so normalized that people feel comfortable spouting hate, and that despite blocking or silencing thousands of accounts, hate continues to be emboldened.
Currently sleeping the sleep of the righteous, @andrew was up way too late building tools to fend off the current wave of fedi spam, playing whack-a-mole with bad accounts, and getting fedi friends up and running with their own blocklists.
I’d like to convene a discussion this week or next to do a mini retro on this attack and some #designthinking work around fedi spam fighting tools. If you’re interested in the discussion, @ me your email or send one to spamretro at hypatia dot ca and I’ll loop you in on it 🙏
Would love to have a proper UR/UX person on the call, I’m a mere amateur at that part 😅
Still going through and sending out invites for a retro/postmortem call regarding this weekend's spam attack, but in the interim I also made an asynchronous retro form: https://forms.gle/V4h9zBE6pcTvpQAx8
Also useful if you hate video calls, have a conflict on your calendar, or otherwise prefer writing. Thanks for sharing and/or replying!
US says Israel has not violated international law during Gaza war (www.aljazeera.com)
After Israel killed seven aid workers in Gaza, the US says it has not found any incidents of Israel violating international humanitarian law in the past six months. An Al Jazeera probe concluded the World Central Kitchen vehicles were deliberately hit.