"I've heard chants which can be antisemitic, depending on the context, when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people. [...] That would be investigated as harassment, if pervasive and severe." #fediblockmeta
People want simple but I love what college leaders said to Rep Stefanik re campus antisemitism. It's what I want here too. Free speech, no blocking servers, unless it becomes harassment and admins won't police it. Otherwise we risk the #fediverse becoming censorious or unwelcoming.
Since the beginning of this year I've been maintaining a Mastodon server blocklist called Garden Fence, available at https://gardenfence.github.io/
As the Discord admin space that was being used to coordinate with other admins on the list has since closed, I've set up the account @gardenfence to pick up communication and notifications around the blocklist.
In particular I hope to expand the list of volunteer reference servers in the near future to replace a server that plans to leave the list, to keep the list at a reasonable size.
#FediblockMeta
I'm now personally blocking Instances, to stop nuisance reporters attempting to silence me speaking up for Palestine. I didn't want to take this action, but if there's multiple bad faith reports coming from the same Instance, day after day, then it's a sign of poor moderation. Or worse.
If you find yourself blocked, it's probably because your admin/mod is not moderating these trolls adequately. And I'm curating a safer, more welcoming space for myself by reducing harrassment via reports.
Admins/moderators, please take action against your members who're misusing reporting function to silence people speaking up about the crisis in Palestine. Just like you would (hopefully) take action against anti-Semitism. As a mod who's part of an excellent team, I know our workloads have increased since early October, and we're moderating complex issues. Please get help if you're not coping.
Don't let nuisance reporters manipulate vital conversations. People need to speak up against the state of Israel's extreme violence. Palestinians must be liberated.
Re-upping this post as the beginning of a short thread: the post was written about a general type of behavior called "beefing": the short thread is about the specific, current Mastodon block list controversy and what it means for Mastodon and the left:
That the claim about baby beheadings in #Israel now appears to be incorrect but was being repeated by most media outlets and even the president, is why spreading misinformation should not be considered a justification for kicking people off of or blocking servers. We're all just often wrong without knowing it. #fediblockmeta
I hope this spurs a rethink of fediblock policy. Conflicts over Palestine/BDS and how commentary related to it can be considered antisemitic/dangerous, are my go to example to lefties re why moderation on the #fediverse needs to be more nuanced. Less about safety than preventing the abuse that shuts down conversations. But that depends on what you want this place to be about. Sharing the best art and journalism or just a place to hang out with your peeps? #fediblockmeta https://social.mondoweiss.net/@mondoweiss/111194372218023969
Servers shouldn't be blocked for being wrong (full of info and opinions most people think are bad or untrue etc), but for housing assholes (accounts that jump into threads to troll strangers) . #fediblockmeta https://youtu.be/C6BYzLIqKB8?si=ycybZpYNv_BtEPTG
We should probably at some point have a conversation about how fediblock creates false consensus in downstream shared #blocklists and why that's a problem.
This doesn't mean that fediblock is in any way a bad thing or doesn't have its uses, but it means that your decisionmakers aren't independent of each other, and if you are running a consensus-based blocklist for others to consume that's a serious problem.
Updates to #TheBadSpace have fixed one concern (how many sources?) but surfaced another: the supposed independence of the "trusted sources". Here for example: @lunasother dared .art to block them, which they did. Fine.
But apparently, so did 3-4 other (supposedly unrelated) admins as well.
What good is a "consensus" system if half the voters are acting in lock-step?
Every time I see someone in the FediBlock tag bring up one of the handful of extremely well-known terrible servers, I'm reminded that we DO really need some kind of starter blocklist for new servers that want to be safe from harassment. In theory it's a great tool, people's egos just get in the way. #FediBlockMeta
When a blocklist that didn't list its perspective on the issue upfront gets involved in an intracommunity dispute
Especially but not exclusively when people outside of a community get involved in intracommunity disputes
There's a fine line to walk on these issues generally—a lot of fine lines, actually, and a lot of nuance that I'm not going to get into right now—but the caution is that blocklists are very easy to weaponize here
@hrefna
It also really needs to be stated that marginalized groups are in no way monolithic: this is one of the key points that makes persecution of us unjust. Not every member of a group has the same standards for who we want to interact with, and some of us would rather have a level of exposure just so we can be seen by these people.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with these "safe spaces" they're trying to create. I think it's great that members of #marginalized groups have online spaces we can just exist on without being forced to deal with the blast of politics from people who don't want us to exist. I may be able to handle it, but no one should have to.
My main issue is when the people creating these #blocklist s don't want to acknowledge that they are erring on the side of caution compared to others. Exposure goes both ways: lowering exposure to the potentially hostile comes at the expense of potential reach.
I found this academic paper from Stanford's Internet Observatory that's actually brilliant! It not only addresses rampant predatory behaviour on certain parts of the fediverse, but proposes a federated solution to automatically reporting CSAM to NCMEC. I would absolutely implement this in a heartbeat! :vlpn_happy_heart:
The federation/instances endpoint on #Firefish, for example, allows you to pass booleans for blocked, silenced, or suspended as parameters to filter results to only show servers meeting that criteria.
Having a database of X and Y block Z seems more useful than only using the blocklists of a handful of people with dubious trust values.
I want to find a solution to #moderation tools like #fediblockmeta inadvertently advertising content they oppose. I want to design a safety tool different in execution from #fsep and #fediseer.
I'm introducing an idea called #fediflags, where servers can moderate servers blindly, based off info supplied by the moderated server itself. Has a server ever asked another to BE suspended, or to have their media rejected? Well, with this they can, to ALL applicable servers.