When Elon was losing class action lawsuits for his blatant, egregious, and widespread racism against Black people, and Black folk were decrying his Alt-right antics and the harm that they cause, everyone was fine.
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Tim Brayreplied to mekka okereke :verified: on last edited by
@mekkaokereke How about “I believe that modern VC-driven business models are irredeemably flawed, to the extent that that lifeboat comes with an unpluggable leak”.
Personally working on trying to prove that an instance based on co-op principles can be sustainable.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to Tim Bray on last edited by
@timbray Same!
But the National Science Foundation is a kind of VC firm LP'd and GP'd by science loving US government employees. ️
And a crypto DAO is a kind of co-op run by crypto bros. 🤮
A lot of VC assets are controlled by alt-right adjacent dudes. If 95% of all co-ops were DAOs, I think many folk would similarly assume that most co-ops don't do any good in the world, are usually harmful, and are often run by sociopathic alt-right degenerates, intent on destroying the world for profit.
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Tim Brayreplied to mekka okereke :verified: on last edited by
@mekkaokereke Can't disagree with any of that. I have this optimistic vision of a future where the Fediverse is a large collection of small lifestyle businesses and member-owned co-operatives.
I think I'm less worried about tech & scaling than you are. There'll be painful spots but there are enough people around with the development and ops mojo to get us through.
I expect GCP & AWS to offer instance-as-a-service and there's nothing wrong with that.
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@timbray @mekkaokereke the tech and hosting parts will likely be solved, there are already some managed offerings.
The hard part about running an instance is moderation and I don't see that changing -
mekka okereke :verified:replied to Pär Björklund on last edited by
@Paxxi @timbray Yeah, but I've become radicalized with the idea that good moderation of smaller communities is *relatively* easy, and of larger communities approaches impossible. As in, moderating for 10 friends is relatively easy, 100 is hard, 1000 is about the limit of an untrained pro, 10K requires a group of trained pros, and I don't know (m)any well moderated 100K+ communities.
Not sure if this is more because it forces a high mod:user ratio, or because mods can understand context easier.
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Pär Björklundreplied to mekka okereke :verified: on last edited by
@mekkaokereke @timbray I'm thinking the smaller the community the more likely that you're intimately familiar with the culture, in-jokes and so on making moderation easier.
I'm guessing that a lot of potential moderators have no clue about "it's okay to be white" and for every minority community there are likely to be similar "stealth" hate content that's intended to fool moderators.
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@Paxxi @mekkaokereke @timbray I help run/mod a small forum and can hold enough culture and history of it in my head to make that relatively easy. And the handful of mods agree on enough thus more so.
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to DamonHD on last edited by
The "C-word" is one of the most offensive words in the US. It's often used in the vilest, most misogynistic contexts. But it's less offensive in Australia? And when combined with other words and contexts, the meaning changes a lot.
When an AUS friend told someone "Mekka's a hard c-word!" that was in reference to me being our rugby team's enforcer. When they said "Oh you're a sick c-word now!" that means I lost weight but stayed muscular. Both intended as compliments.️
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: on last edited by
Imagine trying to moderate abusive language for a Mastodon community server.
"Australian semi-pro rugby players talking about their Nigerian rugby teammate" is just one micro-context. It's not just "anything goes in the in-group!", because there are definitely things my AUS teammates could say that would violate. Either misogyny, racism, transphobia, etc. It's complicated.
How many of these microcontexts can exist in a community of 10 people? 100 people? 50K? 1MM?
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mekka okereke :verified:replied to mekka okereke :verified: on last edited by
Now imagine you think you've gotten it right and *not* moderated the use of C-word between rugby playing Australian friends.
Then a woman replies: "Hi. I'm Australian. I play rugby. I play on the Australian women's national team. That word is *not* less offensive in Australia, and I don't want to see you use it again. Grow up."
Did the mods make a mistake? Or did community standards evolve?
It's complicated. But easier to adjust on the fly with smaller communities.
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Miareplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @DamonHD @Paxxi @timbray it does sometimes feel like the men (and diaspora) of Australia held a referendum on that word but forgot to invite the women
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@mia @mekkaokereke @DamonHD @Paxxi @timbray A big part of this is because context creates meaning, this is how reclaiming words like "queer" works. It's why some words are okay to use with your friends and in-group but are offensive when someone in an out group uses them. This is also why you can't use machines to moderate, they don't understand context and meaning (this is also where machine translation fails and why literary translators will continue to be necessary...and why literary translation can be very intense and hard work in the meaning mines).
*also, part of moderation work ideally would be helping people understand each other and/or understand why something they said was problematic (if it's not intentional, of course, but that stuff tends to be obvious).