Screenshot of BlueSky post showing the power of composable moderation.
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Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhDreplied to mekka okereke :verified: last edited by
@mekkaokereke @ljrk @semitones @tillshadeisgone I am in all the privileged groups, but I am trying to understand what other people experience. One thing that I notice is that there are fewer Black Americans in my feed than their proportion of the population. The Fediverse is less dominated by people in the USA than the old Twitter was, with more people from Europe, and Europe has a smaller Black population, so that might be part of it.
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@EricFielding This is partly because white Europeans and white Americans hassled Black US users who popped in here in the 2022 Twitter migration. (To make matters worse, some white europeans accused Americans of "making race a problem" here, i.e. took the line that people pointing out racism were the problem, not people being racist. For some reason there was less evident racism with fewer Black users
)I'm simplifying a bit in the interest of character limit, but I saw a lot of this firsthand
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@EricFielding Anyway a lot of Black folks very understandably did not stick around, and Mastodon cemented a reputation for being racist
This is a good primer of some of the issues:
https://nexusofprivacy.net/start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/ -
@inquiline In the past, I often felt more politically aligned with Europeans than with my fellow Americans. And on the Iraq War, climate change, urbanism, and many other things, I am. But Mastodon has made me aware that it is a more complicated picture than I had previously understood.
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Quote: "Some people prefer to keep their posts to a closed group of people instead of publishing everything for the world to see."
By not addressing the abuse discussed in the thread, your reply, in juxtaposition, comes across as stating that followers-only is working as intended.
Substitute "harasser" for "some people" and it pretty much summarizes what folk are upset with in this thread.
I assume harassment is not the intent, but without an affirmative statement of some kind that's the message I'm getting from you.
I'm not angry or upset in any way. It's just code. Code has side effects, code is fungible, and can be changed. Is this issue in any queue for fixing?
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@fivetonsflax Yeah... there's... a lot here, isn't there. For some reason in summer 2020 I got to overhear a lot of European discourse arguing about whether Black Lives Matter was a specifically American problem, or not...
IMO there are a lot of things wrong with the USA, but as a country we at least are further along* w acknowledging that both structural and interpersonal racism exist than a lot of europe is. The smallest, & I do mean smallest of victories
*active backsliding notwithstanding
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@stefan @Gargron @mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke is the problem the “followers only” posting or the fact that you can change the post diffusion mode afterwards ?
I mean except that the problem is the people harassing other people. -
@Vive_Levant I don't think you can change the post visibility on Mastodon after you publish it.
So from what I understand, the problem is specifically that you can make a "followers-only" post and tag someone who is not a follower.
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@stefan I misinterpreted your post, my bad.
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@stefan @mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke So this was built out in accordance with early feedback around 2016/2017 and meant to address two things: One, the major downside of "protected mode" on Twitter cutting you off from being to talk to non-mutuals; and two, making sure that you could see if someone was trying to dogpile you in secret. I'm not dead set on this behaviour but it needs to be evaluated in full context. I'll bring it up to the team on Monday.
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:PUA: Shlee fucked around andreplied to Eugen Rochko last edited by
@Gargron @stefan @mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke "followers only" really should mean the followers of the poster AND the followers of any tagged person.
but you know "follow sync" is one of those huge/hard unsolved problems.
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@Vive_Levant No worries, thank you for helping me test this a bit!
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"I'll bring it up to the team on Monday."
Thank you, really appreciate it!
And thank you also for providing the context behind why this behavior exists, very interesting. Really shows how hard it can be to get this right.
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Stefan Bohacekreplied to :PUA: Shlee fucked around and last edited byThis post is deleted!
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@stefan pleasure. Thanks for enlightening me about this harassment technique.
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@Vive_Levant My pleasure likewise!
Coincidentally, Eugen, the creator of Mastodon, just replied with some background for why this behavior exists.
Eugen Rochko (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] So this was built out in accordance with early feedback around 2016/2017 and meant to address two things: One, the major downside of "protected mode" on Twitter cutting you off from being to talk to non-mutuals; and two, making sure that you could see if someone was trying to dogpile you in secret. I'm not dead set on this behaviour but it needs to be evaluated in full context. I'll bring it up to the team on Monday.
Mastodon (mastodon.social)
Interesting stuff.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Stefan Bohacek last edited by
@stefan @Gargron @Bam @mekkaokereke
Thank you. This does seem like a complicated issue and reviewing it now in light of the concerns raised makes a lot of sense.
Did want to flag @UlrikeHahn 's post one more time, which raises the important and beneficial GDPR privacy aspects of this mode.
Ulrike Hahn (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] “followers only” is privacy preserving in that your posts are not public, which has important legal implications under GDPR. If they constitute personal data (as is likely) they cannot be scraped, collected, stored, (eg to train an AI system) except with very specific Art 9 exemptions. That they are a vector for abuse is horrific, and desperately needs fixing, but a lack of data privacy generates algorithmic harms too.
FediScience.org (fediscience.org)
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@risottobias @shlee Ah, my bad, I misread this. Sorry!
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Peter Krausreplied to :PUA: Shlee fucked around and last edited by
@shlee @Gargron @stefan @mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke why shouldn't "followers only" mean "followers of the OP only"? With the ability to extend the visibility to others downstream from the OP disabled?
