Screenshot of BlueSky post showing the power of composable moderation.

tom jennings

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?

@mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke

inquiline

@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

Vive Levant

@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.

Stefan Bohacek

@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.

Vive Levant

@stefan I misinterpreted your post, my bad.

Eugen Rochko

@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.

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@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.

Stefan Bohacek

@Vive_Levant No worries, thank you for helping me test this a bit!

Stefan Bohacek

@Gargron

"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.

@mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke

Stefan Bohacek

This post is deleted!

Vive Levant

@stefan pleasure. Thanks for enlightening me about this harassment technique.

Stefan Bohacek

@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.

Mastodon Migration

@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)

pasta la vida

@stefan @shlee yes, that's what they said. it's not how it currently works but it's how it should.

Stefan Bohacek

@risottobias @shlee Ah, my bad, I misread this. Sorry!

Peter Kraus

@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?

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@pkraus @Gargron @stefan @mastodonmigration @Bam @mekkaokereke extending it to “tagged users must follow poster” might be a good fix to the abuse.

Or allow tagged users to boost it to their followers

Ulrike Hahn

@inquiline I only just saw this post @inquiline and my impression too is that there are differences both between US and Europe and within Europe (e.g., UK versus Germany) in the extent to which the concept of ‘structural racism’ is familiar. That’s not just unfortunate because the concept has value, I think it also creates misunderstanding on this platform, because what a speaker means when they say “this is racist” may be quite different from what a given recipient hears - 1/2

Ulrike Hahn

@inquiline @fivetonsflax 2/2 - and that may be to the detriment of both because I feel that in my two years here I have seen that gap create controversy and reactance on more than one occasion. That’s not, for a second, to claim that known problems here reduce to a misunderstanding, just that this difference doesn’t help. So to my mind, greater conceptual and terminological clarity in communication could be a mutual benefit in that cross-cultural dialogue.

Stefan Bohacek

Hi @Gargron, just wondering if anything came out of that conversation that you'd be able to share publicly.