Mastodon should ask you to pick a "moderator" not an "instance".

Alistair Davidson

The latter is obscure technical detail. The former is about people, and power, and explainable to anyone.

"You pick which person or organisation you want to decide who and what is banned. You can change it later."

Deborah Hartmann Preuss, pcc

@moh_kohn "choose an instance" is the first thing most newbies see - it's jargon, and it's alienating. My friend stalled, asking me "what's an instance"? And "how should I choose?" Come on, y'all can be friendlier than that .

And, while I now agree I should (I did) choose by quality of moderation, there's no way I'd have had the info to do that when I joined. How can people possibly know?
@inthehands

Annelies Kamran

@deborahh @moh_kohn @inthehands it would be nice if there was some kind of sort/filter function like when you're shopping on the web and/or a comparison function so you could select/eliminate instances that meet/don't meet your requirements.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss, pcc

@akamran LOL that could motivate moderators, if they knew their instance was being publicly ranked for things like:

how many instances block them?
how many of their users are blocked?
how many "reports" do they receive monthly vs number of members? What type?
do they actively moderate* LGBTQ hate?
do they actively moderate* racist posts?
etc

that would have been useful info to have!

* how could these be measure/ranked, tho?

#mastodon #MastodonModeration
@moh_kohn @inthehands

Eugen Rochko

@moh_kohn Well, for better or worse, Mastodon doesn't "ask" you to pick anything since 2023. I doubt that most people have pre-conceived idea about what kind of moderation they want either. As others have pointed out, there's so much more going on than just moderation I think it would be irresponsible to frame it that way. What you're picking is a service provider, same as e-mail, ISP, or VPN, and there's just no reasonable way to do it with zero knowledge.

Paul Cantrell

@deborahh @akamran @moh_kohn
It would require some deep thought to make it so that such metric aren’t gamable. (Harassers could set up a huge number of disposable instances, block a popular one, and thus tank its rating.)

However, some mixture of game theory and human process to build a “network of trust” sort of model could make something like this really useful!

Jerry Lerman

@moh_kohn Yes! Absolutely the truth!

Jon

"Well, for better or worse, Mastodon doesn't "ask" you to pick anything since 2023"

Looking at the numbers since you made this change, it's really hard to see it as "for better" from a decentralization perspective.

* mastodon.social now has 32% of active Mastodon users, so the ecosystem is less decentralized than it was

* overall active Mastodon usage has decreased, so it didn't address that problem either.

As I wrote in A faux "Eternal September" turns into flatness

"The biggest strength of Mastodon (and the Fediverse) is that people with niche interests and from marginalized identities, cultures, and communities can find (or work with others to create) an instance that match their priorities and preferred norms. Why not lean into that?

But no."

The biggest strength of Mastodon (and the Fediverse) is that people with niche interests and from marginalized identities, cultures, and communities can find (or work with others to create) an instance that match their priorities and preferred norms. Why not lean into that?

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Olympia Indivisible

@jdp23 Do you think we should have an Indivisible instance? Or maybe WIN?

Jon

@[email protected] It's certainly worth thinking about. I'm just not sure how much appetite there is for investing in a new social network, or how to balance investment between here and Bluesky.