I forget who it was but someone here pushed back on me when I said there were a bunch of Nazi instances on mastodon, but it’s true. They were one of the earliest adopters and they’re still a big nuisance over there. If yarn ever becomes super popular watch out!
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci I wonder though whether that’ll even be a problem for Yarn? 🤔 We already make it quite hard (impossible?) to prop one’s position up over another, or become “popular”, or whatever. Anything else you think we could do more of to slow things down, and keep possible abuses of the ecosystem down? 🤔 – I’ve always been of the opinion that well your opinion is just as valid as mine and you have a right to it, so I’m very much against things like popularism (as seen on the bird site) and censoring (as seen on the blue book site) and other sorts of silly shit™ 🤣 – If you don’t like me or what I have to say, mute me, unfollow me, but don’t be an ass 😆
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Hmmm 🤔
Yarn is just as vulnerable to that dynamic as any other online community
How do we ensure it is not vulnerable or to minimise the inevitable effect? 🤔
Perhaps its worth for yarnd to not have “open registrations” at all 🤔
I say this because even Gitea instances can sometimes be abused by “assholes” (it happened to mine some time ago, and I’ve had my fair share of “spam” accounts – thanks to @mckinley@twtxt.net for helping me clean these up 🙏)
@prologic@twtxt.net hey guys, I’m randomly joining the convo before breakfast.
The first thing I thought of was an invite system like lobste.rs… You cannot join randomly, but someone trusting you must invite you first.
I guess we discussed a few months ago the importance of moderation systems (people and tech), and having a ‘clear’ line of allowed content under the idea of “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”
So it’s not easy, it requires a lot of resources and intent. What do you say?
We saw a glimpse of this already, with the guy who “soft doxxed” me. Imagine if 90% of yarn users were doing stuff like that all day every day. I’d certainly leave pretty quickly–I don’t have time for that, and I don’t have the free time or the inclination to try to fight it.
Yeah I remember, it was a bit of “touch and go” there for us all, but abuse is abuse and as “tetering on the edge” it might have been it was inexcusable. I do wonder though why you’d leave at all? Wouldn’t you just Unfollow problematic individuals? 🤔 You could even just blacklist the world and maybe just whitelist a few known good feeds, maybe pods even (we haven’t built this). – My point is, escaping people like this is probably hard / next to impossible, all we can do is try to help them (assuming they can be helped at all? 🤔 I’m sure some can be helped/saved 🤞), and ensure they don’t or cannot abuse the platform (or in our case, the ecosystem)…
@prologic@twtxt.net I think this is the sort of thing that should probably be discussed elsewhere, so as not to leave a convenient roadmap for how to abuse it published right on-site. It should almost certainly involve as many voices as possible, too. I have strong opinions and a particular bias but it’s a big, diverse topic.
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci “active moderators” and “invested in maintaining the community” and “good tools” – not to be confused with “censorship” right? 🤔
@prologic@twtxt.net unless you intend to become a nation-state, you can’t really censor?
If you’re worried about moderators silencing people then yes, yes they should have that power. And the community values should be very clear about where the lines are and how to deal with moderators who cross them.
@abucci@anthony.buc.ci Yup makes sense. We had to build pod-level tools for that, which behave the same way as the per-User muting of a Twt or Feed. It was tough to build and I actually learned something new when doing so with the community’s help 😅 (although I don’t like to advertise the feature capability, look at Settings -> Poderator Settings yourself)
Btw… I’d like to take this opportunity to mention my strong feelings of the fact that Twts/Yarns disappear from pods (on purpose) and have what I thought were pretty sensible defaults (maybe those defaults could be collectively reevaluated?) – Looking at my own “Muted” list I note that I still have 9 muted Twts and 3 Muted feeds. I could probably cleanup the Muted Twts (as they’ve probably archived into Bolivian by now, the reason this feature is so important)
@prologic@twtxt.net as usual I’d start with definitions. What you understand by censorship due to your environment is different than my definition.
So I usually have a glossary in the organization. The basics, what, how and why are we going to moderate…
@eaplmx@twtxt.net To be honest I would prefer that we define things in terms of the problems they sought out to solve. If someone wants to throw up an issue to start the discussion, we can document this with the builtin pages of yarnd like in https://twtxt.net/help and in the up and coming docs.yarn.social. For reference yarnd has these controls that are noteworthy:
- Ephemeral Twts and Yarns (with its cache design, posts are not displayed premaritally on your Timeline or on the Discover view or Front page)
- Muting Feeds: You can mute feeds on a per-user basis
- Muting Twts and Yarns: You can mute single Twts or entire Yarns (by their hash) on a per-User basic
- And finally, full URI patterns of feeds/domains can be “shadow banned” on a Pod basis (which has the effect of filtering out Twts from those feeds/users from the Discover view / Front page, but not from users that directly follow them)