I love this! Ask people to boost a post if they want to be "notified" of some special news, edit the post to send a notification. In this case @eniko even changed their profile display name so you don't even need to tap on the notification to know what's going on. 💜

Many of the features we take for granted today emerged first through creative use of the existing (limited) features of the platform (e.g. boosts were just "RT @originalaccount tweet" back in the days) and were picked up by platform developers when they become popular. This is how the userbase evolves a platform.

"Hey Siri, what's the humidity today?"

"The humidity today will be up to 60%."

"…Siri, what's the current humidity?"

"The current humidity is 84%."

"Hey Siri, fuck you."

This is a friendly reminder that instead of offering hand-wringing messages of sympathy (which many times are themselves microaggresive) to Black users facing racism on here, money is 1000% more useful and desirable.

There are plenty of Black ppl's #MutualAid requests and threads floating around including the Juneteenth one pinned on my profile. Pick one or some and boost and donate. Folks are trying to live.

*pls boost*

If you've been on the receiving end of racist, sexist or queerphobic harassment on the fediverse, and you're willing to talk about it, I'd like to hear what tools you believe would best help address the problem.

I might ask a few a questions for my own clarity, but I don't intend to argue or make suggestions, and you're welcome to change the post visibility if you don't want anyone else horning in. Some of what I learn here might go into a Destructured post, but attribution is up to you.

I've been participating in the fediverse for about 8.5 years now, and have run infosec.exchange as well as a growing number of other fediverse services for about 7.5 of those years. While I am generally not the target of harassment, as an instance administrator and moderator, I've had to deal with a very, very large amount of it. Most commonly that harassment is racism, but to be honest we get the full spectrum of bigotry here in different proportions at different times. I am writing this because I'm tired of watching the cycle repeat itself, I'm tired of watching good people get harassed, and I'm tired of the same trove of responses that inevitably follows. If you're just in it to be mad, I recommend chalking this up to "just another white guy's opinion" and move on to your next read.

The situation nearly always plays out like this:

A black person posts something that gets attention. The post and/or person's account clearly designates them as being black.

A horrific torrent of vile racist responses ensues.

The victim expresses frustration with the amount of harrassment they receive on Mastodon/the Fediverse, often pointing out that they never had such a problem on the big, toxic commercial social media platforms. There is usually a demand for Mastodon to "fix the racism problem".

A small army of "helpful" fedi-experts jumps in with replies to point out how Mastodon provides all the tools one needs to block bad actors.

Now, more exasperated, the victim exclaims that it's not their job to keep racists in check - this was (usually) cited as a central reason for joining the fediverse in the first place!

About this time, the sea lions show up in replies to the victim, accusing them of embracing the victim role, trying to cause racial drama, and so on. After all, these sea lions are just asking questions since they don't see anything of what the victim is complaining about anywhere on the fediverse.

Lots of well-meaning white folk usually turn up about this time to shout down the seal lions and encouraging people to believe the victim.

Then time passes... People forget... A few months later, the entire cycle repeats with a new victim.

Let me say that the fediverse has a both a bigotry problem that tracks with what exists in society at large as well as a troll problem. The trolls will manifest themselves as racist when the opportunity presents itself, anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-women, anti-furry, and whatever else suits their fancy at the time. The trolls coordinate, cooperate, and feed off each other.

What has emerged, in my view, on the fediverse is a concentration of trolls onto a certain subset of instances. Most instances do not tolerate trolls, and with some notable exceptions, trolls don't even bother joining "normal" instances any longer. There is no central authority that can prevent trolls from spinning up fediverse software of their own servers using their own domains names and doing their thing on the fringes. On centralized social media, people can be ejected, suspended, banned, and unless they keep trying to make new accounts, that is the end of it.

The tools for preventing harassment on the fediverse are quite limited, and the specifics vary between type of software - for example, some software like Pleroma/Akkoma, lets administrators filter out certain words, while Mastodon, which is what the vast majority of the fediverse uses, allows both instance administrators and users to block accounts and block entire domains, along with some things in the middle like "muting" and "limiting". These are blunt instruments.

To some extent, the concentration of trolls works in the favor of instance administrators. We can block a few dozen/hundred domains and solve 98% of the problem. There have been some solutions implemented, such as block lists for "problematic" instances that people can use, however many times those block lists become polluted with the politics of the maintainers, or at least that is the perception among some administrators. Other administrators come into this with a view that people should be free to connect with whomever on the fediverse and delegate the responsibility for deciding who and who not to block to the user.

For this and many other reasons, we find ourselves with a very unevenly federated network of instances.

Wit this in mind, if we take a big step back and look at the cycle of harassment I described from above, it looks like this:

A black person joins an instance that does not block m/any of the troll instances.

That black person makes a post that gets some traction.

Trolls on some of the problematic instances see the post, since they are not blocked by the victim's instance, and begin sending extremely offensive and harassing replies. A horrific torrent of vile racist responses ensues.

The victim expresses frustration with the amount of harassment they receive on Mastodon/the Fediverse, often pointing out that they never had such a problem on the big, toxic commercial social media platforms. There is usually a demand for Mastodon to "fix the racism problem".

Cue the sea lions. The sea lions are almost never on the same instance as the victim. And they are almost always on an instance that blocks those troll instances I mentioned earlier. As a result, the sea lions do not see the harassment. All they see is what they perceive to be someone trying to stir up trouble.

...and so on.

A major factor in your experience on the fediverse has to do with the instance you sign up to. Despite what the folks on /r/mastodon will tell you, you won't get the same experience on every instance. Some instances are much better keeping the garden weeded than others. If a person signs up to an instance that is not proactive about blocking trolls, they will almost certainly be exposed to the wrath of trolls. Is that the Mastodon developers' fault for not figuring out a way to more effectively block trolls through their software? Is it the instance administrator's fault for not blocking troll instances/troll accounts? Is it the victim's fault for joining an instance that doesn't block troll instances/troll accounts?

I think the ambiguity here is why we continue to see the problem repeat itself over and over - there is no obvious owner nor solution to the problem. At every step, things are working as designed. The Mastodon software allows people to participate in a federated network and gives both administrators and users tools to control and moderate who they interact with. Administrators are empowered to run their instances as they see fit, with rules of their choosing. Users can join any instance they choose. We collectively shake our fists at the sky, tacitly blame the victim, and go about our days again.

It's quite maddening to watch it happen. The fediverse prides itself as a much more civilized social media experience, providing all manner of control to the user and instance administrators, yet here we are once again wrapping up the "shaking our fist at the sky and tacitly blaming the victim" stage in this most recent episode, having learned nothing and solved nothing.

from beyond

#unix_surrealism #technomage #monochrome @SDF

When I say that hachyderm.io is well moderated, here's what I mean:

1) There are thousands of nazi instances on the Fediverse, and new ones are created every day. Hachyderm does a great job protecting its members from this reality. Especially those that are vocal.🙋🏿‍♂️ This is not an easy accomplishment given the Fediverse's current slate of tools, and set of design decisions.

2) When abuse reports are filed, either about Hachyderm members, or members on other instances, they are acted upon.

1/N

Seems like huge news: "Nasal COVID-19 vaccine halts transmission"

Study in hamsters indicates vaccines targeting nose, mouth may be key to controlling spread of respiratory infections

medicine.wustl.edu/news/nasal-…

#COVID19 #Covid

Nasal COVID-19 vaccine halts transmission | Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

^{Tamara Schneider (Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis)}

Deathly bug plaguing X right now.

X rolled out a new app today for macOS: just the iPad app running on Apple silicon Macs. There's only one problem: Anyone who uses it will be suspended within a few hours. This is not a joke.

To make matters worse, the functioning app auto-updates to this faulty app, suspending the accounts of everyone who used the old app for no reason, automatically, with not even a suspension notice email.

How do I know about this? I, uh, learned the hard way.