Hey Y’all!

I wanted to circle back on this discussion thread. Things got a bit busy with the instance upgrade (which is now upgraded to 4.1.6).

• With regards to Tier 0 Oliphant, I had initially thought that the list was primarily bottom-of-the-barrel sort of sites, but on closer look, there were sites included that well, people on the instance utilize - such as newsie.social. I thought that our discussion on our Lemmy server, plus DMs and feedback from the Mastodon side figured out which sites we wanted to exclude from the domain block list. All that being said, my objective with the blocks was to remove the known sources of abusive, illegal, or malicious (e.g., spam, malware) content.
• And then that leaves us in the gray zone. There are instances where 98% of the users are great Fediverse citizens, and then 2% are horrible trolls. There are instances where teams of moderators are carefully watching posts, and others were moderators only step in during extreme situations. And there are instances that are for-profit, non-profit, from different countries and contexts, and so on. I don’t have any straightforward answer as to where the line is located in this grey area, with regards to if a domain should be defederated or not.
• @DecaturNature had a great point regarding what if theATL.social becomes either a target or source of disinformation. A group of users (real or actual) could create accounts on the instance in a coordinated fashion, and turn over the apple cart of our existing community posting disinformation and slander. It would seem the line would be clear that those individuals would not be welcome, but if someone is being a jerk or insincere, is that enough justification to ban them?

Final Thoughts

I’m going to chew through the above points. Obviously other err…large social networks have figured something out. And smaller Mastodon servers have done the same. It is quite likely that the current server rules are not satisfactory to cover all the potential issues, situations, and possibilities of human (or bot) behavior of theATL.social users, or content that is federated to theATL.social. If you have any additional thoughts, please feel free to include below. I don’t have a timeline on changes for server rules, but when there are changes (if you wanted to propose changes), I would prefer if that was a collaborative exercise with the core group of users on this instance.

Thanks again for all your comments and feedback!

Food for thought @michael@yall.theatl.social

I found this comment on blocklist systems to be interesting: https://social.treehouse.systems/@adrienne/111043288202527510

How do we unblock any instance that got on Oliphant tier 0 but are later removed? Is that something that will be checked for?

Another thought – how does blocking and silencing affect the new search system? I guess blocking is obvious…but does silence block search? If so, I think that makes silencing much more impactful and we’d need to be more careful with it.

I skimmed over the Oliphant unified tier 0 blocklist, and it does not block any instances that I interact with, for what that’s worth. I am a bit concerned with the idea of routinely updating the block list based on the Oliphant algorithm. I suspect that the Oliphant project has a tendency to attract administrators who most enthusiastic about blocking. The justifications that I see for blocking would often apply to a lot of mainstream/establishment opinion in the USA (and probably more so in GA).

That said, I’m fully in favor of blocking obnoxious sites simply for the purpose of maintaining a pleasant and productive environment. For instance, brighton.social is on the tier0 list – this is basically a conspiracy theory propaganda mill; the local feed screams paranoia. I’d support blocking brighton.social purely to protect theATL users from wandering into a conversation prompted by their nonsense. I consider this to be the same as public parks having a policy that people need to clean up after their dogs. I consider it very unpleasant to be at the receiving end of a propaganda firehose, even if the propaganda is not personally threatening. (I don’t know if this captures the entire story for why they are on the blocklist – there could be other problems with them)

I did notice two sizable instances that are often considered “borderline problematic” in the defederation debates – and both were set to “silence” rather than “suspend”. One, is newsie.social (where Decaturish is located). I vaguely remember some criticisms about newsie.social a few months back – I think part of it was that people were reposting or repeating opinions that published in the Washington Post or New York Times. Many of the critics wanted nothing to do with journalists. As we’ve seen with the BBC instance, there are a decent number of people in the fediverse who would block those mainstream publishers, either because they have different standards from mainstream society or because they simply don’t want that experience on their Mastodon instance. I wouldn’t necessarily take their ‘block’ as meaning that the instance is anything we’d consider horrible.

The other ‘borderline’ instance I saw silenced was “QOTO” – this instance is controversial because its policy is to only defederate when absolutely necessary (e.g. spam overwhelms the server). Many other instances block QOTO either because they view this as aiding hate-mongers, or because they just want to keep the hate-monges a couple steps removed from them. (Disclaimer, my account was hosted on Qoto before I came here)

So I guess I don’t have a clear opinion here. I think even tier0 may be a bit too stringent, but i can’t suggest a better way to quickly distinguish between those that are exceptionally horrible and those that are everyday horrible. Perhaps just silence them, and treat that as a strike, so that if we have any problems with harassment we quickly block the whole server. I suspect that some need to be blocked outright – if you look at Qoto’s blocklist, that could give you a small number that are absolutely intolerable.