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@aral Genuine question, how is defederating threads protecting trans people?

@aral @eatyourglory I’m not sure if I agree completely with this statement.

Defederating Gab, poa.st, cum.salon or RapeMeat was really a no-brainer.

Those were instances created by trolls/fascists/homophobic/misogynist admins, and specifically dedicated to people who share the same ideas and the same ways of treating others.

There’s literally no doubt of the ideology of a person who joins one of those instances: if you join Gab or poa.st, then it’s quite easy to identify your ideas as well.

Can we say the same about Threads? Can we say that everybody there is a transphobic, or a Nazi, or a troll? Can we say that the admins explicitly embrace and actively promote these ideologies?

When you have an instance with millions of accounts, you’re always statistically likely to get jerks. The questions that admins have to ask before defederating are:

1. Are jerks a clear majority there?

2. Are the failures at moderation due to the website administration actively promoting jerks (like it’s the case for Musk’s shithole), or are they due to the challenges of scaling up moderation, or to bars that are just set higher than many Fediverse admins?

3. If we defederate it, what are the risks of cutting out a lot of useful traffic (like institutional accounts, or harmless accounts that are followed by many users on our instances)? In other words, does the signal/noise ratio justify sacrificing the signal in order to protect users from the noise?

4. What are our thoughts about striking a balance between protecting our users from abuse vs. giving them a chance to connect to whoever they want to?

I have the impression that for Threads the response to these questions is negative, at least for now.

Of course, I’m monitoring the situation, and I’m ready to pull the drawbridge at the first signs that Threads has a negative net added value for the Fediverse.

But that doesn’t seem the case for now IMHO (I actually see a lot of nice/decent people on Threads that are genuinely curious about the Fediverse), and I’m not sure if I would handpick a few cases of moderation failures to make an argument in favour of defederation (rather than individual blocks/bans/mutes).

@fabio @eatyourglory Have you actually clicked the links in the post and read the articles?

(Because the issue here is that Facebook/Meta is a bad actor, that Facebook/Meta are not moderating transphobia, etc. And that Facebook/Meta should not be federated with in the same way that any other fediverse instance that does what they do would be. If they’re not being defederated then it’s for one reason alone: their size and what some people feel they can gain from that audience.)

@aral @eatyourglory I’m very well aware of Meta’s challenges with content moderation. And I definitely would like them to be called more accountable for this.

I’m just challenging the idea that full defederation of a platform with millions of people is the right way to respond to these failures, or if more granular measures (blocks/mutes) can be implemented.

Again, if the tree was rotten at its very roots (Gab, poa.st etc.), there would be no doubt about it.

If the head of the platform was actively engaging and promoting hateful ideologies (like Musk), there wouldn’t be any doubt either.

But for now I don’t see any such strong signals from Thread.

@fabio @eatyourglory So GLAAD’s year-long set of receipts are not enough. (First link.) You’re also OK federating with a company that literally bought a VPN service so they could man-in-the-middle attack the encrypted communications of their users while they were using the services of their competitors. (Second link.) This is who you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to?

@aral @eatyourglory no need to convince me that Meta’s corporate strategies are highly unethical. I already blast them on a daily basis.

But I’m also trying to be pragmatic here. Are things like sniffing traffic from competitors the reason why you want to defederate them? If they really wanted to just sniff everything about the Fediverse, they didn’t have to spin up their own public instance and invest so much engineering effort in it. They could have just set up a small Mastodon instance connected to a relay and fly it under the radar. Or just scrape search engine results, since most of the profiles are public. So what do we exactly gain by defederating them?

Honestly, since Threads has federated, I’ve had many friends of mine who have asked me about the Fediverse, and who have been toying with syncing their posts to it. These are folks that would have never joined Mastodon before (let alone run their own instance) because they perceived entry barriers as being too high.

Having Mark as a neighbor is definitely an unpalatable trade-off. But the reward is having my friends and family communicating over the same channel that I use (so I don’t have to use accounts on those closed platforms to communicate with them), as well as increasing the chances of them toying with open protocols without fearing the entry barriers, and also have visibility over the activity of institutional accounts that have so far resisted moving to the Fediverse. It sounds to me like the benefit, for now, is overall positive.

And btw, I thought a lot whether to proactively defederate Threads. I even joins the Fedipact and initially blocked it. But the thoughts in my previous paragraph eventually drove me towards the “give them a try” approach

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.social @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno good to know that just so long as you don’t talk about the genocide you enabled, you can do whatever you want

@fabio@manganiello.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno I don’t think viewing this as “a chance to make the fediverse more mainstream” is correct. This is the fediverse equivalent of the infamous casting couch: bluntly, we’re going to get fucked and get nothing out of it. Meta has enough lawyers, engineers, compute power and paid product managers to make sure he gets way more out of this than anyone else will. He doesn’t enter into arrangements this like unless he gets more out of it than he puts in. If the “plan” on the fedi end is 1. Federate, 2. ????, 3. Social media freedom, then there’s no way in hell the fediverse is going to end up the winner here.

@aud @aral @eatyourglory @fabio

1. We defederate where we can.

2. We hope others will do the right thing.

3. Keep our connections open so we know where the next place to move to is.

4. Build the next place if we have to.

@fabio @aud @aral @eatyourglory then I will always prefer to support my friends that are already marginalized over anything else. I'm quite willing to die on that hill. Mastodon is great because it's easy to moderate, and because it's easy to find a real connection. Threads would destroy any notion of that with. Fuck 'm. And anyone who's on it.

@fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno bluntly: do not willingly give Meta power. They will not give it back.

@eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp could be I misread or read something inaccurate, then. But even in that case, great: best way to get people off corporate social media is by going there and doing it, not by giving the corporation power here.

@aud @aral @fabio @greenWhale I see. What do you think about federating with Flipboard? (a company)

@eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp I don’t know anything about flipboard, so that’s certainly a different conversation in one sense. But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).

@aud @aral @fabio @greenWhale Makes sense.

@greenWhale @aud @aral @fabio Excuse my ignorance, but what are they trying to dismantle?

@eatyourglory @aud @aral @fabio the way admins can tailor the safety of their users. The fact they enter as a monolith, makes that impossible without them letting the volunteer admins take on the work meta should be doing in the first place: getting rid of the assholes.

@fabio@manganiello.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @greenWhale@dice.camp It’s more like “giving the keys to the city to the dude screaming racist slurs”.

But here’s the thing: you’ve clearly not been the target of shit like this, or else you wouldn’t value “discoverability” above the safety of other people, which you say isn’t your responsibility (way to be socially responsible dude).

“ I personally belong to the camp of those who believes that the primary goal of social media is to enable people to connect as easily as possible to others and discover content with the least amount of frictions, and give users enough power and tools to granularly decide what content they want to see.”

Did you miss the part where META’S LACK OF MODERATION ENABLED A FUCKING GENOCIDE

Or do you your ease of connecting over people’s literal lives, you no plan having bitch?

“ I can’t make a plan that is better than theirs if they have all the content and all the users.”

They already have a plan and are enacting it and when you give them what they want, you have no recourse to go back on that.

BUT AGAIN. SOCIAL MEDIA. ENABLED A GENOCIDE. So your little camp about what the “role” of social media “is” is a fantasy only a privileged person could have.

So rather than accepting a known bad quantity into our presence, why don’t you instead listen to the numerous minorities telling you this is a bad idea?

@fabio@manganiello.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @greenWhale@dice.camp you are not a friend to minorities; you are carrying water for white supremacy and capitalism and spilling it all over the rest of us.

Enjoy the taste of pigeon shit.

@fabio@manganiello.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @greenWhale@dice.camp and if you find me cursing at you more “disrespectful” than telling minorities their safety is worth less than your ability to avoid inconvenience… I mean, I’d say that’s an opportune time to reflect, but you lack that capacity.

@aud @aral @eatyourglory @greenWhale get your shit together and wash up your mouth with caustic soda before ever attempting to talk to me again. I’m just sticking rational arguments together without ever getting personal. I expect the same level of respect.

I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years. With my own money, with my own time, and even risking my own career and incolumity for people I didn’t even know.

And I’ve done so because I’ve been myself among oppressed minorities, and a target of discrimination for most of my life, and I’ve started from a quite low spot in life too. Just because I don’t constantly show off my trauma, or slam an oppressed minority badge of honor on everybody’s face and ask for everybody’s pity, it doesn’t mean that I’m a privileged white guy who had daddy paying all of his bills, and doesn’t know what it means to be publicly discriminated.

Don’t you even realize that YOU are the fascist jerk here?

You talk so much about protecting oppressed minorities from aggression and prejudice, and yet you are the one who’s dumping a full page of aggressive scatology upon a stranger who has probably gone through more shit and prejudice than you - and all just because I’m trying to have a civilized conversation about the trade-offs between discoverability/connectivity and sealed insulation from any possible source of injury.

You talk so much about preventive defederation, throwing the baby away with the bathwater if that’s the price to pay to make sure that nobody ever interacts with any potentially disturbing content, and you don’t realize that you’re just creating an unscalable and sealed safe bubble that does more harm than good. You probably wouldn’t tell vulnerable people to stay sealed in their houses only with their trusted friends around to avoid any contact or potential conflict with a potential jerk on the bus, at the mall or on the street. Yet that’s exactly what you’re advocating here, telling yourself the unforgivable lie that ascetic digital exclusion from the rest of the world is the best solution to strengthen the oppressed.

You talk so much about diversity, and yet you are the one throwing insults (including the f words) at somebody who is on the same ideological camp as you, but who just so happened to reach a different conclusion than you on a certain problem, and is trying to rationally consider all the trade-offs of a difficult problem. You like diversity only as long as everybody’s conclusions are exactly aligned with yours, and you bark like a rabid dog at anyone who deviates from the only path that you feel it’s righteous, and you’re so busy enjoying the nauseous smell of your ideologically inconsistent farts that you don’t even realize that your aggressivity and your inability to engage into a civilized discussion with someone who disagrees with you on a particular topic makes YOU the true fascist here.

Now just go back and re-read the messages you’ve sent me in this thread. Do you feel proud of them? Does your aggressive language show a good picture of you? Do you feel like your friends and family would be proud of you for showing such an ugly side to a perfect stranger on the Internet who just happened to disagree with you?

If you can answer affirmatively at all of these questions, then please proceed at blocking me before I do that with you. It means that you belong to that extremist minority of the minority that takes pride of its purist ascetism and does more harm than good to the world.

Otherwise, I expect an apology for your motiveless aggression.

@fabio@manganiello.social @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @greenWhale@dice.camp you deserve no respect for suggesting that marginalized people are worth less than your convenience. Go fuck your eye own socket and piss off with “you weren’t polite so you’re the fascist”.

You’re actively ignoring the voices of minorities telling you this is harmful. Fuck. Off.

@aud @aral @eatyourglory @fabio absolutely this.

@SallyStrange@eldritch.cafe @fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno a regular Martin Luther King, Jr over here

@fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp @aral@mastodon.ar.al @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno you don’t have a contract with them, and even if you did, you absolutely do not have the finances or the legal means to enforce it.

@eatyourglory@mastodon.uno @aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.social @greenWhale@dice.camp well, yeah, they want the goodwill. Is there any guarantee they’ll keep that? Any contract? Any means or enforcement? It’s their server, their software.

If they tried things like that now, no one would federate. But what about a year from now?