this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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No I mean instances like mastodon.world who do ok moderating their own users, but are very poor at moderating the instances that federate with them. So any minority users who joins mastodon.world can still be (and is, I’ve seen it) subject to the worst bigotry on the fediverse.
I'm just so tired of watching green mods make the same mistakes. "It's not my job to weigh in on debates or tell people what to think." No, but it's your job to reduce disruption in a community. If someone comes in going "being gay is a choice if you ask me," they have about 30 seconds to clarify their position or they're gone from my discord server and generally that won't do it. We have a lot of LGBT folks who have NO desire to deal with those people in a the little corner of friends we've created. That person is not entitled to their time and attention. It is our job to look out for the best interests of all our users, yet we categorically see mods get bogged down by a handful of incredibly disruptive attention seekers/combative personalities that make it shitty for everyone else. It's so predictable at this point.
We banned someone a few months ago from our discord who had some of the best insights about gaming I've ever seen. The dude was remarkable. But my god he was such a jerk! He kept being such an ass to people who disagreed with him. "That's just a brain dead take." "People who like that have no taste so frankly I don't care what you or they think." Just constant antagonism that halted all conversation and made people feel like crap. So we booted him! We asked him to stop, he didn't, and his disruptions just became unwelcome. We didn't play rules lawyer with him or debate things. We said stop, he didn't, that was the end of it, and while I miss his insights the community is noticeably better without him.
Most mods aren't clueless. They know bigotry is occurring in their communities. Yet they too often just won't be proactive about it because the behavior doesn't overtly violate the rules. Don't let bad actors weaponize your own rules against you!
Another thing is that some people are loud specifically to drown out other's voices.
That's why true free speech can not be a free-for-all, you must put a dampener on those people and it doesn't matter how closely they technically follow the rules if they do not follow the spirit and cause the quality and mood to degrade with their presence.
Absolutely!
I've always thought that people should be able to hotly debate ideas all they want, but as soon as they leave the ideas out and begin disparaging people, good-bye.
Sure but some communities simply don’t want to be debating all the time and some people refuse to accept that lol like my LGBT friends constantly talk about how exhausting it is. Sometimes they just want to talk about a tv show.
They basically are tired of constantly justifying their existence, even if the questions are genuine/good faith.
Absolutely. Not everyplace is an appropriate forum for every topic under the sun.
Yeah that’s kind of what I’m driving at. Some folks truly believe all debate must be allowed everywhere “as long as it’s nice.”
"Off topic" is a legitimate reason to downvote a post or comment, even one made respectfully and in good faith.
I do sometimes wish more sites had adopted something like the system Slashdot used, with multiple categories of up or down votes (insightful, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc.) which users could weight according to their own preferences. The simplistic "either up, down, or neutral" model is a rather blunt instrument.
That's great but the talk in this thread isn't about some communities, the demand is that mastodon.world should defederate more.
I find these opinions kind of antithetical to the whole fediverse idea, if you want a small gated community do your thing, but why should the biggest fediverse instance merrily defederate everything left and right
Some people are very good at saying the most despicable things in the nicest tone. It's difficult
That's one of the current weaknesses of the fediverse right now. Devs are working on more comprehensive moderation tools, but it's all under development.
I think so many admins - many of which are the folks who would/could be helping improve the tools - are focused on keeping the car from breaking down that we won’t see any meaningful development of mod tools for quite some time unfortunately. Outside of mastodon, the fediverse just isn’t ready for prime time yet. Won’t stop me from using it though!
I've recently been added to the mastodon.world mod team. The amount of spam that gets posted makes it much harder than Lemmy to weed out the bigots. But it's improving. And like on Lemmy.World we request Mastodon.World users to keep reporting..
Hey, sorry missed this reply. That’s good, the key issue is the bigot instances that boost a post to their own instance and then there’s a pile on, on that instance. I don’t know if that’s visible to mods, but it’s certainly visible to the user who is being abused. StillIRise1963@mastodon.world cops A LOT of abuse.