Well, that was depressing. This is the only viable replacement for Twitter we've got at the moment.

@ceejbot I'm hoping this can serve as a learning experience. I admit my faith in Mastodon is a bit shaken as well.

@nolan @ceejbot Just means the moderation tools aren't quite there yet. That's where open-source shines. Now we can improve this for all.

@nolan @ceejbot
Technical architecture decisions (decentralisation, federation, etc.) will never solve what are - fundamentally - human social problems.

@nolan @ceejbot
That's not to say decentralised/federated systems aren't/won't be/can't be better than centralised systems, but I've seen people rely WAY too much on the architecture and start to believe it will solve every problem. See also: blockchain ALL the things.

@ceejbot It's a social problem not a technology problem. Federation doesn't solve the social problem, but I never expected it to. It just gives us a choice of providers so we can hope that one of them will find a way to solve the social problem (or at least resist it).

@ceejbot Say Wheaton had started using a personal instance, so the admin reports wouldn't be an issue - as the admin and sole member of the instance, he could just ignore them. He'd still have to spend all day blocking people dogpiling him. Meanwhile, people on other instances could freely call for his continued dogpiling. There are lots of instances that wouldn't stop it, or would even encourage it.

The decentralized, federated nature of Mastodon seems to make it REALLY hard to moderate.

@Robby Strength & weakness: we're not held hostage by, say, Twitter's weird love of Nazis, but then the Nazis aren't held hostage by what law enforcement Twitter *does* have to comply with.

Centralization is not a solution either. Did you read Motherboard's amazing article about FB's moderation problem? https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-moderation-works

@ceejbot I didn't mean to imply that decentralization is bad per se. Certainly centralization has major challenges even with a good, moral mod team (which none of the big social media sites have, obvs), but decentralization does pose unique problems.

I'll be very interested in seeing the solution as they arise, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any.

(Thanks for the article link, I will give it a read.)

@ceejbot moderators need force multipliers to deal with abuse, which can only be provided by the software platform assisting with the investigation

@riking @ceejbot Gonna make further improvements to the moderation UI a goal for 2.5.1

@ceejbot Since instances in the Fediverse can block entire instances, I could see how fractured sub-networks might form to mitigate the dog-piling and bad speech. Blocking bad instances could be a way to coerce the administrators of those instances to suspend bad accounts and enforce overall community norms. Maybe I’m just being too optimistic, though.

@ramsey @ceejbot I’ve mentioned this in a similar thread before - this is exactly how Fidonet worked. Instead of instances it was individual BBS, and the forums were moderated by making Sysops responsible for the acts of their users. Moderators could ban a BBS with all its users from the whole network(!) if the sysop did not remove a user on request. I was a moderator and I can assure you that sysops helped eagerly to educate their users to follow community rules.

@ceejbot excellent points. One thing I haven’t seen discussed is why he didn’t switch instances to one where the admins wouldn’t listen to the reports? Seems like an easy solution, unless I’m missing something.

@ceejbot - @Fraying had an idea that flips the moderation focus from reports to reported-users and would really limit dogpiling:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8622

@sivy @Fraying *Excellent* suggestion.

@complexadaptive @ceejbot no disagreement there; this conversation was just about identifying behavior patterns that will affect moderation going forward.