I'm talking about all of the misogyny crap today because folks keep speaking for me and saying I'm one of Fedi's big boosters.
It's true, I do prefer this place to corporate driven social media. But I want to be abundantly clear, I don't feel welcome here. Not really.
I get garbage sent my way that would give you therapy bills. And largely, as a quirk of decentralization, most of you won't ever see it.
Fedi is like being gaslit, every time I use it. And I need to flipping say that.
Yeah, I feel that, I've definitely touched up against some pretty insane parts of the Fediverse. Honestly it's kind of difficult to get an overview sense of the general vibe of the place because of how odd and messy federation (and defederation) works.
Everything will be smooth sailing for the most part and then you run into these people with these crazy groups of people following them around who will target you for some percieved slight, and then just as quick you never see them again.
@contrasocial I think a big problem is that folks see "Fediverse" as "big Mastodon instances" and not all of the little actors out there who can ruin a day with hate speech, terrifying images, etc. A big part of that is the (often great) job of moderation, where dark corners are quickly cut off, but not from everyone.
@vkc the issue if that you have your own server, sadly dozen of server are unmaintained, or hosted by morront mysoginistic ... so if you don't defederate them you are toast.
I have both the hardware and the knowledge to run my own server but i won't as i don't have time to do the defederation / moderation.
maybe ask @jerry if he can (kindly) give you an easy to use list of server to defederate so they cannot annoy you anymore ?
@vkc I appreciate you. You're welcome here.
I feel that moderation tools on Fedi is lacking. There should be a way for smaller instances to follow the moderation decisions of larger, more well-moderated instances. Maybe in the form of a community blocked users and instances list that updates in real time, and instances can choose to follow that 100%, or apply whitelists and blacklists to it.
Maybe multiple block lists, like we do with ad blocking.
@nthelt @vkc there is a working way!
some form of community blocklists - well, they are 'shared blocklists' but they contain also exchange between some of the well moderated instances - see https://codeberg.org/nev/awesome-fediadmin/#basic-blocklists
some good resources also from @iftas at https://about.iftas.org/library/denylist-resources/
some instances publish their blocklists in raw, importable, form.
mastodon allows importing whole blocklists (but not automatically)
#GoToSocial allows subscribing to any blocklist on the internet and it will update in short intervals as they change.
GoToSocial also has a very fine-grained control if a post can be commented on, or boosted - including approvable requests to do so.
(btw, also some GTS devs block mastodon.social on their own instances because of "not good" moderation on that huge instance)
is it obvious i'm using gts?
also, I think terms "blacklisting" and "whitelisting" is not appropriate to use. most use terms such as blocklist and denylist.
@vkc Very sorry you have to put up with all this, and thank you for speaking up about it.
Truly, truly disappointed in the community here, and the lack of tools for people to defend themselves.
When people say "Veronica loves the Fediverse", they remove my agency from this place. I'm a character. They're the narrator. I don't like that.
I think for a lot of folks, Fedi is sweet. It's quiet. It's slow. But for many, many, many of us, it's this slow-rolling insanity machine where you see the WORST THINGS and nobody else does.
And to be frank and clear, I'm just talking about things from my white US perspective. I don't even get the worst of it, and I recognize that.
What I've shared today is just *annoying*. It isn't the level of malevolence that I've seen.
I've had stuff sent my way that I have nightmares about. I won't share that crap. But annoying stuff? I'm not holding that back anymore- you-all are getting called out.
