I don't even want to hear about free speech. You aren't entitled to someone else's attention. Trolling is not a Constitutional right. You want to do that, spin up your own instance.
And certainly, someone could start a free-speech-anarchist instance with all pest controls off. For mastodon.social, though, I think they have a real responsibility to crack down on this shit.
The right to abuse is not about freedom. It silences people. It restricts freedom and expression—it never enhances it.
@csilverman The problem is the lack of transparency. Gargron doesn't make it apparent to new users that he's blocking big chunks of the Fediverse.
@sonya @csilverman oh, m.s is blocking some instances? #til
@csilverman @abackstrom here's some background on this:
1) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/816385
2) https://community.highlandarrow.com/notice/807252
(partisan sources but still good for getting up to speed)
I didn't realize how much of the Fediverse was blocked from .social until I switched to Maly because .social was struggling with bear the traffic. Then I was pissed that this wasn't made clear up-front.
@abackstrom @csilverman IIRC the blocked and/or sandboxed instances are shitposter.club, freezepeach.xyz, gs.smuglo.li, and community.highlandarrow.com
but there may be more that are lower-volume so I'm not aware of them in general, or that I'm forgetting at the moment
@csilverman @abackstrom to be absolutely explicit, I think any instance admin should be able to block whatever other instances they want – but they should also be totally transparent about it with new users, so that people know what they're signing up for
@sonya @abackstrom Oy—sounds like a mess. I'll be honest, shitposter and freezepeach do not sound like sources of high-quality people, but blocking communities out of personal spite is not cool at all.
Obviously admins who want to play God will do whatever they like, and their communities will suffer for it. I think the benefit of a clearly stated CoC, though, would be that you can't just ban people you dislike—there's an expectation that you follow your own rules.
@csilverman it depends on your taste — I would be disappointed to miss out on posts like this :) https://shitposter.club/notice/2301547
@sonya ...hahaha what?
(Or maybe this is essentially performance art for the sake of art, and I shouldn't even be attempting to make sense of something on a site called "Shitposter Club".)
@csilverman that user has a Markov bot hooked up to their account, so it's like half auto-generated nonsense and half human-written posts
I love it
@sonya That's hilarious. I love these things.
I'm trying to avoid any mention of Trump these days, but someone did a Trumpbot—powered, apparently, by a neural network—and the results are fascinating; basically what Trump would say if he was a lot more honest/self-aware:
Honestly, I'm not fully convinced these aren't written by a person. Or maybe I just don't want to admit AI's gotten that smart.
@csilverman it could be that a person curates the Markov output and only posts the best tidbits
I recommend playing around with https://ermarian.net/services/converters/markov/words
it's really fun! song lyrics, article snippets, whatever
@sonya @csilverman @abackstrom
Agree. A simple 'does not federate with' or 'only federates with' (like awoo.space states) on the about would be fine.
What about existing users though? I don't want to have to abandon my account & all its history if, in the future, the admin of my server has a falling out with the admin of another server? (Not that I think that's likely with tchncs.de but if I'd picked another server I might not have been so lucky).
@frankiesaxx @sonya @abackstrom If I'm understanding how this works, as long as you personally aren't banned, you'd still keep your followers and posts—they'd just remain on whatever server you had an account on, and wouldn't be visible to the server that blocked you. That would suck, but I'm not sure how to avoid that.
@frankiesaxx @csilverman @abackstrom yeah, I think that's a tough one. multiple admins of new instances have told me "I don't block any other instances right now, but I reserve the right to decide to" — being able to port your identity and bring your social network with you is *the* key missing feature
@sonya @frankiesaxx @abackstrom Heh. Now I'm envisioning some sort of "Hitchhiker's Guide" for Mastodon instances: a hopefully objective site that lists popular communities and provides specific metrics: level of regulation, maturity of the admins and users, general culture/topics, etc.
A few entries along the lines of "don't sign up here—the admin is a galactic asshole who can't get along with anyone" might help make sure everyone at least tries to keep things cordial.
@csilverman @sonya @abackstrom Haha. TripAdvisor for Mastadon instances!
@frankiesaxx @csilverman @abackstrom my friend @way made a version of that! it doesn't include levels of federation or instance-blocking though http://tooter.today/
@sonya @csilverman @abackstrom @way Oh thanks! I've been kind of poking around the smaller instances and some of the gnu social sites out there to start following interesting people & bringing them into our federation on tchncs. That's gonna help a lot.
@sonya @csilverman @abackstrom Agree. I don't think it's unsolveable but it's probably not a priority at this moment. I imagine back end stuff, load management and scalability and other stuff is probably taking precedence.
I think you can export and load follows and blocks at least, but yeah, I'd ultimately like to see the ability to port an entire account history, including toots, boosts, stars etc.
@abackstrom @sonya Curious, how do you know this? On what grounds is he blocking them?
I couldn't find a Mastodon CoC anywhere. I found this (https://mastodon.social/terms) which, unfortunately, doesn't have anything close to a CoC at all.
I realize that they're still trying to get all their ducks in order and legal docs take time, but having a clear "no abuse" policy seems pretty important, especially given that rampant abuse is the reason why a lot of us are here.