Hm, yeah I guess no one has been speculating about this part of the de/federate Threads reality. Everyone’s worried about Meta and EEE, but what we should have really been discussing is the history of Meta moderation and community guidelines which have often cited “free speech” when people use white supremacist dog whistling but cite “calls to violence” when people of color actively complain about white supremacy.
There’s a reason why we have seen news articles about large LEO Facebook groups trading and making joke comments on racist memes…
We were worried about the technology, but we should have been worried about cultural infiltration.
Oh, we haven’t been speculating about moderation because that’s a known quantity. A major driver of defederarion discussion on the microblogging side of the fedi has been about the moderation issues that people would have to deal with if federated with Threads. And especially about bad actors on Threads getting posts from users on defederated instances via intermediary sites, and then spotlighting vulnerable people to trolls on other instances.
It’s why many niche Mastodon instances are talking about defederating from any other site not blocking Threads. It’s a significant mental safety risk for vulnerable people in the alt-right’s sights.
I’m not an “early adopter” of the Fediverse per se, but I came over on the reddit migration on June 11. I feel like I’ve been an information sponge trying to wrap my head around the organization of the Fediverse and seeing the benefits. I think I’m pretty up to speed, at least enough to discuss it with people offline and explain it in a way that does it some justice.
But I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the drawbacks of the Fediverse. I’ve seen a few threads about major privacy concerns related to the Fediverse, but most of the comments responding just kind of hand wave the issue.
Seeing a possible larger issue here regarding the moderation issues, I can’t see anything other than a total containment of Threads away from other instances. Like, great - use ActivityPub, but don’t talk to me (kbin.social) or my child (literally everything else that wants to interact together in the Fediverse with kbin) again. Lol
Exactly. What happens when a far-right troll like libsoftiktok sics thousands of rabid followers on a fediverse account? I get the feeling our small, volunteer group of moderators just don’t have the resources to cover that kind of brigading.
Also, I don’t think moderation can even stop brigading or the downvotes to hell avalanche. It could only stop thread and comment creation on just your one community/magazine on your instance.
Nothing could stop a bad faith actor from finding my comments on a different instance and harassing or brigading me there if that instance federated with Threads, even if my instance defederate from Threads.
Well, at least downvotes isn’t going to be much of a problem, as threads users will only be capable of upcoming stuff they see here. They don’t have a downvote button. :)
They will be able to send swarms of trolls to harass. If Threads does even federate, I suspect even admins who didn’t sign the fedipact will defederate quite fast.
The way the Fediverse is designed you need to actively seek out content. It’s not going to be all that easy being a troll from threads attacking content on the Fediverse.
What I could imagine is that bigots might seek out LGTBQIA+ hashtags (along with hashtags related to other culture war dimensions), and find content from the Fediverse that way,
Then again, if that proves to be a problem, sites like Blahaj will probably be pretty darn quick to defederate. And this type of content, even when posted by kbin or Lemmy.world users or whatever, will probably often take place in communities hosted by instances like blahaj. So the thread trolls would find themselves isolated from the discussion pretty fast.
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of queer people who use threads. If all servers immediately defederate from it, these people will never get to have a glimpse into the fediverse. They could benefit a lot from joining a different platform, but if we focus only on the bigots we’ll end up never reaching them.
The same logic of course applies to other communities affected by the anti woke culture war bullshit, I’m just too lazy to come up with a more original example. :)
That’s different though - it’s going here and actively creating a user and settling. Interactions with Mastodon users are mostly limited to special interest groups and microblogs I feel, even though we’re all in the same network.
Hm, yeah I guess no one has been speculating about this part of the de/federate Threads reality. Everyone’s worried about Meta and EEE, but what we should have really been discussing is the history of Meta moderation and community guidelines which have often cited “free speech” when people use white supremacist dog whistling but cite “calls to violence” when people of color actively complain about white supremacy.
There’s a reason why we have seen news articles about large LEO Facebook groups trading and making joke comments on racist memes…
We were worried about the technology, but we should have been worried about cultural infiltration.
Oh, we haven’t been speculating about moderation because that’s a known quantity. A major driver of defederarion discussion on the microblogging side of the fedi has been about the moderation issues that people would have to deal with if federated with Threads. And especially about bad actors on Threads getting posts from users on defederated instances via intermediary sites, and then spotlighting vulnerable people to trolls on other instances.
It’s why many niche Mastodon instances are talking about defederating from any other site not blocking Threads. It’s a significant mental safety risk for vulnerable people in the alt-right’s sights.
I’m not an “early adopter” of the Fediverse per se, but I came over on the reddit migration on June 11. I feel like I’ve been an information sponge trying to wrap my head around the organization of the Fediverse and seeing the benefits. I think I’m pretty up to speed, at least enough to discuss it with people offline and explain it in a way that does it some justice.
But I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the drawbacks of the Fediverse. I’ve seen a few threads about major privacy concerns related to the Fediverse, but most of the comments responding just kind of hand wave the issue.
Seeing a possible larger issue here regarding the moderation issues, I can’t see anything other than a total containment of Threads away from other instances. Like, great - use ActivityPub, but don’t talk to me (kbin.social) or my child (literally everything else that wants to interact together in the Fediverse with kbin) again. Lol
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Exactly. What happens when a far-right troll like libsoftiktok sics thousands of rabid followers on a fediverse account? I get the feeling our small, volunteer group of moderators just don’t have the resources to cover that kind of brigading.
For what it’s worth, LibsOfTikTok’s already getting slapped by Threads’s moderation.
Nope, she has repeatedly had posts reinstated after being initially flagged for hate speech, including that one. Meta knows their audience.
Also, I don’t think moderation can even stop brigading or the downvotes to hell avalanche. It could only stop thread and comment creation on just your one community/magazine on your instance.
Nothing could stop a bad faith actor from finding my comments on a different instance and harassing or brigading me there if that instance federated with Threads, even if my instance defederate from Threads.
This Fediverse stuff is… complex.
Well, at least downvotes isn’t going to be much of a problem, as threads users will only be capable of upcoming stuff they see here. They don’t have a downvote button. :)
They will be able to send swarms of trolls to harass. If Threads does even federate, I suspect even admins who didn’t sign the fedipact will defederate quite fast.
The way the Fediverse is designed you need to actively seek out content. It’s not going to be all that easy being a troll from threads attacking content on the Fediverse.
What I could imagine is that bigots might seek out LGTBQIA+ hashtags (along with hashtags related to other culture war dimensions), and find content from the Fediverse that way,
Then again, if that proves to be a problem, sites like Blahaj will probably be pretty darn quick to defederate. And this type of content, even when posted by kbin or Lemmy.world users or whatever, will probably often take place in communities hosted by instances like blahaj. So the thread trolls would find themselves isolated from the discussion pretty fast.
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of queer people who use threads. If all servers immediately defederate from it, these people will never get to have a glimpse into the fediverse. They could benefit a lot from joining a different platform, but if we focus only on the bigots we’ll end up never reaching them.
The same logic of course applies to other communities affected by the anti woke culture war bullshit, I’m just too lazy to come up with a more original example. :)
I don’t know, a lot of us found our way here from Reddit and Twitter without being federated.
That’s different though - it’s going here and actively creating a user and settling. Interactions with Mastodon users are mostly limited to special interest groups and microblogs I feel, even though we’re all in the same network.