@jon it’s worth noting that many of the harms you’re talking about trying to prevent are artifacts of other design decisions Twitter made, which mastodon mostly hasn’t yet replicated. So it may be worthwhile to dial down the prescriptiveness a few notches.
meta
@anildash @jon@social.lot23.com Very much this. I'm seeing a lot of assumptions in there about what Mastodon is supposed to be, not the least of which is "optimizing for the majority of the world population".
That's the goal of a startup looking to establish a monopoly. It's not the goal of people building a nice place for themselves and their friends, which just so happens to also be usable by others.
I don't doubt that this is what the data showed in the context of Twitter's goals and context. But even leaving aside that data can be highly misleading for a variety of reasons, Mastodon and the broader fediverse simply *do not* have the same goals and context, and so you cannot port over the conclusions from that data 1:1.
(There are also some quite questionable implications about 'human nature' in there, but that's a separate topic.)
re: meta
@anildash @jon@social.lot23.com Addendum: a specific point where I'm strongly questioning the data is "doesn't increase abuse". How was this measured exactly?
Because marginalized folks have been complaining for *years* that their reports are not being taken seriously, and that they eventually just stopped bothering reporting stuff.
So how did you ensure you were actually measuring abuse, and not just a proxy metric for people's maximum tolerance of bad moderation?
re: meta, antisemitism
@joepie91 @anildash @jon it's especially galling when you report an account called "Eva Braun 88" (not even an exaggerating), with a header image displaying the blood libel myth, who posted nothing but antisemitism and swastikas, glorifying nazis, which, as a reminder, is illegal in Germany, and there's even an option in the reporting tool on German Twitter... and get a reply back the very same minute that there's no violation