Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@robinsyl (And relatedly: I'd rather discuss potential solutions to these sorts of problems with people who *don't* completely ignore the potential implications for other folks of their proposed 'solutions', like this person is doing - because I find that a very self-centered way of approaching the problem)

@virtulis I would say that it's not impossible in this context; and that the answer lies in "accounting for the needs of the people who would be displaced, and explicitly making room for them, even if it comes at the cost of your own inconvenience".

Lots of people on fedi successfully do this, and it doesn't cause issues! But there are also people who don't, and who take a "this should cater to my needs specifically, because I'm used to everything doing so" stance, and that is IMO where it goes wrong.

Adapt to the local culture instead of expecting the culture to adapt to you, is pretty much what it comes down to.

@someonetellmetosleep@queer.party @virtulis Oh, there are certainly some real problems. But these problems have been highlighted by a lot of other people, who *don't* mix those genuine problems in with "I just don't want to make any effort and that's a failure of the platform"-style rhetoric.

It's kind of a similar dynamic to that "they may be evil, but they had some good points" thing (not saying that this person is evil, but for analogy's sake) - that may be true, but there are less shitty people saying the same thing, so why hold up those specific people

@robinsyl But that's the thing, "just suggesting blocking and muting" isn't what happened, there has been a large amount of offers of help: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/111513924065977393

And there's a very big difference between "supporting marginalized folks" and "making privileged folks not experience any discomfort" to begin with, which becomes very obvious in the laconic way they've been commenting on CWs

@virtulis Or to put it differently: a loud enough voice claiming that everything is wrong, will disrupt the culture of "privileged folks are guests of marginalized folks here" proportionally, and it will be marginalized folks paying the cost for that

@virtulis There's a major distinction between random people and "influencers" having such views, though: the latter have significant, well, influence.

Especially for someone who has a *reputation* for nuance (which this person definitely does), their view is likely to influence that of others. At a large enough scale, that worsens the problem of "social pressure to make it more like Twitter", something that has already been causing a lot of trouble and changing the development direction of Mastodon (for the worse, from a marginalized perspective).

Basically this comic: https://webcomicname.com/post/185588404109

@virtulis Or to put it differently: the responses have been almost indistinguishable from the usual tantrums thrown by privileged folks when they are faced with something that, for once, doesn't cater to *them, specifically*.

I was willing to give them more benefit of the doubt given their history, but that is not infinite.

@virtulis I've been tracking the whole thing for a while now, including clicking through to read the replies (sort of a habit when people complain about harassment, because I usually don't see it due to the strict blocking on this instance.)

Things I have seen repeatedly over the past several months:
- People suggesting to move to a different instance, noting that much of the harassment seems to come from a few instances and mas.to is known to be too conservative in blocking these
- People suggesting *specific* other instances to move to
- People offering to host the account on their instance, with a certain moderation/defederation policy
- People explaining extensively and calmly why CWs exist, what problem they solve, and why they are important
- People explaining that Mastodon isn't really made for large amounts of followers or the needs of influencers
- People noting that it's *okay* for Mastodon to not work well for them, it doesn't have to be for everybody

Notably, the annoyed/frustrated comments got angry responses from the person we're talking about. The helpful ones were either ignored entirely, or the response was "I don't want to do that" with either no elaboration or "that's too much work".

Like, the benefit of the doubt has been extended here well beyond what could be reasonably expected, and every form of help or advice has been rejected or ignored.

And there's a point where it just becomes this: https://social.pixie.town/@joepie91/111513879991587108 - and as far as I'm concerned, that point has well been reached by now.

@Vampire And so in the end, to just call it what it is, it essentially evaluates down to "privileged dude is demanding that everybody caters to their desires, damn the consequences for marginalized folks who already have nowhere else to go"

Which is uh, Not Great

@Vampire My problem is more with that this has been explained time and time again, and I have seen basically zero willingness to put in any work, and equally zero effort to understand why things work how they do and that they may simply not be the intended audience (eg. around CWs)

I can understand having a wrong expectation, given eg. the poor reporting in media - but once that understanding has been corrected, if someone insists on retaining the same expectation, *then* it becomes a conscious choice

Also for fucks sake stop automatically assuming that "Mastodon doesn't scale" is a bug! Not everything needs to be global scale! There are other reasons to build platforms!

(Note: we're not talking about unmet needs of marginalized folks here. The dynamics would obviously be very different in such a case. It's more the opposite of that, in this case.)