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

@crash I would say that I'm interested in both, mainly because I'm not sure that it *can* be made more sustainable in this model, from what I've seen so far. I would certainly be open to solutions in that area, but I'm not holding my breath, basically

@crash I would agree in an idealized sense, but in practice people come in with preconceived notions based on past interactions with entirely different groups and cultural norms, and often it isn't all that easy to show why something works that way, even if it seems obvious to the people embedded into that community...

Past experiences can significantly color how a person observes things that they see in front of them, and which aspects of it they do or don't perceive, even if that isn't a conscious process. This problem gets worse the more your community deviates from widespread social norms

@crash I try to do the same, but I've never seen this actually be sustainable in the long term :/ Just gradually burning out the people doing this, especially on hotly debated topics

@crash (But I have no idea what that something might look like exactly)

@crash I think that part of the problem with that approach is exactly that it is easy for the new perspective to drown in books worth of recycled discussion, because the newcomer has no idea what has already been discussed... I would like to see something more sustainable, that scopes the conversation to those new perspectives specifically

Polycule expansion day?

... is this literally the reason that the Bible, Quran, etc. exist?

I feel like one of the most fundamental problems of open-access (including online) communities is the asymmetry of policymaking discussions.

If you have made a well-considered but unintuitive policy decision, and you have already done all the work of reasoning through the implications, an influx of new people will forever keep trying to recycle discussions that you've already had and are already tired of.

But the people newly coming in have never had this discussion before, and are not familiar with the rationale! And even if they are willing to 'take the culture as it is' and learn it gradually over time, it's very difficult to know what is expected of you without having access to the background.

And so you end up with the same discussions and arguments being rehashed over and over again, eventually burning out the people doing the policymaking and causing the whole thing to fall apart.

And so far, I have not seen any credible mitigations for this problem, because "read the manual before doing anything" is an unreasonable ask and so is "you will just have to accept that those are the rules", in the general case.

@tchambers It is of course your choice what policy you implement on your instance, but I see one big issue in that rationale:

Consent is something that can only ever be given by the person affected, to the degree that they are comfortable in giving it. It cannot be extrapolated from consent given for something kinda sorta similar.

The consent to federate, for instance, is given for a very specific subset of systems (other AP implementations) in a very specific cultural context with very specific expectations. You do not need to understand or agree with those constraints; that simply is the extent of the consent that was given.

You cannot then take something that is not an AP instance, go "this is kind of the same, so therefore I will interpret you as having consented, even though you haven't and you're actively objecting". That is a consent violation, and this sort of 'creative reinterpretation' of consent is very much a big part of the rape culture problem.

There may well be very good reasons that people consent to AP federation but not to BlueSky bridging. You may not be aware of those reasons, you may be aware but disagree with them, it doesn't matter - those are the boundaries that some people have set, and that's the end of that conversation.

To reiterate, what policy you implement on your own instance is your own choice, but I think you should be a lot more careful about the implications of what you say regarding *other* people's choices, even (or especially) if you know Ryan personally.

(Yes, I am aware that the post also says "there may be legitimate reasons to block them". But it still tries to extrapolate consent, instead of acknowledging that people's 'correctness' fundamentally does not matter here.)