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

@Stealcase Like, to put not too fine a point on it: suggesting a policy of "multiple warnings before a ban" essentially means "sacrificing the safety of a number of community members for the comfort of a bad-faith actor and keeping up an outside appearance of faux objectivity".

That's basically what you're suggesting here. I would suggest learning more about the moderation culture here, who it is meant to serve (hint: not onlookers on birdsite), and why that culture exists.

@Stealcase It is completely absurd to institute some arbitrary threshold of "multiple violations" as a hard rule, and that only serves to give bad actors more room to be abusive.

It's noticeable how much more concerned you seem to be about the person doing the harassing than about the person being harassed.

@Stealcase "Just block someone who harasses you" is how you create a toxic environment, and inclusivity is certainly not attained by tolerating abusive behaviour. "Keeping up appearances" is not the goal here.

The rules on that instance are very clearly defined, and they exist for good reason. If you cannot or do not want to understand the concept of community safety, then frankly there is nothing for me to further discuss here.

@oct2pus @Dee Oh oh I remember converting an old CD drive into a latched rubber band shooter

@Stealcase What I mean with "I doubt it would have mattered" is that the user in question seemed to be actively looking for a fight, and so would likely have responded roughly the same if they got a warning instead of a ban. In other words, it would not make the "terrible PR" go away.

@probgoblin @ajroach42 Oh, believe me, I've talked XMPP's folks ears off for years about the poor UX and how that was harming adoption.

But no, that definitely wasn't the only reason - it was already dead (for its intended purpose) before Discord and such showed up on the scene, just the 'UX delta' with proprietary platforms has been steadily increasing ever since.

The two issues feed into each other, really; bad UX was a problem from the start, and that's what allowed GTalk to become popular as an XMPP client very quickly, being actually reasonably usable.

But the other way around, Google tearing a large strip off the network has significantly cut down on the amount of people that *could* have been fixing the UX, and led to some problematic "outcast" internal community dynamics further preventing it from improving...

So by now it is all miles removed from the 'state of the art', and community inertia means that it'll probably remain that way forever, despite a handful of clients trying to be better :/

@luci @AgathaSorceress@eldritch.cafe Precisely this, it is very much incentivized by Twitter and platforms like it, and people *do* unfortunately carry that over elsewhere...

@f0x your app is a ~distributed system~ now

@Stealcase I don't know whether a reason was specified, as the only available screenshot is incomplete. If it wasn't, then that is a legitimate problem.

However, in this context, I very much doubt it would have mattered - because people who are genuinely confused normally *ask* what the reason is, rather than immediately picking the most contentious reason available and publicizing it. I've seen that pattern *a lot* as a moderator, and it rarely bodes well for their intentions.

And yes, Mastodon is also not entirely free of this sort of thing, and that is a problem. But that's orthogonal to my point - I'm specifically talking about this particular incident.

@Stealcase @welshpixie Reading the conversation around this over on the Twitter side, I'm frankly unconvinced that a different policy would have helped any here.

Approximately nobody in the replies or QTs has asked for more context about what happened - they're all taking the person at their word that it was "censorship of art". The clarification posted in one of the subthreads by someone else, has been mostly ignored.

This is exactly the "looking for a fight" dynamic that I've seen *so often* on Twitter, where some popular vocal person makes an accusation and all of their followers blindly follow it and start harassing the target, retroactively justifying things as necessary.

IME, you can't do anything against that sort of behaviour. They'll consider *whatever* slight against them to be grounds for harassment, whether it's a (temp) ban or a warning. If they were given a warning, I very much doubt they'd be crying "censorship" any less.

@welshpixie I think this is probably a universal experience among (harm-prevention-oriented) community moderators... I certainly recognize it from my moderation duties outside of fedi as well

@nova@hachyderm.io It may be worth posting a "request for offers" on LowEndSpirit - there's mostly small providers hanging around there that can often do custom requirements. Likewise there's LowEndTalk, but that's a considerably less friendly place nowadays, unfortunately. Both have a reasonable chance of success especially for a community service, though.