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

@Stealcase Again: this is an imaginary problem. This is well-established policy on mastodon.art, it is very specifically *the reason that people are there*. It is not the job of an instance to look good in public; its job is to protect its community. And mastodon.art does so.

That is frankly where the conversation ends. If this does not sit well with you, then that is ultimately *your* problem, and I would once again implore you to learn more about *why* moderation culture is what it is here.

@Stealcase All of those 25k users signed up for that instance by themselves, with clearly defined rules. Those who do not like them, can sign up elsewhere. This is very clearly working fine, and has been for a long time. You are conjuring a problem into existence that doesn't actually exist.

I also have actively moderated communities for many years, and my remaining patience for moderation models that serve abusers (which *particularly* includes legalistic moderation) is firmly at zero. I do not have any interest in further discussing warning policies.

@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.