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

@elilla @toni Somewhat tangential but related thought: I also feel like fedi and AP being inspired in their model by centralized 'web 2.0 social media' silos was always going to bite us sooner or later, because it's fundamentally a growth model and not a sustainability model.

Even just its nature of being centered around individuals (as a type of 'public performance') rather than communities naturally invites this kind of culture shift and growth pressure, I think.

@elilla @toni The option to hide QTs entirely would probably be a good idea.

The 'culture shift' thing is a bit complicated. Had it been implemented as opt-in the moment it was proposed (years ago), I don't think such a shift would have occurred, simply because of the opt-in culture that it establishes, ie. it would be treated as something to be wary of by default.

Today, I am less certain, exactly *because* it has taken so long and other implementations have already implemented the feature without the opt-in mechanism, and so they have ended up setting a culture of expectation for the feature being there.

The whole 'pressure to maximise growth' thing I certainly agree on, and it's making a lot of these issues a lot more difficult to resolve because this wasn't headed off at the onset 😕 (And again the bad Mastodon governance plays a significant role here too)

@elilla @toni This is one of the things that would be addressed by an opt-in QT mechanism (but probably not by an opt-out mechanism!), as it would mean that QTs would not be available reliably, which is usually the kind of thing that effectively prevents a culture from forming. It's one of the reasons that an opt-in mechanism was originally proposed.

@toni @elilla (This same problem of "nobody affected has the power to deploy a fix so everybody argues to the death instead" also plays out across a number of other moderation-related issues on fedi, incidentally)

@toni @elilla It's not quite that simple, and the discussion has been rather muddied, unfortunately.

The short summary is:
- QTs serve as a tool for harassment especially for privileged white folks.
- QTs also serve as an important online equivalent of certain aspects of Black culture (I can't recall the name right now, sorry).
- These two needs are (mostly) reconcilable by making QT support a choice of the person being QT'ed.

The problem is that an opt-in (or opt-out) implementation of QTs has not been forthcoming for reasons of governance failure in Mastodon, and this has created fertile ground for endless shitfights *among users* where this whole nuance of 'varying demographics and needs' is drowned out by a flattened representation of the issue where 'forced absence' and 'forced presence' of the feature are considered the only two options.

Essentially, because nobody has the power to actually fix the problem in the implementation, all the energy goes into *arguing badly about* the problem instead, even though a solution has been known for a long time by this point.

@Gaelan Written for the target demographic, perhaps? 😅

@mfierst @bert_hubert (Of het geheel binnen eigen beheer opbouwen, natuurlijk, maar daar lijkt binnen het neoliberale politieke frame nogal een taboe op te rusten.)

@mfierst @bert_hubert Ik geef het een 50/50 kans dat de ICTers dit wel degelijk aan zagen komen, maar dat er bijvoorbeeld van hogerhand geeist is dat het binnen een reguliere aanbesteding gedaan moet worden met een budget dat specifiek is toegespitst op de kosten van de Microsoft-wolk, en dan hou je als ICT-aanbesteder niet echt opties over.

Immers, om een lokale markt op te bouwen van aanbieders die op dergelijke schaal diensten kunnen leveren, zul je eerst in die markt moeten investeren en (als grote partij) commitments moeten maken om die diensten in de toekomst af te nemen, anders is het voor niemand rendabel om het uberhaupt te proberen. Maar dat lijkt moeilijk te zijn binnen het gebruikelijke 'kant-en-klaar' aanbestedingstraject...

@bert_hubert Bedankt voor al het werk dat je hiervoor doet.

Ik vermoed dat we best wat verschillen in politieke uitgangspunten hebben, maar je hebt absoluut gelijk op dit punt, en ik waardeer je doortastendheid in het ter sprake brengen erg. Dergelijke doortastendheid is veel zeldzamer dan het zou moeten zijn!

@jonny I feel like there's two separate issues at play here, in that "insular response" and "lack of governance structure" are two separate things.

The lack of a governance structure/process of some kind is indeed a problem, though one that IMO is subject to the exact same power dynamics as the 'politics of fascism'; in that there are a handful of 'figureheads' who de facto hold decisionmaking power regardless of the intentions of anyone else around governance (and who don't seem very interested in sharing or making space).

The "insular response" is more complicated though. Many (especially marginalized) folks are here not because they signed up to 'fix society', but because they were seeking refuge personally, in a social space that is made for them, where they are not excluded like they are everywhere else.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: is it actually even reasonable to essentially draft some of the most vulnerable and lowest-spoons folks into becoming responsible for fixing world politics? *Can* you actually expect "fedi" as a whole to be the solution here?