I promise this thread has a happy ending. But my beef with the Twit was always that I'm verbose, so bear with me. Try use small few word. :)
Anyway... next thought after WCGW is "What's the fix?" A little tweak to the Admin > Moderation panel and any solo like this could be marked as such, so mods on large instances would know I'm not just a troll, but a menace? Sure, but that's reactive.
Mastodon could also defederate my instance if I, the lone user, had no followers on that instance. 3/
That is, the software itself could be programmed to check how many users the blocked instance had. If it's 1, then it could defederate. If someone else on that instance later follows me, I would be refederated unless my solo had also been fediblocked.
My engineer's brain -- fresh off a day's work -- finally satisfied that I'd found a technical solution to a technical problem, I hit my vape, slurped some beer, and got philosophical... 4/
Because what if I *do* get reported? It can ... might ... probably *will* happen. I'm not exactly an unbiased judge of my users (me). Plus, there's lots of shady squatbags on this planet and I'm... opinionated.
This ain't a technical problem. I can't glibly smirk and blithely code my way out.
I can post a policy: block at will. I can be accountable.
That's the lightbulb word. Accountability. 5/
Because it IS just me, only I am accountable. I have no users to disappoint. I can be blocked and defederated entirely and my instance made moot without any hand-wringing about the other users on my instance. Because there are none.
Hopefully that doesn't happen heheh. I don't think clapping Cruz face beer beanings warranted reporting. But it was Reddit, so.
This brings me to the "What else?" question my brain likes to ask. Gotta future-proof this shit.
Well, if I *do* wanna go public... 6/
Then how do I, some dude, handle moderation? What rules to use? How many strikes for which rule break? These aren't technical problems. I'm not good at solving them. They're reactive.
Maybe generalize the proactive idear about defederating an instance when all of its users are blocked or unfollowed? Not necessarily blocking the instance, but removing from the federated list. Strikes on instance defederation.
Spaghetti-throwing aside, I think there's lessons here... 7/
@notroot when I used to boot up communities and ran one in particular for nearly a decade. This strategy worked really well:
-Define the purpose of the user generated data. What’s the goal of the community content?
-Define moderation guidelines that serve the content goal, and general kindness.
-Issue signalling system for community to self-report.
-Have enough moderators for signal responses and self discovery.
-2-3 warnings
-When banning, reference which moderation guideline.
@notroot When I created paxilprogress.org it was to “bring together people’s experiences around SSRI usage.” This refined over the years to, “support everyone’s personal journey with and away from SSRIs.” Because SSRI discontinuation syndrome was so traumatic, and nothing makes people write like pain (happy people don’t join support groups as often haha), then it skewed further into SSRI withdrawal support. I tried to protect the support-during tone via informed consent.
@notroot The technique is to never be an open free-for-all database for people to journal in. A service provider has a purpose in life, and data has no intrinsic value. So define the parameters for assigning value to content, and for you to get value from it. The goal(s) don’t have to be too specific, or they can. There’s plenty of opportunity to be more open at first, then refine, or be more specific at first and then relax.