this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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I'm not an "early adopter" of the Fediverse per se, but I came over on the reddit migration on June 11. I feel like I've been an information sponge trying to wrap my head around the organization of the Fediverse and seeing the benefits. I think I'm pretty up to speed, at least enough to discuss it with people offline and explain it in a way that does it some justice.
But I don't think I've seen a lot of discussion about the drawbacks of the Fediverse. I've seen a few threads about major privacy concerns related to the Fediverse, but most of the comments responding just kind of hand wave the issue.
Seeing a possible larger issue here regarding the moderation issues, I can't see anything other than a total containment of Threads away from other instances. Like, great - use ActivityPub, but don't talk to me (kbin.social) or my child (literally everything else that wants to interact together in the Fediverse with kbin) again. Lol
The thing is, because minority-targeting trolls aren't taken seriously by any corporate social media platform, there's no big downside compared to them. It's just that them showing up here is effectively taking the safer space these communities they've built away from them, returning things to basically how they were just before they fled those other spaces.
They were made safe not due to the tools, but due to obscurity, and they're about to lose that obscurity.
This is... I don't want to call it a "good thing", because people who have suffered many assholes suffering them all over again is in no way, shape, or form good, but it's highlighting an issue that's been clear to these communities, but not to developers on the Fediverse: The moderation tools here are hot, sweaty garbage.
Hopefully we can see serious movement on making useful tools now.
I don't know if you have history on reddit, but the "safety because of obscurity" and having that taken away by increased visibility is absolutely what I lived through as a member of a subreddit called TwoXChromosomes. TwoX was a really welcoming space for women-identifying people to get a breath of fresh air from the constant "equal rights means equal lefts" kind of casual misogyny on the rest of reddit. And then corporate created the "default sub" designation and put TwoX on the list.
I remember the moderators at the time making it very clear to the community that they voiced their dissent but it was happening anyway (wow, what does that sound like?) and now a lot of the posts there get inundated with "not all men" apologists and all the OPs have reddit cares alerts filed on them.
Not disagreeing with your perspective at all, but there at least have been hidden enclaves on platforms like reddit that are not achievable on platforms like Twitter, in which consenting adults could find each other for consenting activities.
You can't do that stuff on Twitter or IG because everything is too out in the open. You can do it on some other websites but they don't have the userbase and broader appeal and legitimacy like reddit had.
Just not sure that there's a way to achieve it in the Fediverse because we're not just talking about the fact that there's a small but hopefully trustworthy group of admins who could wade through everyone's posts and DMs, or surely Google is indexing your comment and post submissions... We're talking about a solicitation of a sensitive nature goes out so much further than you can imagine.
Please know this is not about finding new channels to conduct illegal activity!