solarbird | Even on Mastodon, people are a problem

So there’s a discussion going on a few places on Mastodon about toxicity of replies for very-large-follower accounts. GottaLaff has been talking about it some, Technology Connections have been talking about it more, and more aggressively, along with PopeHat.

And what you have to understand is that these people aren’t like some of us, the ones for whom “toxicity” means “death threats” and “national political campaigns against your right to exist.” They mean stuff like “youtuber shouldn’t even be a job.”

There are some people who react to their unhappiness and say, “Fuck ’em, what do they know about toxicity? Look at the nothing they’re complaining about. We don’t need celebrity/influencer/corporatist bullshit here anyway.” As someone who has had death and rape threats at home, school, and work, and as someone who has been at war her entire life and barely even notices people just being generally unpleasant, please believe me when I say I get that reaction. Particularly given the… disparity… between the severity, not just one to one, but even fairly well up the scale.

We get the boulders; they get sand. But thanks to the scale of their follower count, they get a lot of sand. And while it’s easy for someone used to boulders to look at a bit of sand and snort, “Seriously? That’s what’s set you off?” I remind you that enough sand can kill just as effectively as a large boulder – or a bullet.

So I get it. I understand.

But then I put that aside and say, if you don’t want to care about them, individually, fine.

Care instead about the people who want to follow them, because those followers will follow them away.

If you want distributed social to be a thing, if you want not to be a hostage of the latest billionaire to buy out your platform and turn your beloved hellsite into a fascist disinformation fountain and propaganda machine, you have to care about large-account followers, because they have to want to be here too.

And the biggest thing is all that “caring” means – in this particular context – is giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.

They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.

They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.

And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.

After all, that’s why we had all those blocklists.

Do you remember those? The Twitter user blocklists people used to pass around? That was a solution to a worse form of this. The worse form that we’ve substantially (but not completely!) solved through defederation and soloing fascists and white supremacists into their own silos, using the nazi bar phenomenon against them. It’s great!

But that’s not enough if you have 1000 people who are just being dicks.

Even before Musk, those Twitter blocklists kind of stopped being as big a deal, in no small part because pre-Musk Twitter solved the problem (or at least solved it enough) by letting people have better control over their notifications, and over replies to their posts.

Federation solved it for fascists at scale. We have to solve it now for sealions and assholes, because that problem not being solved is what’s starting to drive large-audience people away. And we have to solve it for them because when they leave, they take a bunch of their followers with them.

If you want federated social media to matter, we have to solve this problem, and I think we have to solve it soon. Because there’s a window here – and I think that window is starting to close.

[My replies on the original thread that triggered this posts. It has more details.]

Hey, remember all the Twitter user blocklists people used to pass around?

Remember those? They were important but they became a lot less so after a while because pre-Musk Twitter came up with a way to handle this.

Twitter solved it, now we have to solve it too.

That’s what I think you’re missing. Yes, the version of it Twitter needed to solve was a lot worse for a lot of us. For some of us, “your job shouldn’t even exist” is pretty ignorable when our standard is, “I’m going to kill every fucking one of you faggots and here’s where you live,” right?

Doesn’t make it not a problem, though! People shouldn’t have the kind of armour plating some of us had to grow to be online.

So it is a problem and still needs to be solved, and that’s true even if some of our emotional reactions are “that’s enough to get to you? really?” See again: people shouldn’t have to have the armour plating some of us have.

Does that make it resonate?

I mean, if your admin keeps up with fediblocking (as I work to), then we have solved the worst of it. (That’s a big if, but let’s say you have an on-top-of-shit admin who follows the various fediblock tags and seeks this stuff out.)

But the next tier down isn’t solved at all by fediblock. Yes, the Federation does a really pretty good job of siloing nazis! That’s great! As I’m fond of saying, it’s the first social network to use the Nazi bar phenomenon against nazis!

But that doesn’t do shit about people just being assholes, and having a lot of assholes flock to you may not be life-threatening, but it is terribly, terribly wearying.

And even if you dgaf about “youtube creators” and “influencers” and all that, if we want the Federation to work, we have to care about the people who do. The people who want to follow them.

Which is something those “corporate shill” idiots never seem to comprehend when they’re being assholes in, say, a youtube creator’s replies.

Also, what’s being talked about here really is giving people the ability to curate their own experiences, including in their notifications.

Some people are going to need a base level of help in doing that, right? Again, this goes all the way back to those user blocklists we used to pass around on Twitter. But that’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t even exist here yet.

We need to make it easier for people to curate their own notifications. Right now, there’s not really a way to do it. I use a phone client that groups notifications and that’s really critical for me, and that the web interface doesn’t do it is a huge minus.

Help. People. Curate. Their. Own. Space.

Anyway, I’m genuinely trying to communicate that this actually does matter and the 100% diy slow-solution doesn’t work when the firehose is aimed at you, and Old (pre-Musk) Twitter demonstrated that, and had to come up with a (surprisingly opt-in) solution for it.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.