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.

( Original thread, preserved )