Coelacanth

It’s an inherent problem with having both users and communities on the same instances, and just how humans tend to operate in general in that we automatically gravitate to others and clump together.

I think it was @rglullis@communick.news who was saying that in an ideal world there would be two types of instances, one for users and one that only served as hosting space for communities. That way you could block or defederate user groups without losing access to entire communities.

Of course, we’re way past the point where reorganization into a structure like that is feasible. But it’s interesting to think about.

Yes, agreed. Wholesome Yuri being banned might be the most outrageous decision of them all on the banlist, for me.

What’s crazy is they could have simply:

• Apologised
• Explained the intent to reduce toxicity
• Agreed there was a lack of transparency
• Refactored their existing “enable toxicity mode” feature into a clearer, toggleable blocklist feature

Yes, I think there is genuinely an audience for what he was doing (or something akin to it), and it would genuinely have been a useful onboarding tool for getting a certain type of person to consider dipping their toes in the Fediverse.

But first of all it absolutely has to be separated from the safety/anti-spam filters. Bundling it with those is very malicious.

Second it must be opt-in.

Third, it must clearly say somewhere that “this anti-toxic setting is a curated block list based on my personal preferences”. There should then have been an option to use a personal blocklist instead of the developer default.

And fourth, I guess ideally this type of filter should maybe have been maintained by a somewhat more… well-balanced individual.