While the corporate silos remove safeguards, I think the fediverse should accelerate privacy and safety initiatives.

It starts with the leadership.

Developers like me.

Who start initiatives and divert funding to those in our community who are making progress in these regards.

https://respectfulplatforms.org

@dansup I certainly agree that developers like you have a big role to play in helping the fediverse accelerate privacy and safety features.

With Pixelfed's momentum you have some great opportunities to show leadership here by prioritizing safety.

• as a coder, lead by example. Implemement moderation roles and a dashboard. Prioritize fixing open safety- and moderation-related bugs.

• as somebody who's started an initiative that's getting funding, you can be a role model by diverting a lot of it to moderators on pixelfed.social and other instances you run, moderators in the community, and safety-focused developers in the Pixelfed and the broader fediverse communities.

Those are only a couple of ideas, there are other ways as well.

@thenexusofprivacy I appreciate the feedback, and wonder if we can schedule a voice or text chat to discuss this further.

I'm great at building, but I admit that I'm starting to get in over my head managing everything, so I welcome your advice and the opportunity for you to advise us in getting this right!

Let me know!

@dansup It's the classic "good problem to have but still a problem." With the growth rates of pixelfed.social and Pixelfed in general -- as well as Loops -- I can certainly see why you're feeling like you're in over your head.

So my advice in general is to prioritize safety and moderation even if it means doing less. Defer UX improvements and maybe even onboarding until you've made progress on safety. Close registration on pixelfed.social until you have a mod team in place and a path to paying them that makes it sustainable. Like I said in another thread, the opportunity won't go away.

@thenexusofprivacy I agree with most of what you said, but closing pixelfed.social registration would be detrimental to the success of our project.

People are not looking for a decentralized Instagram alternative, they are looking for a Instagram alternative.

If we don't capture the hype, and prepare them for other servers, they will most likely join some VC funded app.

The bigger picture view is important here, and one I think you'd understand.

BlueSky Flashes are no better, in fact worse.

People are looking for an Instagram alternative where they don't have to deal with hate, harassment, and illegal content. If you really want to look at the bigger picture, you need to take safety into account.

Large instances are much harder to moderate than small instance. Instances with open registration attract harassers, people who want to spew hate speech, scammers, and worse. Until you have a moderation team, and the software to support them, in place, you're living on borrowed time.

"If we don't capture the hype, and prepare them for other servers, they will most likely join some VC funded app."

Look at what's happened with Mastodon. Instead of prioritizing safety functionality, in early 2023 Eugen changed the default so that people would sign up on .social ... and growth flatlined. When people have a bad experience on the flagship instance, it turns them off the patform as a whole

Do you really want Pixelfed to get a reputation as a place so loosely moderated that people get harassed -- or worse, as a place where you can find content that's so bad (even illegal) that it's blocked on Instagram and Bluesky?

BlueSky Flashes are no better, in fact worse.

In what way>. It seems to me that Flashes has a big advantage over Pixelfed on the moderation front: they build on Bluesky's AppView and other infrastructure, they leverage Bluesky's omderation -- automated tools, 100+ contract moderators, labeling from composable moderation like Blacksky.

Of course, Pixelfed has advantages of its own. And many people don't want to be on a VC-funded, currently-mostly-centralized platform, so even if Flashes is successful your market isn't going away.

@dansup