The Nexus of Discussions

It is a huge workload so kudos to you for taking it on -- it's great to see things moving forward!@Gina @fosstodon

Great to hear!@fedify @nivenly @hollo

@natematias really interesting thread, thanks for the summary, and looking forward to digging into the article!

@WeirdWriter excellent points! On #1 and #2, I don't know of any projects with that functionality currently.

@brayd yeah, the inabiity to undo defederation -- and the way people don't get notified -- certainly means it's a big impact. My impression is that instances that have been around for a while generally do understand how big the impact is, especially when it's larger instances getting defederated ... but, hard to know, and of course there are so many instances around that there are always plenty of exceptions!

I agree. Names can be reclaimed; or, once the community regroups and charts a different path they can continue under a different name if it turns out that makes more sense. In any case, getting the people from the community who want to move forward together is a great first step. It might or might not work, but certainly worth a try!@Gina@jwildeboer

Great question @Edelruth . FOSS is an acronym for "Free and Open Source Software" -- sometimes written as F/LOSS for "Free/Libre and Open Source Software"And excellent post @daemon_nova, thank you for taking the time to write it out so clearly!

@ryan progress is good! although hmm that also makes the implementation of being able to control it from the admin dashboard a lot easier so there's even less of an excuse ...

@mttaggart yep. great analogy.

Yeah, it is very frustrating that there's no way to know what followers you've lost. The whole thing is frustrating!And fosstodon probably was listed on instance directories. It really is a dilemma for new people ... when I look at joinmastodon.org's directory it includes some instances that are widely blocked, but for people who don't know about instance catalogs there's no way to discover this. Recently I've seen several people referring to a post that one of fosstodon's admin apparently made about pronouns back in 2019, but that's not the kind of thing a newcomer could discover. Similarly unless you're following the right people, there's almost no trace of the English-only incident, the incident where they clarified that it violated their code of conduct, refer to a white supremacist as a Nazi, or the incidents related to anti-PoC and anti-LGBTQ+ moderation. Specifically with Fosstodon, one tip-off of potential problems at the time you signed up was the "no politics" rule in the CoC. Rules like that (even when they're well-intentioned) are in practice racist and anti-trans. But even there, it's not like the CoC specifically said "we're racist and anti-trans;" you'd have to read it closely and realize the implications of the rule. And there are plenty of problematic instances wehre the rules are fine, they're just not enforced (or enforced discsriminatorily), so while that might have worked here, it's not a magic bullet.@jbqueru

Yeah, time will tell. And at this point even if they do back down it's not clear how much that'll change things. "OK fine we'll do something about this fascist now that everybody's threatening us with defederation" is somewhat better than not doing something about it, but still not great. Tiem will tellAnyhow great posts @jasmine ! One good thing about incidents like this is I find new people to follow!@sillyCoelophysis

PDS = "personal data store", the servers in Bluesky's architecture that store posts and media. It's possible for people to host their own PDSs, but today 99.9% of the people there use Bluesky's.There isn't an exact equivalanet of a PDS in Mastodon; an instance stores data (like a PDS) but also does other stuff that on Bluesky is part of other servers (AppViews, Feed Generators, etc.). ActivityPods is an interesting project to do a Mastodon-compatible server that also allows for data portability ... it's sill work in progress, but promising. @Mons1serrata @mastodonmigration

The shoutout is richy deserved, @_elena -- I've learned so much from your experiences, and I really appreciate all the time you put into both exploring and communicating what you've learned!And yes @FediTips ' work is also incredibly valuable -- very complementary.

Thanks very much for the invitation! I was able to register so am hopefully @jon ... it's a great example of the usability challenges: now that I've signed up though it's not clear what to do next, my default feed is empty (makes sense, I'm not following anybody yet) but what am I supposed to do? And for that matter, i wanted to be @jdp23@social.communitarium.org and chose that for the shortname for my initial channel but apparently that wasn't the right approach. Oh well. These things are all fixable but the project never got critical mass in the community to get stuff like this fixed. Still, looking forward to playing with it!And this is all intensely political, so agreed about the political aspects. Here's some of my perspectives on that - https://privacy.thenexus.today/if-not-now-when/ and https://privacy.thenexus.today/strategies-for-the-free-fediverses/@baslow @onepict

An interesting followon to the Bluesky verification discussion I haven't seen discussion of over here: @aviva.gay introduced the ability for users to appoint their own "Trusted Verifiers" to their bluesky alt client, deer.socialOK, relatively few people adopt alternate clients, so this doesn't immediately help everybody (just like phanpy's UI doesn't help the vast majority of people who run the official Mastodon apps and don't even know about the alterantives). Still, it's a signficiant development, and there's a lot to learn.Speaking of a lot to learn, here's a very good thread about Trusted Networks and how it relates to "verification" -- so I wanted to add it here as well. https://bsky.app/profile/rhalin.bsky.social#bluesky

@scott agreed that trans and queer people generally feel more free to be themselves in larger cities (both in the Philipines than here) and that's a good thing. But as somebody who's lived in the Castro -- the queerest part of San Franciso, which is probably one of the queerest cities in the US and home to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence -- even in enclaves like that there's still plenty of discrimination, harassment, hate, etc. And it's the same dynamic in the fediverse. There are plenty of trans- and queer-friendly instances and that's great, one of the real strengths and uniqueness of the fediverse. Then again, there's also plenty of hate and harassment out there, from anti-trans instances and people, defederation helps but isn't a complete solution. And (here as elsewhere) there are structural issues, such as the way that almost all of the resources and press attention goes to cis people, and very little to trans people.

Thank you for calling attention to this! Even though I've seen other discussions, it makes a huge difference when the editor of OS News is also talking about the problem!@thomholwerda @osnews

@FediPact thanks for spotting this! apparently they've said they'll continue to use the threads.net address for federation so the existing block should theoretically continue to work, at least for now ... still i agree with the recommendation, any instance who's blocking threads.net should block threads.com as well just in case they have they "accidentally" has a "bug".