The takeaway of the whole #fosstodon incident shouldn't be,
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The takeaway of the whole #fosstodon incident shouldn't be,
"THIS IS WHY MODERATION IS BAD BECAUSE MODS ARE BASICALLY SMALLER VERSIONS OF CENSORSHIP PEOPLE!"
Nor should it be takes like, paraphrasing here, but,
"I had to examine my stance as a moderator, and really examine the kind of community I want to foster, so as a result of this examination, I've concluded that the Fediverse is absolutely no different from anywhere else on the web because people start drama and people are passionate about things."
Despite those eye rollingly dull takes, we can learn something!
There's a few things we can learn from the whole thing.
1. Notifications are important. For offline people, having to wake up to an instance defederation one day seemingly at random isn't a good user experience. Defederations should be an option for email notifications people can check or uncheck.
What Fediverse projects have these kinds of notifications?
2. In app notifications are important. For this, I'd have placeholders where your friends mentions and stuff are, not home timeline, that say, this instance has been blocked, or this instance has been defederated, or something.
Again, I'd love to know what projects already do this, if any.
3. Taking time to craft a meaningful statement would be better than sharing Mastodon post links, well, unless you have an instance with a character limit such as mine. Seriously, instances should be giant walls of text. I'm not joking! It's been proven, over and over again, that short threads are just a bad user experience waiting to happen, but I've long since learned that tech people don't like to make things easier on users so, let's keep chucking on people! I'm sure it will all work out if nothing changes, but moving on,
4. More projects should start pointing to well ran community wiki's on their homepages or similar.
Community documentation is especially good for things that need quick updates and people need to know where exits are. If you don't want to maintain your own Fedi documentation, link to strong community wikis.
If I think of more, I'll edit this post. I've already read 3 blog posts on the subject by privileged dudes that painted this whole issue as drama, and they aren't worth linking to, honestly! You can find them really easily by just reading the hashtag though.
-
The takeaway of the whole #fosstodon incident shouldn't be,
"THIS IS WHY MODERATION IS BAD BECAUSE MODS ARE BASICALLY SMALLER VERSIONS OF CENSORSHIP PEOPLE!"
Nor should it be takes like, paraphrasing here, but,
"I had to examine my stance as a moderator, and really examine the kind of community I want to foster, so as a result of this examination, I've concluded that the Fediverse is absolutely no different from anywhere else on the web because people start drama and people are passionate about things."
Despite those eye rollingly dull takes, we can learn something!
There's a few things we can learn from the whole thing.
1. Notifications are important. For offline people, having to wake up to an instance defederation one day seemingly at random isn't a good user experience. Defederations should be an option for email notifications people can check or uncheck.
What Fediverse projects have these kinds of notifications?
2. In app notifications are important. For this, I'd have placeholders where your friends mentions and stuff are, not home timeline, that say, this instance has been blocked, or this instance has been defederated, or something.
Again, I'd love to know what projects already do this, if any.
3. Taking time to craft a meaningful statement would be better than sharing Mastodon post links, well, unless you have an instance with a character limit such as mine. Seriously, instances should be giant walls of text. I'm not joking! It's been proven, over and over again, that short threads are just a bad user experience waiting to happen, but I've long since learned that tech people don't like to make things easier on users so, let's keep chucking on people! I'm sure it will all work out if nothing changes, but moving on,
4. More projects should start pointing to well ran community wiki's on their homepages or similar.
Community documentation is especially good for things that need quick updates and people need to know where exits are. If you don't want to maintain your own Fedi documentation, link to strong community wikis.
If I think of more, I'll edit this post. I've already read 3 blog posts on the subject by privileged dudes that painted this whole issue as drama, and they aren't worth linking to, honestly! You can find them really easily by just reading the hashtag though.
@WeirdWriter excellent points! On #1 and #2, I don't know of any projects with that functionality currently.
