Hm, yeah I guess no one has been speculating about this part of the de/federate Threads reality. Everyone’s worried about Meta and EEE, but what we should have really been discussing is the history of Meta moderation and community guidelines which have often cited “free speech” when people use white supremacist dog whistling but cite “calls to violence” when people of color actively complain about white supremacy.
There’s a reason why we have seen news articles about large LEO Facebook groups trading and making joke comments on racist memes…
We were worried about the technology, but we should have been worried about cultural infiltration.
Oh, we haven’t been speculating about moderation because that’s a known quantity. A major driver of defederarion discussion on the microblogging side of the fedi has been about the moderation issues that people would have to deal with if federated with Threads. And especially about bad actors on Threads getting posts from users on defederated instances via intermediary sites, and then spotlighting vulnerable people to trolls on other instances.
It’s why many niche Mastodon instances are talking about defederating from any other site not blocking Threads. It’s a significant mental safety risk for vulnerable people in the alt-right’s sights.
I’m not an “early adopter” of the Fediverse per se, but I came over on the reddit migration on June 11. I feel like I’ve been an information sponge trying to wrap my head around the organization of the Fediverse and seeing the benefits. I think I’m pretty up to speed, at least enough to discuss it with people offline and explain it in a way that does it some justice.
But I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the drawbacks of the Fediverse. I’ve seen a few threads about major privacy concerns related to the Fediverse, but most of the comments responding just kind of hand wave the issue.
Seeing a possible larger issue here regarding the moderation issues, I can’t see anything other than a total containment of Threads away from other instances. Like, great - use ActivityPub, but don’t talk to me (kbin.social) or my child (literally everything else that wants to interact together in the Fediverse with kbin) again. Lol
The thing is, because minority-targeting trolls aren’t taken seriously by any corporate social media platform, there’s no big downside compared to them. It’s just that them showing up here is effectively taking the safer space these communities they’ve built away from them, returning things to basically how they were just before they fled those other spaces.
They were made safe not due to the tools, but due to obscurity, and they’re about to lose that obscurity.
This is… I don’t want to call it a “good thing”, because people who have suffered many assholes suffering them all over again is in no way, shape, or form good, but it’s highlighting an issue that’s been clear to these communities, but not to developers on the Fediverse: The moderation tools here are hot, sweaty garbage.
Hopefully we can see serious movement on making useful tools now.
Supporting free speech means allowing people you hate to talk too. Censor a Nazi one day, then the next day it’s something your weird friend likes, then the next day it’s something you like.
Everyone deserves a platform online, but they have to earn their audience. Censoring them is only going to make more people want to go to other platforms to hear and see what they have to say.
That’s just common misconception. Free speech is there to protect people from the government, not business. If my anti-racism voice gets suppressed on Threads (assuming I ever make an account there) I’d just move to another platform.
And really, there’s no good reason for a well-intended internet community to allow racism expand.
Racism will expand if you censor it.
How many racists have a big audience? And I mean openly, explicitly racist. Not the dog-whistle racism from Fox news.
People have been censored by automated systems for just criticizing racists. Yes, that means that all the people who call them out for being shitty get censored too.
𝓓𝓮𝓯𝓮𝓭𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓽𝓮
If all instances defederate it will force people to hand their data over to Zuckerberg to access the bigger network, and they will have no control over what shite the algorithm pushes into their timeline.
There’s a very good case for some instances to defederate. All of them defederating would be a terrible mistake.
There is no strategical alliance to be made with Meta. That company literally complicitly hosted the platform for a genovide to be planned.. There is no outsmarting, strategic federating or any sudden interest on their side involved. Its all a plot to wring people out in the most heinous way they can get away with.
What exactly would any fediverse user be getting out of this? Why would Meta have any interest in giving us anything, even attention?
