Fediverse

Fediverse has a bonus in that you know you are in a bubble. Where social media giants make bubbles for you silently with their Ais.

And herein lies the problem with the mega sites - moderation. You just can't staff for that many zillions of people without looking toward automation to protect the bottom line.

Historically, even larger communities - forums and such, would enlist mods who were actually members of those sub-forums/SIGs, to perform the less than enviable task to maintaining order in the community. Mostly from trolls and list bullies, because politicization has created a mostly newer dynamic in super large communities policed by the proprietors.

Problems such as these exist even here in the Fediverse, on instances like mastodon.social and many of the huge asian instances, although the latter are generally more focused, rather than generalized, and the members generally better behaved.

The beauty of this all in the Fediverse has been touched on several times even in this thread:

One can move instances, one can filter undesirable actors as well as instances, and instance admins can apply policy of what that particular instance will tolerate from other instances. Theoretically, if there are bad actors at one instance, the admin seeing this in the feeds on another can contact the admin of instance that is home to the bad actors - and this is indeed the recommended approach. Too many naive admins are quick to pull the trigger however, and end up disenfranchising themselves from instances that have many friends interacting with their own userbase. But it the remote admin doesn't engage when requested, there is little choice and the instance can be blocked.

In my ToS's for most of my platforms, the FAQ lists a question, "Do you allow Porn?" The short answer for most instances is yes, but media is blurred, with options to filter media, block actors that don't mark content NSFW or receive reportings from my users, and ultimately, just whack a whole instance - a combination of all of those in several of my MRFs are present.

Heck, I didn't even block Gab at first (I thought, it can't be as bad as they are saying), when they initially came online, but then I started seeing swastika shit coming through the pipe and thought, "fuck that, my users don't want to see that, and I didn't want to deal with the (and I believe very few when compared to the huge userbase they have) plethora of bad actors spewing things just because it will incite anger from folks combing through the fedi streams. The whole decision took about a week and then I was like, "Oh no fuck that shit".

There's some pretty militant hate sites on the other side of the spectrum too, and after giving them opportunities for their admins to reign in their bad actors, what was needed was a "Complete defederation" with them too.

Basically, I've found that simply setting, "Media is forced NSFW" along with, "Posts are removed from the federated timeline" usually does the trick, and still permits local users to engage with people they wish to.

The way I've seen it for the past 30+ years is that, if I'm not getting complaints from my users or admins of other systems then I'm doing my job and it's all good. And I still run an active FidoNET node (1:102/127) from decades ago when I first started offering dial-up Internet access (to the NSFnet) and nobody even knew what that was.

Everyone needs a place for them to go. And they should have it. Maybe not in my town square, but the Fediverse does indeed serve to accommodate all in a decentralized network that can look accordingly different from where you're peering into it from, and that's a good thing, because it breaks the freaking backs of the FacePlants and removedters and InstaSPAMs of this world, and returns us to a newer kind of network of true communities where people can interact locally as well as remotely with one another - without being nicely packaged for consumption by the privacy invading aggregators of destruction.