I was reading some defederation discussion so:
If there's a situation where it's not clear who the bad actors are, or there's at least one & maybe more, how do you navigate that as a moderator, or how do you want your mods to navigate it?
I want to understand the calculation better, like do you trust your gut? Do you vote? I don't think gut checks are bad to be clear, I am a trans person on the internet, I block on gut feelings plenty.
This UFOI thing sounds like a genteel Nazi shield to me?
Generally people concerned about a "fair trial" for things like "are people allowed to block you or not" are people that I want to block, kind of on principle, so I don't think their way is the way.
But I have read some drama on here where it is NOT super clear to me if there's one asshole or if everyone involved sucks in a 5-spidermen-pointing meme kind of way. I think that must be hard to navigate, right?
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@caztastrophe i think blocking based on a protestant idea of like, moral purity is the wrong approach. the question for moderators isn’t “who is morally good and morally evil in this situation” but (a) how can i protect my users and (b) how can i do my job as a moderator
for the first question, it’s usually pretty obvious who is a threat, because they say or do things which are threatening to your users, or they have a pattern of not responding when other people they are accountable for do those things
the second question is harder, because sometimes as a moderator what you’re doing isn’t so much Responding To Active Threats but doing other things to keep the platform running smoothly, like talking out conflicts, de·escalating, etc. so you want to be sure that any instance you’re federating with is an instance which you feel comfortable having those sorts of negotiations with. if your feeling is “there’s no way i, as a moderator, am going to want to talk to the admins on this instance ever,” just IMO, you should defederate with them regardless of whether they did anything “wrong” or “bad” or regardless of why you might feel that way. because you need to be able to do that to do your job properly
bear in mind that many large instances (like mastodon.social) only do the first bit and don’t engage in the second bit at all. so this approach isn’t universal. but for people who view instances not just as technical services but as communities, being able to trust the people doing the community work is paramount. at the end of the day that’s a gut check, but you try your best to keep those feelings in accordance with reality
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@Lady
Yeah I am on team "if this person is an asshole it doesn't matter if they're a technically-correct, morally upstanding asshole, I don't want to hang out with them"
It's just an interesting kind of experiment we're all doing here at a great big scale and I'm really curious about how it works