it doesn’t fucking matter. i want every person who wants to fix the fediverse to go and read “Thoughts about Community Support around Intimate Violence” <https://archive.org/details/zabalaza_2009_intimate_violence> and then really reckon with how far away we are from ever implementing ANY of those practices in this space. there is not the will or maturity here to tackle any of the really difficult conversations that an actual community platform would have to grapple with on a regular basis, and technologies of community organizing delivered to a social context where people are more worried about losing their parasocial relationship with some popular account than they are about actual abuse doesn't create communities, it creates cults. and mastodon is a space where time and time again i have seen people pay lip-service to “restorative justice” as a way of justifying allowing abusers to continue sharing a room with them while making those same spaces unsafe for all of their victims. conversations about this never happen because the people who get hurt are forced to leave.

nobody wants to talk about this. there is zero will to do the hard work of fixing it. but you think maybe by distributing posts a little differently, things would improve? the beef between myasstodon and PV would have been ten times worse if friends of myasstodon were in charge of formal networks of federated instances instead of just informal ones. “but then you could just block them all in one go” literally when has federation drama ever been this simple

i’m not saying we can’t make things better. i’m saying the social change has to come FIRST. stop trying to build technologies for a community which doesn’t exist and can’t effectively use them. look at the communities we actually have and the actual history of this platform, and take a scientific approach to creating a space which is better. organize and build political consciousness. people will fucking make the technologies they need in their free time if you can get the communities and social support in place for them to do it; we’re not lacking in tech whizzes here