Moderation.
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@markwyner Seven posts before this on my home feed was someone calling out mas.to (and others) as a badly moderated. I just don't see how that sort of thing is in any way helpful.
Thanks for all you do, and please keep up the good fight.
@GlasWolf @markwyner It's helpful for marginalised people who want to know who takes their safety seriously and who doesn't. Mas.to might be fine if you're a white guy who never experiences targeted harassment online (must be nice), but for a LOT of people, it's not good enough.
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
Hey @markwyner! Thank you for dealing with that asshole quickly, and sorry for any shade you got when I called out mas.to (and other big, open reg instances) in my post.
I know y'all are doing your best
️🩹 and I'm sure you get a similar percentage of bad actors trying to register as we do, but with a higher volume of registrations.I was irritated that I'd been targeted by yet another blatantly horrible troll account (it happens regularly), so I made a pretty blunt post.
I should have specifically said *not* to be rude to any mods in the post (like I usually do when a post might incite actions by my followers).
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@legendary_creeper @markwyner Well, we do not call socialists that are after the initial batch "neo-socialists"…
Their question is valid, though. Neo-nazi is an dictionary-level term. And as I noted, it’s nuanced.
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We’re a huge server. One of the biggest. So we get targeted. A lot.
For every nazi account you may see for a brief moment, you don’t see hundreds of others that we managed to catch before you saw it. We block some email domains and IPs when we can. We do tons of pre-emptive work behind the scenes.
We’re also volunteers. We have a team that spans many time zones. But that doesn’t mean we have someone on guard 24/7/365. Shit happens. It’s no reflection of the integrity of our team/server.
🧵 3/4
@markwyner Honestly, I looked at your instance location and time zone and figured you would all be fast asleep.
I felt sorry for how many reports you were going to wake up to. -
> Or perhaps you'd prefer to think of it as Nazi-the-actual-noun vs nazi-the-personality-disorder?
I do not since it would oppose the truth based of my current knowledge about neurology and psychology.
But I do have an unhealthy tendency for accuracy and perfectionism. That's why it bug me.
Perfectly acceptable question. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that would have my ADHD brain twitching as well. Especially being a super fan of grammar and language.
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@legendary_creeper @markwyner it always seems like a diminutive to me - like it is saying they are nazi-light
People who wear swastikas are nazis IMO
In WW2 people were called nazis who were not party members - so it has always been a broader term
Todays Nazis may described as "neo-nazis" - but I think that is a type of Nazi not a different category.
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@markwyner
It fills my soul with goodness to see there is an active defense force springing into action when the nazis attack. Thank you!@NMBA we’re all in this together.
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In my experience y'all do a fantastic job with moderation. When I report a bad actor, it's gone quickly. I don't even see huge swaths of the harmful things I see others talk about, which means y'all are getting to it well, at least for the times when I'm active here. Thank you.
I've occasionally pondered sending a thank you note when I've heard about some bad actor, but not seen it at all. I'll try to actually do that, so y'all get an occasional random thank you.
@equiraptor awe. How very kind of you to say. Thank you. 🫶
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@GlasWolf @markwyner It's helpful for marginalised people who want to know who takes their safety seriously and who doesn't. Mas.to might be fine if you're a white guy who never experiences targeted harassment online (must be nice), but for a LOT of people, it's not good enough.
@welshpixie @markwyner To clarify, it's the hyperbole that I think is unhelpful. Throwing "nazi bar" accusations at an instance because it took their mods, what - an hour or two? - to suspend an asshole account is unfair. Also I suspect that Mark takes user safety very seriously, and it would be insulting to suggest otherwise.
Instead it would be more helpful to spread the word that those in marginalised/high-risk groups may be better served at a smaller, more curated (non-open reg) instance.
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
@markwyner Just to balance all the "wahh you should be closed" comments (with no understanding or experience of why that might not be practical/sensible at your scale) - I'd just like to add my thanks, to you and the team.
I for one deeply appreciate all the hard work y'all put in. Please keep punching nazis.
Thank you.
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
Thank you. No, THANK YOU!
In the fediverse, encountering bigots etc doesn't have the same effect on me as doing so on Facebook etc did -- in corporate sites it was part of the rising background radiation and reporting them was hit and miss at best.
I'm the fedi, I KNOW AND SEE them be dealt with. I can see and hear -- eg this, from you now -- that it is dealt with. And same day or next generally. So instead of feeling like I'll soon be drowning in shit, were all involved in the management of trouble. So my reporting a post etc to an admin is again, peer to peer.
Fundamental relationships have been changed in fediverse methodology.
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Moderation. It’s a roller coaster.
Today, a (literal) nazi opened an account and began harassing people. We received ~80 reports within minutes. That may be a record.
We suspended the account, of course. But not before a lot of people yelled at us. For the record, this is not preventable when registration is open. We can only react. So be nice.
My gratitude and love for the person behind this report. It made me chuckle. 🫶
🧵 1/3
@markwyner can't there be a cooldown so new users only can post only once per day.
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"not preventable when registration is open"
so it's preventable.
i suggest you start preventing it, dispshit.
@matildalove Calling people “dipshit” for trying to achieve a goal *you share*, but in a way that you don't believe strikes the perfect compromise, surely seems like an excellent way of spreading positivity and convincing people. /s
Thanks, @markwyner, for your unpaid labor of love!
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One last note, then I’ll STFU about this…
Feedback is appreciated. IF it’s kind and helpful.
It hurts me that a nazi slipped through today. Like, it crushes my soul and makes me sad. And I want for us to prevent that.
So we’re going to use this as a learning moment to see what else we can do moving forward.
🧵 4/4
@markwyner thank you to you and yours for the efforts you make trying to keep the spirit of what the web should be alive.
If it weren't for you guys we'd be crushed by the big tech shit.
Keep on rocking my friend!
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@markwyner @luciledt You pulled off a heroic effort to rectify a horrible situation that was completely preventable by closing registrations.
Of course, 99% of the time there is no problem. But open registrations allows that 1% to do damage before you get to it -- even if you get to them fast. The damage is already done.
My instance has closed registrations, because I do not prioritize instance growth over the safety of the wider fediverse.
This assumes that the goal of open registrations is instance growth. In some cases it is, but that’s not absolute.
One of the reasons new people are reluctant to join Mastodon after being on centralized platforms is the sign-up/onboarding process. Open registrations is one way we can reduce that friction.
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I see there being three kind of nazis.
Capital N Nazis are members of the 30-40s German party as well as members of the American Nazi Party. Self described, Hugo Boss wearing, actual, factual Nazis.
Lowercase n nazis are general fascists of any stripe. Vernacular nazis, if you will. If someone calls themselves a “race realist” and cares a strange amount about legal immigration while only discussing how much violence is required to deal with illegal immigration.
Neo-nazis are kind of a transitionary fossil between Nazis and nazis. Before you could be a random racist wearing a suit and appearing on CNN to discuss white genocide, the neo-nazis of the 70s-90s had to blaze a trail of bank robbery, zine publication, murder, early internet adoption, and that time they blew up the Federal Building in OKC. They cared less about aesthetics and more about outcomes.
@kathleenbelew’s book Bring The War Home and Robert Evan’s audio treatise The War On Everyone are both useful resources.
Wow. What a fantastic and meaningful reply. Far more informative than mine. Thanks for your edifying explanation.
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@markwyner moderating, in any size community is hard work, we salute the mods in this household!!
As for feedback, I don’t know much about this particular event, or your instance, but you’ve just given a big list of ‘reasons why open registration is bad and creates a lot of extra work’ with no reasons to why it has to stay open.
Is there a reason it -has- to stay open? Genuine question, like would making it manual approval create more work for the mod team overall?
@Mudlark it def means more work. Not that it’s not worth it, just that it’s hard to be timely about it. Our energy is focused more on analyzing actual reports.
Also, as I mentioned to someone else. One of the reasons new people are reluctant to join Mastodon after being on centralized platforms is the sign-up/onboarding process. Open registrations is one way we can reduce that friction.
Moreover, there are new filter tools coming in a forthcoming Mastodon release that will help with this.
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@markwyner Moderation and management of open services is a thankless, soul-crushing task sometimes. I hope you know that more people appreciate your work than find fault with it. And the people getting angry with you are mostly angry that Nazis exist, and misdirecting it at y'all.
Anyway, please keep up the good work and banning the baddies.
@jzb beautiful. Thank you so much. And, yes, I do know that more people appreciate mods than those who hate us.
Everyone has a right to their opinion. And we’re not perfect.
I know we’re doing our best. And we’re all fighting the same fight. I hate nazis and they hate nazis. Punching us won’t help. The fight against us (when we’re trying to do the right thing) is the wrong war.
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@coalburner3000 @markwyner @kenjen additional dimension on that one, tho: many folks have multiple 8s in a username, esp on financial stuff, because it's a good luck things in some cultures (the 8 looks like "happiness" in Chinese, is my understanding)
my family used to do a lot of banking in Monterey Park, which is mostly Chinese, their banker liked them and saved some "good" account numbers, long story short, thirty years later I look like a total white supremacist in my financial life
Definitely. False flags are no joke. So it’s a balance. Same goes for IPs. We can’t just block every IP of every bad person, because IPs move around.
There are new tools coming to a future version of Mastodon to help with registrations. We’ll definitely be working on some ways to make use of them.
