Community Moderation, The Bad Place, and Doing the Work Yourself

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

I'm kind of a weirdo. I have an account on numerous ActivityPub instances ranging from Mastodon, to Misskey, to a rather new one that replaces Tumblr, called Wafrn. And I'm writing this post today, because of something that I was made aware of via that new Tumblr replacement, AP connected instance: People are still sharing blocklists across the fediverse (see: activitypub, mastodon), but this time in a slightly more sophisticated manner via an app called The Bad Space, and one of its biggest contributors is mastodon.art.

Thankfully, you don't have to do all the research yourself, as someone has already done that, in order to provide legitimacy to claims that blocks on The Bad Space are largely based on personal grudges, transphobia, homophobia, and anti-anarchist sentiment (among other things that have nothing to do with people being fascist and hateful).

Obviously, I would like to use part of this post today to advocate that you do not use The Bad Space as a replacement for your own judgment. But I'd also like to say that you should never, ever, use anyone else's judgment as a replacement for your own, especially when it comes to community moderation.

I get it, sometimes doing the work is monotonous. It gets boring, tedious, and it's easier to just copy and paste the work someone else already did. But that's not good, especially in our current climate of general anti-lgbtq+ sentiment around the world. Where bad faith actors will do everything in their power to silence and isolate those that already hold very little social power in their own lives.

Community moderation on open-source social media is no different.

I've advocated before that Bluesky's method of user moderation, wherein users craft personal mute and blocklists, and then share them, is a recipe for disaster. Personal grudges become set-in-stone, and then normal, generally good people end up cut-off, and isolated, and some of them never even find out that the isolation is something artificial--Created by mini-megalomaniacs.

But this type of behavior, and lack of personal moderation, goes all the way back to Twitter's own Blockbot (which is now defunct) that emerged during the years of GamerGate. Where you could follow and download a curated blocklist (that was administrated by only a few people), and block out all the wannabe nazis.

Except the list had tons and tons of transgender women on it who have never, ever been guilty of fascist brain-melting, and were more just there because, again, admins didn't like them.

This is still not something many were, or even are aware of. Because when it comes to marginalized groups, it's harder to get people to pay any real attention. I should know. I have a lot of experience with this.

Enter: Mastodon, the fediverse, activitypub.

Owning your own Mastodon, or otherwise ActivityPub server, is an attractive idea. Build your own space, curate your own feeds, moderate your content, and never have to deal with overzealous strangers who want you to conform to extremely specific rules; strangers who might ban you on a whim for superficial, ridiculous reasons (it's happened to me!).

But that last bit is very important. Moderation.

If you aren't willing to do the work yourself, to personally verify what communities you're blocking and what people you're suspending, and I'm going to be very clear about this: You shouldn't be running a community.

Yes, there should be consequences for people and instances that create bad faith blocklists that others will use without even thinking. But you can stop this behavior, this act of wrongness, by being an admin, or a community moderator, who does the work themselves.

If you don't want to do the work, if you find it boring, you don't enjoy it, you'd rather use automation to replace your critical thinking, I'll say this one more time: You should not be running a community.

I don't have an answer for how to stop miniature feudal lords from attempting to put up walls around the fediverse that keeps all those they've deemed undesirable out. But I at least know how to start deconstructing their little kingdoms, and it begins with you.

Thanks for reading.