Interesting Links for 04-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Who wants to give a tummy rub to a cute little kitty?

(tags:cats video cute leopard )

2. What did Susan Hussey say? Royal race row explained (with transcript)

(tags:racism UK royalty )

3. Twitter now reinstating neo-nazis

(tags:ElonMusk Nazis Twitter OhForFucksSake )

4. "I Was Wrong About Mastodon" (and moderation and scaling)

(tags:mastodon socialnetworking )

5. Labour's manipulation of selection contests reveals its emptiness of purpose

(tags:labour OhForFucksSake )

6. The Excel World Championship Is the Internet at Its Best

(tags:Excel spreadsheet competition )

7. EU Leader Uses Mastodon to Tell Elon Musk How Twitter Needs to Be Regulated

(tags:Twitter Mastodon regulation Europe ElonMusk )

8. How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years

(tags:UK India )

9. 53% of Britons are non-religious. Who are they and what do they believe?

(tags:religion UK atheism society )

10. Learning to play the piano improves people's ability to process sights and sounds

(tags:piano music psychology )

11. Female monkeys prioritise friends and actively reduce social circle as they age

(tags:monkey friendship family )

12. UK to let safety laws lapse. Because sovereignty.

(tags:safety UK Europe law OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[andrewducker]

There are already examples of instances being defederated because they were hosting people doing attacks and refusing to moderate them.

Hopefully this will continue.

[mellowtigger]

The huge instances (mstdn.social, if not also mastodon.online) are also threatened with defederation because their moderation isn't scaling upward fast enough. That's not a problem of policy but resources. Brandolini's Law can affect any instance of Mastodon, even the ones leading the calls for defederation. I think Mastodon is better technologically than Twitter, but the fact remains that zergs are an effective tactic. The problem can be automated, but Mastodon doesn't really have the automation to moderate yet, and that's a long term problem waiting to happen.

[fub]

It all comes down to the admin of the instance, and the culture among admins seems to be more geared towards scaling the infrastructure rather than their moderation with the new influx of users on their instances.
The network will allow anyone to contact anyone else, unless it's explicitly closed off by the admin -- but by then the damage will have been done. There are blocklists that an admin can use to defederate from specific instances, but those are not popular in certain corners (I was literally told that my use of a blocklist was "inexcusable" and I should "go back to Twitter"). And it is all manual work for the admin.

Pay attention to who says that Mastodon is so friendly -- it's all white, privileged people. Marginalized people are still marginalized on Mastodon.