theATL.social Discussion

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Let's Discuss: Moderation and Block Lists (yall.theatl.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) friends. Your friendly admin, @michael, here.

Currently, theATL.social blocks two domains from federation but does not utilize any block lists. the Lemmy yall.theATL.social does not block any domains.

My general admin philosophy is to let users decide what content they want to see, or not see. However, the Mastodon UI can make the adding/removing of domain block lists a bit tedious. (There are some tech/UI-related options to make this easier.)

On the other hand, I am personally not a free speech absolutist, and there are limits to what content could/should be relayed through theATL.social's servers.

For example, illegal content, instances dedicated solely to hate speech/harassment, etc. To that end, the Oliphant Tier 0 block list offers a "floor" to remove literally the worst instances operating on the Fediverse: https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blocklists

As your admin, I don't want to make any unilateral decisions - rather, I'd prefer a user/stakeholder conversation, with as many Q&As as helpful.

With that intro, let me know your thoughts:

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey Y'all!

I wanted to circle back on this discussion thread. Things got a bit busy with the instance upgrade (which is now upgraded to 4.1.6).

With regards to Tier 0 Oliphant, I had initially thought that the list was primarily bottom-of-the-barrel sort of sites, but on closer look, there were sites included that well, people on the instance utilize - such as newsie.social. I thought that our discussion on our Lemmy server, plus DMs and feedback from the Mastodon side figured out which sites we wanted to exclude from the domain block list. All that being said, my objective with the blocks was to remove the known sources of abusive, illegal, or malicious (e.g., spam, malware) content.
And then that leaves us in the gray zone. There are instances where 98% of the users are great Fediverse citizens, and then 2% are horrible trolls. There are instances where teams of moderators are carefully watching posts, and others were moderators only step in during extreme situations. And there are instances that are for-profit, non-profit, from different countries and contexts, and so on. I don't have any straightforward answer as to where the line is located in this grey area, with regards to if a domain should be defederated or not.
@DecaturNature had a great point regarding what if theATL.social becomes either a target or source of disinformation. A group of users (real or actual) could create accounts on the instance in a coordinated fashion, and turn over the apple cart of our existing community posting disinformation and slander. It would seem the line would be clear that those individuals would not be welcome, but if someone is being a jerk or insincere, is that enough justification to ban them?

Final Thoughts

I'm going to chew through the above points. Obviously other err...large social networks have figured something out. And smaller Mastodon servers have done the same. It is quite likely that the current server rules are not satisfactory to cover all the potential issues, situations, and possibilities of human (or bot) behavior of theATL.social users, or content that is federated to theATL.social. If you have any additional thoughts, please feel free to include below. I don't have a timeline on changes for server rules, but when there are changes (if you wanted to propose changes), I would prefer if that was a collaborative exercise with the core group of users on this instance.

Thanks again for all your comments and feedback!