The pro of all of these new instances popping up is that you can build your own communities where you feel safe with people you trust.
The con is that there is less quality control. People of color, women, trans folks, and folks with disabilities and illnesses are constantly harassed when we post on public, a lot of (newer) instances don't have codes of conducts, and we don't have all damn day to keep blocking instances (bc there are so many).
@guerrillarain Not only that, setting up Mastodon, from what I've heard repeatedly from people who have that skillset, is hard, even by professional standards. It's one of the reasons Pleroma is getting attention among devs.
*and then*, Pleroma culture by-in-large is...well, that thing that they do.
*and furthermore*, if someone points that out, the response is a) hostile and condescending b) focused on the tech rather than the culture
*and in addition*, that puts things back to Mastodon
@shoutcacophony @guerrillarain As a tech-savvy person, I had no trouble following the tutorials to make my own way instance, but it's clearly not something you can do without these chops. Another thing to note is: a solo instance means that you are pretty much solo, as your discourse reaches no-one.
@key @guerrillarain right, both of those things. further, a solo instance that isn't a close fit for much of Masto culture (for example, expressing a wider range of diversity) is going to have a hard time breaking out of that, unless they have very committed admins/social coordinators.
@shoutcacophony @maloki @guerrillarain https://masto.host .
There is another hoster among us but can't find the link anymore, sorry about that :/
That solves the technical difficulties to setup your instance :)
For the record, Mastodon is not hard for a seasoned sysadmin, it is standard web of nowadays. It just takes quite a few resources ( machine resources ) to run, even if post 2.4 is much better. Can expand if desired.
I am sure also that quite a few would be happy to help...
@shoutcacophony @guerrillarain Some technical things (eg. instance hosting, data backup, updates) are inherently difficult and there's little one can do about that.
Services like masto.host may help in that regard, as you can let them take care of all the technical stuff. That's no substitute to listening to people's needs, but may be an answer to some purely technical concerns.
Of course the problem of ease of hosting is orthogonal to the one of there being too many new instances without CoCs.
@guerrillarain Thisssss. It's possible to pay someone to host it for you but then you are beholden to the whims of whomever is spearheading the version of the paltform it runs. Plus it requires you to put that time (and monthly cost) into running it.
It's unnecessary gatekeeping.
@guerrillarain yep, a lot of this is because a fair amount of 'popular' Mastodon users are also instance administrators which leads to a whole thing where discourse becomes things which only other instance admins care about
this was even worse when I first joined back in April, it has mostly since died down, it used to be basically weekly, thank the lord
even most instance admins are burned out on that sort of discourse at this point
@guerrillarain the technical barrier to hosting a social medium has got to come down. *drastically.* there's absolutely no reason for such a thing to require knowing how to code and futz around with relational databases by hand
@mona @guerrillarain There is actually a reason: if things go wrong (and trust me, they always will), wizards aren't always going to help. Even something as easy to use as Mac and Windows requires some deep knowledge about command line usage when you have major problems.
I don't like it either, but as someone who studies in User Experience (UX) and tries to tackle such problems to make them user-friendly, you'd be surprised at just how many walls come up from the raw nature of software itself.
@guerrillarain @teradyne yes. I appreciate that our platforms are broken, and that to solve this problem properly likely requires a thorough reinvention of personal computing. we have been retrogressing since the seventies, not advancing. but the effort must be made.
@guerrillarain That kinda comes with the territory of federation and decentralization. I have the skill to set up my own instance, but I also know how difficult that is, and choose not to because of that. I don't have the time or money to do so.
That said, with the freedom to make your own instance also comes the fact that some instances aren't going to play by the rules of others. Your only option is to block those instances, simply because of that freedom. 1/
@guerrillarain It's one of those things where we've seen the alternatives to that freedom (Twitter and Facebook), and they're not exactly all that great either. I wish there were better options that didn't result in outright censorship, but I have no idea what that would be.
@guerrillarain If you don't want to moderate your instance(s), make them closed
... that was my solution, anyway.
@guerrillarain I think there should be more instances like awoo.space, that operate on an allow-list rather than a block-list.
@guerrillarain Is there an option to maintain a whitelist of known-good instances rather than defaulting to "trust everyone" and trying to blacklist the baddies?
@christianbundy @guerrillarain
iirc that is the way occult.camp and awoo.space operate with federation
@guerrillarain Mastodon actually have a lot more mods per user than the mainstream social networks. So I am not sure I agree that there is less quality control.
If it's something I am vehemently against. It is bigots... but the only one I have seen actually harassed is Eugen. I have also seen people talk bad about coders. That they are not human e.t.c.. This don't mean it doesn't exist here.
Are there any particular feature you are missing? You have the option to manually approve followers.
@shellkr 1) There are a lot of instances that do not moderate or do very little moderating, so assholes and nazis and transphobes can create accounts on those, spam and harass people of color (which I have seen and also experienced), and reporting does absolutely nothing to remove them or so many of them to report and I have to block the whole instance. Those instances federate by default, so you essentially have to be harassed to block them rather just... not be harassed.
@shellkr 2) I find it absurd that I have to avoid being visible to avoid being harassed and targeted by racists. Yes, I can lock my account, which I do, but I had to do that because of the spam and harassment. That is not comforting, and it's a problem that I raised.
But the point remains, tech doesn't change culture. It's a tool, but decentralizing doesn't magically shield marginalized people from being targeted.
@guerrillarain Yes, it is absurd. A proposal when you have been harassed. Take a screenshot. Make the a-hole visible. 95% of Mastodon would make the life very hard for that person.
Yeah, you are right about tooling not having an immediate effect on overall culture.. The tooling despite being reactive is the only way it can be done. Unless you remove the ability to make toots. I can not think of any proactive measure that would help.
What is your thought on a solution?
Also, this kinda came up, but not everyone using Masto/masto-like sites are tech savvy. Telling me to build my own instance or do _______ as someone who barely understand what it means and entails isn't useful.
Masto discourse is not accessible and some of yall are just hostile and annoying and condescending for no reason whatsoever.