Cage the Mastodon: An overview of features for dealing with abuse and harassment
Taylor Lorenz
@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social
Can anyone who understands how this platform works better than me explain why we can’t have crucial harassment tools like restricting replies to mutuals only, or mass blocking? Also any reason we can’t get link previews on here? Just curious if these are things that can ever be implemented 🙏🏻
Adam A
@adamaronoff@infosec.exchange
@taylorlorenz some of those features exist, others are in progress, and some are unneeded because of how mastodon operate. Here's a much better explanation:
Cage the Mastodon: An overview of features for dealing with abuse and harassment - blog post by Mastodon creator — Eugen Rochko , Jul 6, 2018
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.
First, a refresher on the fundamentals, which haven’t changed: Mastodon is decentralized between independently-operated servers. These servers each have a separate admin, and possibly a moderation team, as well as their own code of conduct. From that follows that:
You can be with a community that resonates with your values and ideas of moderation
The ratio of “everyone” to “people who can handle abuse reports” is much, much higher than on any centralized service
The moderation team of your server, be it just one admin or multiple people, is a lot closer to you and more approachable and can therefore take abuse seriously
So that’s already a huge advantage over other platforms due the basic design. And in my opinion it’s got advantages over the other extreme, too, a pure peer-to-peer design, where everyone would have to fend for themselves, without the pooled resources. However, there’s more.
Design decisions
Before I proceed, I need to delineate that the following design decisions are more about what the software nudges you towards, rather than a tamper-proof barrier against some behaviours, which is not possible. Mastodon deliberately does not support arbitrary search. If someone wants their message to be discovered, they can use a hashtag, which can be browsed. What does arbitrary search accomplish? People and brands search for their own name to self-insert into conversations they were not invited to.
What you can do, however, is search messages you posted, received or favourited. That way you can find that one message on the tip of your tongue.
Another feature that has been requested almost since the start, and which I keep rejecting is quoting messages. Coming back to my disclaimer, of course it’s impossible to prevent people from sharing screenshots or linking to public resources, but quoting messages is immediately actionable. It makes it a lot easier for people to immediately engage with the quoted content… and it usually doesn’t lead to anything good. When people use quotes to reply to other people, conversations become performative power plays. “Heed, my followers, how I dunk on this fool!” When you use the reply function, your message is broadcast only to people who happen to follow you both. It means one person’s follower count doesn’t play a massive role in the conversation. A quote, on the other hand, very often invites the followers to join in on the conversation, and whoever has got more of them ends up having the upper hand and massively stressing out the other person.
[link:|Continued at - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/cage-the-mastodon/]
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