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- cross-posted to:
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Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you guys think.
Maybe I’m a bit too much of an optimist, but I’d hope that distributed administration would help with that sort of thing. But I don’t know, do Mastodon users seem to be more racist than Twitter users? Perhaps an important difference would be that it might be a bit more difficult to block an intolerant user if you knew he’d come knocking on your door!
It boils down to moderators dropping the internalized mandate of “protecting free speech” as well as not being so literal with rules/enforcement that they can be used against the community.
If someone is consistently disrupting the community, ban them. If they’re using obvious dog whistles and arguing they didn’t technically break the rules, ban them.
With any luck, federated platforms will have an increasingly prevalent role on the internet, and affective moderation will become more of a science as more of us are provided situations in which we need to moderate.
I think part of the issue is the churn burn of mods. New mods all assume everything can be “peacefully resolved” and get taken advantage of OR they truly don’t give a shit and give safe haven to the disrupters by telling squeaky wheels in the community “they don’t break the rules so it’s impossible to ban them.”
Older mods drop the ban hammer typically more and get harassed until they’re tired of it and move on.