Shiri Bailem

@dark_stang @seasonone as someone who uses both: abstraction is mostly about (a) cross-compatibility (making one command work across multiple different database backends) and (b) interfacing more naturally with code to reduce the work needed to make changes

@mudeth I 110% agree faeranne, especially in that this is much like the topic of encryption and how people (especially politicians) keep arguing that we just need to magically come up with a solution that allows governments to access all encrypted communication somehow without impacting security and preventing people from using existing encryption to completely bypass it. It’s much like trying to legislate math into functioning differently.

The closest you can get to a federated moderation protocol is basically just a standard way to report posts/users to admins.

You could absolutely build blocklists that are shared around, but that’s already a thing and will never be universal.

Basically what you’re describing is that someone should come up with a way to *force* me to apply moderation actions to my server that I disagree with. That somehow such a system would be immune to abuse (ie. because it’s external to my server, it would magically avoid hackers and trolls manipulating it) and that I would have no choice in whether or not to allow that access despite running a server based on open source software in which I can edit the code myself if I wish (but somehow in this case wouldn’t be able to edit it to prevent the external moderation from working).

You largely miss the point entirely of my other arguments: email is a perfect reference point because, despite private vs public, it faces all the same technical, social, and legal challenges. It’s just an older system with a slightly different purpose (that doesn’t change it’s technical foundations, only just how it’s interacted with), but the closest relative to activitypub with much much larger scale adoption. These issues and topics have already been discussed ad nauseum there.

And I didn’t say users would moderate themselves, we decide what is worth taking action on. If you’re not an admin, you choose whether or not something is worth reporting and whether or not you find the server you’re on acceptable to your wants/needs. If you take issue with anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and nazis and your server allows all of that (either on the server itself, or has no issue with other servers that allow it)… then you move to a server that doesn’t.

Finally, this doesn’t end in centralization because of all the aforementioned gray areas. There are many things that I don’t consider acceptable on my server but aren’t grounds for defederation.

For example: I won’t tolerate the ignoring of minority voices on topics of cultural appropriation and microaggressions… but I don’t consider it a good idea to defederate other servers for it because the admins themselves often barely understand it and I would be defederation 90% of the fediverse at that point. If I see such from my users I will talk to them and take action as appropriate, but from other servers I’ll report if the server looks remotely receptive to it.

@mudeth @pglpm The grey area is all down to personal choices and how “fascist” your admin is (which goes on to which instance is best for you?)

Defederation is a double-edged sword, because if you defederate constantly for frivolous reasons all you do is isolate your node. This is also why it’s the *final* step in moderation.

The reality is that it’s a whole bunch of entirely separate environments and we’ve walked this path well with email (the granddaddy of federated social networks). The only moderation we can perform outside of our own instance is to defederate, everything else is just typical blocking you can do yourself.

The process here on Mastodon is to decide for yourself what is worth taking action on. If it’s not your instance, you report it to the admin of that instance and they decide if they want to take action and what action to take. And if they decide it’s acceptable, you decide whether or not this is a personal problem (just block the user or domain on in your user account but leave it federating) or if it’s a problem for your whole server (in which case you defederate to protect your users).

Automated action is bad because there’s no automated identity verification here and it’s an open door to denial of service attacks (harasser generates a bunch of different accounts, uses them all the report a user until that user is auto-suspended).

The backlog problem however is an intrinsic problem to moderation that every platform struggles with. You can automate moderation, but then that gets abused and has countless cases of it taking action on harmless content, and you can farm out moderation but then you get sloppiness.

The fediverse actually helps in moderation because each admin is responsible for a group of users and the rest of the fediverse basically decides whether they’re doing their job acceptably via federation and defederation (ie. if you show that you have no issue with open Nazis on your platform, then most other instances aren’t going to want to connect to you)

@mudeth @pglpm you really don’t beyond our current tools and reporting to authorities.

This is not a single monolithic platform, it’s like attributing the bad behavior of some websites to HTTP.

Our existing moderation tools are already remarkably robust and defederating is absolutely how this is approached. If a server shares content that’s illegal in your country (or otherwise just objectionable) and they have no interest in self-moderating, you stop federating with them.

Moderation is not about stamping out the existence of these things, it’s about protecting your users from them.

If they’re not willing to take action against this material on their servers, then the only thing further that can be done is reporting it to the authorities or the court of public opinion.

@scrubbles My favorite early moment was him firing people based on lines of code written… which of course meant he fired all of his best because the worst programmers write many lines that do less while great programmers write few lines that do more.

@shortwavesurfer The propulsion is absolutely linear, the perk of an ion drive is that it’s mostly electrical with minimal fuel consumption.

It’s also something we’re already using, the first one actually launched was in 1964, though for some reason we never stopped hyping it.

An ion engine would absolutely make the trip take *longer* as you’d have to wait for better transfer windows (9 months is the timeframe *after* we wait for a good transfer window), we’d have to wait even longer for one with an ion drive and it absolutely wouldn’t be a shorter window.

@shortwavesurfer @InquisitiveApathy ion drives really don’t solve any of these problems.

Orbital dynamics are *weird* and “more speed” isn’t a solution. With orbital dynamics your relative position and speed are directly related, so moving faster basically means changing direction. Once you’re in microgravity thrust power is more about how quickly you can steer and fuel quantity is how many maneuvers you can do. Ion drives can do a lot of maneuvers, but every maneuver is very slow (which also makes them more complicated because you need to account for the changes that happen over the course of the maneuver).

We don’t travel to orbital bodies in a straight line because it goes beyond an absurd quantity of fuel to do so (ion drives don’t even scratch the surface of the amount needed, let alone the complexity they add due to slow acceleration).

Right now we don’t have much to improve the speed of getting places and not much on the horizon there either, so we’re focusing on questions like how to survive getting there.

@saba @Recant We’re definitely not going to have a moon colony in our lifetime, and a manned mars mission would only be a disaster.

The reason we haven’t really gone back to the moon and don’t have a colony there is because it’s much more expensive to access and offers no real benefit over space stations. It’s perk is low gravity instead of microgravity, but it trades off in massively increased fuel and time costs as well as the inability to “dodge” hazards. The moon has no special resources, no capacity for terraforming, and if we were wanting to build enclosed habitats we could do that more easily in a space station.

Mars is kinda worse because as far as I can tell we’re finding problems faster than we’re finding solutions. My favorite recent example of this is that we discovered anyone we sent would go blind before reaching the planet (microgravity destroys your vision over time, it took us forever to find out because the astronauts were hiding it so they wouldn’t be disqualified from future flights).