Yes, I’m not the creator of the post. I just thought I’d make it easy for them.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

About time. Hope this leads to actually good things for mastodon rather than a series of increasingly worse decisions by the current supreme leader who doesn’t seem to care about safety, moderation or creating and keeping a unique identity for it and other things besides.

Can’t speak for others but I’ve learned more about politics on fedi than any other platform. Also, centralised platforms are no longer ‘fact checking’ and didn’t really do a good job of it when they did. I’ve seen folks provide sources on fedi at least.

I think this is just the latest in FUD about the fedi for the most part, it has a few good points, but mostly it doesn’t really know what it’s talking about.

It is a shame then that very few countries can claim to actually be democratic then, since representative democracy is not true democracy.

It is closer to the ideal perhaps, but it is not truly for the people in a way that matters. Only direct democracies where people vote on policies etc are actual democracies, representative democracies tend to teater on that autocratic/totalitarian edge where the elected and unelected (at least by the people) representatives/government often enact policies and laws not in line with what people actually want, especially in first past the post systems with effectively only two parties.

There are still many problems even with direct democracy in this current system as capitalism allows those with the most money and to lie and influence, however, that’s true of representative democracy also, if not moreso in the case of bribes and lobbying.

Heck yeah, something original.

The only problem with loops so far is its full of reuploads of other people’s content which I consider bad and also boring. Folks should make their own stuff.

Time to get smashing cameras and bullshit laws like this.

Thankfully both it and Siri can be completely disabled or just not even installed in the former’s case.

I am glad you asked. Whilst it is primarily a social issue, the lack of good moderation tools tie into it.

The main developer behind mastodon is well known for not giving a shit about moderation and has attacked those who actually do good moderation before both in words and by making the moderation tools confusing and in some uses useless for users and admins alike.

The flagship instance of mastodon proves this as it is still not behind any kind of verification when you try to sign up to it meaning spam bots and the worst people can openly sign up which is something instances and people who care about moderation don’t allow as checking users aren’t nefarious is a good first step.

It’s also got many many users on it which is likely intentional as a lot of social media creators both commercial and non commercial think it is a numbers game and that is all that matters rather creating something sustainable and pleasant.

This had a knock-on effect in that many of the tools he created for moderation he changed, such as making the reporting tools for users have one reporting like “I don’t like this” or something effectively go in to the bin, never seen by admins or moderators because he in part runs one if the biggest mostly unchecked/not well moderated instances and so instead of moderating well wanted to do less work in moderating which big fucking red flag there that your instance is too big and you aren’t really concerned with moderation.

Not caring about moderation means that other instance admins and users have to do your work for you whilst you can gleefully ignore all the problems you cause, especially if you also develop the code and don’t give users or admins the tools they need or keep making changes to make it less and less something unique and to be cherished and more and more corporate which is exactly what it seemed like he wanted in the first place, for it to be twitter but with a bit more care though lessening that as time went on.

So whilst it is a social issue, tools and the way the technology is thought about and the way the technology is presented to users and admins alike helps as does listening to what is useful and what is not.

That is what mastodon could do: give a shit and stop messing with moderation tools whilst developing better ones and listening to users and admins, especially the most vulnerable or those who care about what is needed.

P.S. Oh and he also removed one of the timelines from the mobile app he developed for using mastodon because on his instance it was a mess and so thought it was useless because he refused to do good moderation, I think that says a lot as well.

The problem in many cases isn’t that they don’t literally see it but that they aren’t aware of what constitutes racism a lot of the time. That’s the primary issue here. That and they don’t listen to those that have to endure the harrasment, or don’t believe them.

I mean tools help somewhat but really the solution is on a social level, for people to start giving a shit.

I mean, it is a systemic problem in that society is racist, social media reflects that. It could be the one to change that in part if people cared enough to fix things both online and off. But they don’t, they’re so dedicated to upholding the structures of white supremacy and remaining willfully ignorant that they end up caring just about themselves.

Having said that, whilst Bluesky may or may not care about moderation on a global level (I’ve heard mixed things), I think this kind of community building and user level block lists is a good thing, so it may work out for now.

Like all commercial ventures into anything online I do expect it’ll become enshitified eventually, but for now may it long continue and hopefully drive the devs, moderators and actual users of the fediverse to care and introduce better moderation features or actually care about doing it and stopping the many white supremacists etc on the network through various means.

Well, they exist. Probably because a lot of the harrasment goes on in DMs or in followers only posts (or instances block them or they do dogwhistles etc).

Yes, but people are, regardless, still awful and so it’s not a place me or many others would recommend precisely because not many care enough to do anything about it. Which is exactly why I try to.

Mastodon was complicated

and full of racists/white supremacists (still is).

I believe that had improved recently, especially due to funding from the original creator of Twitter and Bluesky.

Though in general yes, apps that are about ‘extreme’ privacy tend to be as they like to avoid the big corporate tech servers for notifications etc whenever possible and probably other things too meaning they have to use more power in order to get the same results as the ones that do use them.

Yep, ready to disable it all the moment it restarts for the upgrade.

Matrix had a security vulnerability it knew about for years and did not fix until recently leaving many clients with broken encryption. Plus its flagship client (at the very least) clearly cares more about business interests than the common user.

XMPP is terrible for the average user, its encryption (OMEMO) in most clients is not the latest version of it (making it weak) and can be turned off, a bad thing for an encrypted messenger. Plus verification requires comparing a string of numbers in most cases, something most users do not want to do or would find it difficult to accurately.

SimpleX Chat has not proven itself to be legal request resistant yet (they seem not to have any information on requests recieved) and does not have many audits. Plus it is very barebones and has bad UX. Until they fix these things it will not be attractive to most typical folks.

I mean, we could all move to Funk Whale, however, finding/sharing music on that would be if not illegal then highly contencious.

Thank you for explaining!