J. Nathan Matias @natematias@octodon.social
Building public interest, independent research on online safety & fairness. PhD Candidate, MIT Media Lab. Harvard BKC. http://civilservant.io natematias.com
Fortunately for us, I am not the only person on the internet to imagine the idea of teacup dinosaurs.
.@cwylo if I could have a cute animal break at my dissertation defense, I would choose teacup dinosaurs
Having moderated a large online community for about a decade now, I'm finding the collective arguing about CW protocol and kindness vs. freedom interesting and familiar and tiring and valuable all in a mix.
Community self-identification is a weird process, and I think I am mostly glad that mastodon doesn't by its very structure require the answer to be monolithic and universal.
But I will tip my hand a little and say that erring on the side of kindness is pretty much always defensible.
A couple of PSAs that new users may find useful:
- Faving toots does nothing, your followers (and local timeline) will only see things you boost
- Following people from other instances ensures you can see their toots in the future and that they'll show up on your instance's federated timeline
I appreciate it, no apology needed! :heartpulse: Nonetheless, current status: :hear_no_evil:
@lolkat @LogicalDash gotta finish the PhD first! But once I submit next week, I'll be happy to offer whatever kind of help I can, whatever admins & communities are most interested in.
@CobaltVelvet @lolkat yep, that's how The Block Bot does it, with a community process for deciding who to go on the list, and how to appeal the decision.
Watching @CobaltVelvet introduce community guidelines convinced me to become a Patreon supporter.
There are still many questions about what we all ultimately do together with this instance, but this is an important early start
The guidelines: https://octodon.social/about/more
The Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/CobaltVelvet/posts
@cwylo oh cool. I'll have to take a look after I finish my own dissertation!
@cwylo which one?
There you go, a explicit list of topics requiring a CW in public timelines. https://octodon.social/about/more
Simple: put a CW on NSFW or violence in any way or you get silenced/banned.
Use more of them in an opportunistic way, for anything negative or depressing.
@cwylo it's not too late for my defense! Sadly, I'm allergic to animal dander :(
I subscribed to that mastodon admins mailing list ( https://mstdn.fr/users/taziden/updates/338 ), and I have released a tagged release of #Mastodon v1.1, so that people have something recent to pin their version to instead of pulling from master. (Also working on making master more stable through a PR-based process)
To make a statement on the current debate, I think a list of mandatory CW would be a good start on the instance level.
You can't enforce a rule if there's no explicit rule; you can't expect someone to CW everything you think deserve one without making it explicit.
So what would you want on that list?
Algorithmic discrimination animated. From a talk I'm giving tomorrow at the Harvard Data Privacy Lab
@linguangst @ksunter I think I'll try to round people up this summer to update it to include all the awesome recent research in the last 2 years
@ksunter @linguangst *waves* see also our collaboratively created resource guide to academic research on harassment/moderation from 2015 meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Online_harassment_resource_guide
If you report someone, please add context.Tweets and/or comments, the more the better.
If I can't find an obvious reason I'll just waste a minute reading someone shitpost and not take any action.
