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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • In my experience anonymous people online don’t hide their bigotry behind an eloborate 10-point system. In this case, yes. I believe the motivation is exactly as it’s presented.

    The fact that the dev clearly thinks it is a fair justification shows exactly the mindset. The problem is bad enough on its own without making up additional poorly founded accusations.



  • You’re right, I should specify (although the condescension is not helping your case). They are views deemed problematic by the Tesseract dev.

    I’ve had run-ins with other devs or instance admins who find my views problematic, and banned me from their community/instance/whatever. That’s unfortunate, but it’s transparent. People know who the petty tyrants are and act accordingly.

    This is something different.

    Having a frontend preemptively blocking users and instances based on the sole judgment of the dev is unprecedented AFAIK. We don’t need to invent intimations of bigotry to see why this is wholly bad for the platform. It goes against basic principles of transparency, openness, and free choice that the Fediverse is based on.

    I believe that a front-end (client) should be a tool to access the service/network. It shouldn’t be making content decisions. If someone wants to make a block list and publish it for others to use, that’s great. If someone wants to trust an admin for content curation/blocking, well… that’s how this whole thing works. People choose or change instances based largely on that trust. But to have a tool for accessing the network also modifying the content? That’s bad, and a bad precedent.


  • See, THIS is the issue I wish people would focus on. The dev of a pretty important frontend has set up a block list. They have made it the default. They have not applied a clear and equitable criteria, set up a community feedback channel, or any sort of crowdsourced input.

    The modlog is open, meaning that anyone can see exactly what moderators and admins (generally) are up to. People can (and do) push back when things decisions are punitive, arbitrary, or unclear.

    This is not that. You have no way to see why your username was included, or correct it if it was in error. There is no community feedback to direct what standard makes sense.

    That’s the problem. It’s draconian. By manufacturing some shrill accusations of bigotry, yeah, it makes a lot more flashy posts, but doesn’t help in addressing the issue. If we can’t accurately name problems, we can’t solve them. We are just a mob on a witch-hunt.



  • That’s a big distortion. They are accounts that advocate violence or other problematic political views. Many of them are also LGBT, but that’s not why they are on the block list.

    I do think it’s problematic for a client/frontend to default-block any group of individuals or instances at all, but portrayimg it as motivated by bigotry when it’s not is pretty messed up too.