I think the main issue with Content Nation, personally, was that it looked like an SEO spam site that was using the fediverse as its source for content scraping.
That being said, that still doesn't justify the toxicity from the paranoid nerds that targeted this guy. I was quite surprised when the Bridgy Fed stuff happened, but now, I'm not surprised in the slightest.
Take my upvote. There's nothing about Mastodon that Bluesky doesn't do for the average user and for me it's got an actual laid-back vibe where Mastodon feels like people trying to indoctrinate me into a nerd cult.
Sidenote, it'd be nice if Pleroma or one of its forks had the stronghold on the fediverse instead. It's got a lot more features than Mastodon and Bluesky.
I don't think it's fair to write off the entire medium like that. They all share a common ancestor in Twitter and I think it's fair to say the toxicity is inherited from there.
Nah, fuck that. If you're not paying me for the data you're harvesting from me, with or without intent to monetize it, I'm going DEFCON 1, dumping the mag, and emptying the silos. I am not accepting that Zuckerbergian shit out of anybody, I don't care who they claim to be to me or what they claim to do. Too many capitalist pigs try too hard to put their trotters on my data for me to not anymore.
I think you missed a key part of the article. Content Nation was not harvesting data from the fediverse; it was just federating. It was a new project that had just spun up and didn't have a full feature set yet, but other than those missing features it was a normal fediverse instance.
Damn. Poor guy! He didn't deserve any of that. I hope this whole shit show results in positive changes and better documentation, but I don't have high hopes, unfortunately. I hope Sascha is doing okay. Thank you for sharing this great article here!
Very interesting article! Very much fits with my own experience. The following things I decided to take as lessons learned from the fedi so far:
stating novel concepts will get you ignored at best ans bullied at worst
lemmy lacks (at least afaik) a way to share blocklists for destructive people (not instances)
if you keep your posts on the constructive side, you will get a lot of positive replies but some will come at you no matter what
Especially when in a bad mood I need to get off lemmy if I cant emotionally distance myself from the bad actors.
Mastodon is a different kind of animal. They have centralized blocklists (like oliphant.social) to keep whole instances of trolls out. I havent had really bad situations since I implemented those but I have to report people nearly on a daily basis.
The reasons I have to assume are very varied and as such probably the solutions should be varied as well. Reasons I concludes from many discussions:
lack of social skills on both sides
no explicit behavioral code on instances or communities
lack of active moderation and guidance
the fediverse kind of includes those unable to keep an account unbanned on corpo media
lack of (social) education, like biases and phallacies
All these are solvable imo. Not all by the same thing and none of them immediately. Obviously people will disagree with me and I‘m fine with that. My personal thoughts on solutions are as follows:
Moderators get fixed shares of donations (x% over all moderators)
Sidebars and rules get more fleshed out with links to social resources and education, explanations for those not immediately understanding it
Explicit rules against ad hominem attacks and getting personal to win an argument
Imo, these will be beneficial for lemmy. Mastodon might benefit from other ideas. Feel free to share those and discuss with me.
Disclaimer: Ridicule and Ad hominem attacks will not be replied to but immediately blocked.
I read that. I‘m not entirely sure what that means though. They host an instance with many users for a long time? Even if thats the case they might be very bad at social skills and got set off by misinterpreting his intenstions (not trying to defend, trying to understand so I can form an opinion and search for a solution)
I can get people being cautious about for-profits trying to monetize user data, but trying to ruin this guy's life over it, regardless of whether or not he was actually trying to make money from their data, is just sick. Anyone who thinks this is an acceptable method of protest is fucked up in the head.
