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If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better.

By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.

@kissane@mstdn.social Thank you for bringing this to light. This is one of the reasons having QT’s (actual qt‘s and not a work-a-round) is and has been helpful for BIPOC on the bird app forever. It highlights bad actors, allows the community to come to the defense and should make it more noticeable to mods. It’s stuff like this why I speak out daily about the gatekeeping and HOA attitude. You’re so right how they talk down on big social but then want to control peoples experiences here in the #Fediverse being told to block is not enough. #Mastodon needs to do better as do we all

Erin Kissane

@damon I've felt a little neutral about QTs because the same dynamics that make them work for this use also make them worth for racist, misogynist troll kings—but if you axed those people right away with good moderation, that wouldn't be an issue. Feels like a system with interconnected parts that all have to work together.

@kissane Yep. Black Twitter refined using QTs as a means of calling out racism (and sexism, hypocrisy, etc). And racist misogynist troll kings. have plenty of other tools they can use (includng 11-thread reply chains).

Of course the details of how QTS matter a lot -- and there certainly needs to be more anti-harassment functionality and better moderation in general. So we'll see how it goes.

And @damon, 💯 !

@trochee I like it! QT's recenter power in a way than reply-and-boost doesn't. Of course this cuts both ways but it's certainly useful for the underdogs.

BTW I did a deep dive on "Black Twitter, quoting, and white views of toxicity on Mastodon" earlier this year in privacy.thenexus.today/black-t.

@kissane @damon

The Nexus Of Privacy · Black Twitter, quoting, and white views of toxicity on MastodonDoes quoting really cause toxicity?

@trochee @jdp23 @kissane @damon I think it would be great to have more built in ways to call in or ... call sideways? Before jumping right to call out. Call outs are just inherently a really powerful tool that can be abused.

@trochee @jdp23 @kissane @damon Of course there is no way to systematically prevent abuse or going overboard. But it helps to give people intermediate options, so that the whole culture isn't normalized around going to 11, because the dial actually has a 1 through 10.

@misc There are already plenty of intermediate options! Agreed that calling in is often a better initial approach, but when racist behavior repeats and persists (as it has on Mastodon for the last 6+ years), powerful tools are needed as well.

@trochee @kissane @damon

@jdp23 @trochee @kissane @damon I'm not sure I agree we have a sufficient set of tools. I think there's a lot we can do in between what we have, and what existed on Twitter, which had no guardrails and therefore had a real tendency toward public shaming spectacle that I understand why the anti-quote people would be afraid of recreating. We shouldn't limit ourselves to the best tools we had before.

@misc @jdp23

I agree there COULD BE intermediate options

but also we have to build them into the affordances of the software _to the users_ and the community practices (e.g. onboarding!) so that our communities actually use these intermediate options when appropriate.

@kissane @damon

Agreed, there's lots of room for innovation here -- both in terms of norms and affordances.

But back to @damon's point: as @kissane's OP illustrates, sometimes spotlighting bad behavior's useful. A tactic that #BlackTwitter uses effectively in this situation (QTs) has been blocked from Mastodon for years, which has the effect of reinforcing the anti-Blackness here.

@trochee @misc

@jdp23 @damon @kissane @trochee I agree with all of this and QTs should have been enabled a long time ago, but I think developing those norms and affordances should be a priority, because the concerns about abuse are legitimate. I’m not arguing for zero tools for spotlighting abuse, I’m arguing for many tools. And I was just trying to sketch out an idea for something that would work like a limited-reach QT.

@misc

<3 for the idea of "QB this tedious person to my posse of people with more patience than me" but not convinced that can be done without enabling the dogpiling use cases that some bad actors perform on Twitter

@jdp23 @damon @kissane

@trochee @jdp23 @damon @kissane Not fully, of course, just like you can’t prevent people from doing screenshot quotes or unauthorized search crawls, or anything else that people don’t want. But, like, as one example, what if quote boosts were followers-only by default, and it took an active choice to flip it to public? Even a simple soft guard rail like that could be helpful.

@misc

the problem with that is that the worst dogpilers would actually be happy to make it "followers-only"; remember "Libs of Tiktok" as a use case

@jdp23 @damon @kissane

@trochee @jdp23 @damon @kissane True, but I am less concerned about making guard rails to constrain truly malevolent actors, and more nudges to shift norms.

@misc think about the implications though. From that article I shared: "Women and other marginalized groups say they are disproportionately targeted" by harassment from private QTs.

[Of course, with good moderation that might not be as much of a problem. But that's not the reality today in most of Mastodon.]

@trochee @damon @kissane

@trochee This simple diagram highlight some of the changes that could help!

Well okay it's not all that simple, privacy.thenexus.today/social- discusses in more detail.

But of course there's no guarantee that the actual design of QB's will take this into account. Several of the things I point to are long-standing requests that have been ignored to date. Sigh.

@misc @damon @kissane

@jdp23 @damon @kissane @trochee The good news is that Mastodon is officially enabling quotes, so we can focus on using our time to develop the other stuff.

@trochee @jdp23 @kissane @damon We have had them running on Treehouse since January, people use them a lot, and we've had zero issues. (We have a whole mod team and are willing to banhammer people for being jackasses, though, which helps a lot!)