Originally published June 9, revised June 10.
DRAFT! Feedback welcome –
Most of the suggestions below are targeted at developers, admins, moderators … but I decided to lead with one that everybody can help with.
For many people, very much including me, the Fediverse isn’t easy. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017 and I still find it very complex – and confusing, too, like when I click on a link and sometimes it opens me pu in a window that’s not logged in anywhere, or the way posts federate means I don’t see all of a conversation. Hopefully it’ll get easier over time but that hasn’t happened yet.
And yet, you constantly hear people talking about how easy it is – which implies that anybody who doesn’t think it’s easy must be stupid, incompetent, or doing something wrong.
This is not helpful. It’s annoying and drives people away.
So don’t say it.
And while you’re at it, also don’t say “it’s good that it’s hard to sign up, it keeps the quality high.” As well as being annoying, that’s elitist. And besides, think about it for a second: it’s gotten a lot easier recently to sign up for a blue check mark on Twitter. Has that made the quality higher?
2. Improve the getting-started experience
Less than 20% of the accounts that have signed up on Mastodon in the last year are still active,. That’s actually better than it sounds: in Twitter’s or Google+’s early days, the number was less than 10%. Most people who check out a new social network don’t stick around.
A good way to make it more likely that people will stay around is to focus on improving their initial experience. People are a lot more likely to stay around if things start off on a good note – and a lot less likely if they get frustrated or (as well’ll discuss below) greeted with hate speech or racist abuse. So while you’re never going to make everybody happy, putting work into improving the getting-started experience for new users can make a big difference.
A couple of specific tactics that could be useful here:
- Make sure “getting started” guides are easy to find for new and potential users. The simple three-screen “welcome modal” Shel Raphen designed for Mastodon in 2017 had a big impact, and the joinmastodon.org “hub” site has also been helpful, but those certainly aren’t ot the only approach – templates for a well-written short pinned posts on communities and instances could also be very effective, and as long as reddit doesn’t censor it people could share it there to help people who haven’t yet moved get started. Lemmy already has joinlemmy.org (althogh like any website there’s room for improvement) and I’ve seen drafts of a couple short getting-started guides, so things are on the right track (although I’m not sure about the Kbin world), but more time and energy directed here is likely to pay a lot of dividends.
- Make it easy for people to avoid instances where racism, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Muslim bigotry, and other forms of bigotry hate speech are tolerated. In response to Gab, Mastodon introduced the Mastodon Server Covenant requiring sites to commit to “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia” in order to be listed…. which is a good first step, although needs to be expanded to other forms of bigotry targeting Muslims, disabled people, immigrants and other groups. It also needs to be combined with good moderation – as I discuss in the section below on Values, there’s currently Islamophobic content on several prominent Lemmy sites, including the flagship lemmy.ml. As I said on lemmy.blahaj.zone,
[A] we’ve seen on Mastodon, if a Black user goes to a site where racism is tolerated and quickly encounters racist sh*t, they leave and tell their friends; ditto for trans, queer, Muslim, etc. users having bad initial experiences. Once that happens a bunch of times the reputation becomes hard to shake.
- Give instance admins control over their “landing page” so they can give the right information to potential users. Just what information that is depends on the instance. For example, instances that so many communities that a list would be overwhelming might decide that it’s best to show a list of top local posts. Instances that host a handful of communities might be better off having a list of communities be the landing page. Instances with a single community, designed as a home for an individual subreddit, might want to show the community on the main page – or a welcome post, telling people how to log in. Mastodon’s often resistant to giving admins options like this, but “once size fits all” usually doesn’t fit everybody equally well.
3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind
Scaling is hard was probably the main lesson 😀
– Ryan Wild, admin of masodonapp.uk, on Mastodon
When a surge happens, everybody’s overwhelmed. Instances allowing open registrations get so many signups that they have to add new hardware capacity, and often don’t have the moderation resources to keep up. Instances that screen registrations for new users want to turn things around as quickly as possible, but have to deal with hundreds or thousands a day. Dev teams need to deal with performance issues, critical bug fixes, and urgently-needed improvements – while also supporting instance admins and developers, who on the one hand are helping to spread the load but on the other hand are one more demand on already-scarce time.
There isn’t any magic answer here: scaling is hard, and even large commercial sites can have problems keeping up with intense surges. Still, one key lesson is the importance of spreading people out to multiple well-moderated instances to overloading the flagship and other big instances. In principle, by allowing people from one instance to interact with each other instances, the fediverse makes this easy.
In practice, it’s more complicated. Asking people to choose an instance right off the bat, before they’ve had any experience with the platform or even know what the implications of choosing an instance are, can be a huge barrier. So it’s tempting to try to simplify things by pointing everybody to a default instance but that doesn’t scale: every significant surge to Mastodon has led to mastodon.social having to close down signups for a while.
So landing pages and guides that help people through the process of choosing an instance are crucial – and so are good instructions for how people can set up their own instances, community support for when they run into problems, and best practies for admins to scale their instances.
More positively, since smaller fediverse instances tend to retain more active users, this is a great opportunity to shape the network; Marcel Costa’s analysis shows that Masotodon decentralized significantly as a result of the November 2017 surge. That’s good! But it was pretty exhausing for all concerned. As mas.to admin Rodti Macleary said in February’s The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump, “I loved Mastodon for fun. For a little while, Mastodon became work. I came quite close to burnout at the end of last year.”
Which brings me to a few other key lessons for instance admins:
- build teams place to help with moderation, system administration, and support
- put a funding structure on place (via patreon, ko-fi, LiberaPay, or a sponsorship mechanism) to deal with ongoing costs.
- if things are starting to get overloaded, put the brakes on growth to keep from having to choose between burning out and giving people a bad experience. As long-time fediversian Michał “rysiek” Woźniak says
Manage your spoons well.
The wave of sign-ups will come and go, but burn-out or some bad moderation decisions will affect a community for a long, long time.
It’s better to slowly but reliably build a small, resilient, safe space than to try to go hockey-stick on sign-ups only to have people get burnt, abandon their accounts, and tell their friends about it.
[If you’re not familiar with “spoon theory”, it’s a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. The term was originally coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus and is now used widely in the disability community. What The ‘Spoon Theory’ Means for People Living With Chronic Illnesses, Disabilities is a good discussion.]
4. Prioritize accessibility
“One of our moderators, u/itsthejoker, has had multiple hour-long calls with various Reddit employees. However, as of the current time, our concerns have gone unheard, and Reddit remains firm.”
– r/Blind moderators in Reddit’s Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of the /r/blind subreddit,
While reddit killing third-party apps is bad for users and moderators in general, it’s even worse for blind users and moderators. Reddit’s own software doesn’t play well with screenreaders and other assistive technologies. As a result, third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit for Blind, and Luna for Reddit are crucial for blind users to be able to participate. Reddit now says they’re going to continue to allow non-commercial accesibiity apps, although won’t give a list of criteria and it’s also demanding free labor from developers who want to help blind people so it is not by any means a good solution.
Reddit not prioritizing the needs of blind users is nothing new.
“We would also like to note that r/blind, u/rumster in particular, have continuously contacted Reddit over accessibility concerns, over the past 3 years, having received no substantive response.”
– MostlyBlindGamer, in a reddit comment
So now’s a great opportunity for KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse to collectively show that they’re not like reddit – and attract a bunch of people who are tired of being ignored. KBin and Lemmy both have some accessibility problems now (as does most Fediverse software), but most of these problems are fairly easy if developers decide to take the time. It hasn’t been prioritized to date – but it’s easy enough to change that.
The Accessibility section of Mastodon: a partial history has examples of successful community-driven development worth emulating, like Changeling’s Guide to Mastodon for Screen Reader Users and the highly-accessible Pinafore web client, created by Nolan Lawson. Lawson’s What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs talks about Marco Zehe’s “patient coaching” and comments on the Pinafore GitHub repo as a “treasure trove of knowledge,” and illustrates how much help and support can be available when people sincerely reach out.
Then again Mastodon also provides example of what not to do here. The main dev team hasn’t prioritized implementing alt text on images: it took over a year to implement originally, so it wasn’t available during the April 2017 wave; configurable message lengths and underlined links, both valuable for accessibility, have been implemented for years in forks but aren’t well supported in the mainline branch.2 Hopefully Lemmy and KBin will do better on this front – and Mastodon and other fediverse software will also take the opportunity to start improving their own platforms’ accessibility.
5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation
Yeah, all of those exist already – and on reddit too – but the scale’s likely to increase siginificantly. KBin and Lemmy have more tools than Diaspora or Mastodon did back in the day, ibut it’s not clear how much they’ve focused on these issues yet – there’s still a lot more that could be done here. For example:
- Provide individual users the abilty to block instances. Mastodon’s innovation of instance-level blocking – allowing instances or individual users can block everything from a site that’s a source of harassment, trolling, or just unwanted content – allowed users and sites wanted to avoid interactions with channer, shitposting, and Nazi instances. Lemmy currently doesn’t allow individual users to block instances (although admins can), and multiple people have already requested this functionality.
- Work out a process for community-curated instance block lists. If each new instance has to learn the hard way that there are some well-known bad actor sites out there, a lot of users and admins will have unnecessarily bad early experiences. But having the main dev team curate block lists (an approach Mastodon has wisely stayed away from) risks centralizing power even further. Community-led processes like the Oliphant.social block lists and The Bad Space are a good alternative – and may well be useful starting points, as long as there are good instructions for admins on how to adopt them and a process for subscribing to updates.
- Be ready to respond when spammers start to take advantage of open registrations or communities that anybody can share too. As Brian Krebs’ Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer highlights, the fediverse has gotten big enough that it’s worth spamming, and sites with open registration make spammers lives very easy. Mastodon responded by introducing a captcha on signup, which puts in a speed bump for spammers at the cost of making things more difficult for people with vision or motor challenges. Turning off open registrations, at least temporarily, may be a better option.
- “NSFW” flags aren’t enough. Porn is popular on reddit. Many fediverse instances don’t want to host porn, because of concern about legal liability or other reasons. Not only that, different jurisdictions and cultures often see things diffferently in terms of what is and isn’t legal or acceptable: in early 2017 Mastodon faced a dicey situation around sharing images that were completely legal in Japan but consider very risky by many Western sites,. Mastodon does have some tools like the “reject media” federation option and content warnings (CWs), althouth their far from sufficient and cause challenges of their own: CWs haven’t been improved signiicantly since it was first introduced in 2017 and have led to constant battles about norms and racialized CW abuse. A far as I can tell, Lemmy and KBin currently only have an optional NSFW flag to put on posts – even farther from sufficient. beehaw.org, currently the third-largest site after the flagsnhip lemmy.ml and the tankie lemmygrad.ml, has a NSFW policy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they and other similar sites wind up developing a fork.
6. Invest in moderation tools
“Reddit admins have had 8 years to build a stronger infrastructure to support moderators but have not. “
– Sarah Gilbert, AskHistorians and uncertainty surrounding the future of API access
As Gilbert’s outstanding description of the situation discusses, Reddit’s underinvested in moderation tools for years. Alas, ever since 2017 , so has Mastodon. And so has every other fediverse software platform I can think of.
Now’s a great opportunity to change that.
In the short term, there could be a lot of leverage porting the moderation tools that have been developed for reddit – or finding ways to replicate their functionality in a federated environment. Moderator time is often the scarcest resource during a high-growth surge, and if moderators can’t keep up with the load there will be more spam, disinformation, racism, harassment, and people having bad experiences. Tools can amplify their efforts, and potentially let people who don’t have as much moderation experience help more effectively. And done right, these tools evolve to work on other fediverse software, where there’s certainly room for improvement.
But why stop there?
In this study, I perform a collaborative ethnography with moderators of r/AskHistorians, a community that uses an alternative moderation model, highlighting the importance of accounting for power in moderation.
Drawing from Black feminist theory, I call this “intersectional moderation.”… To ensure the successful implementation of intersectional moderation, I argue that designers should support decision-making processes and policy makers should account for the impact of the sociotechnical systems in which moderators work.– Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of
Moderation Built on Care and Power, Sarah Gilbert, J . ACM, Vol. 37, No. 4, Article 111. Publication date: August 2023.New tools designed to center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes and prioritize the needs of the communites – and prioritizing accessibility from the beginning – could be truly transformational. Sure, easier said than done, but this is a good opportunity to make progress.
7. Values matter
Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days.
– Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017
It’s still true! Mastodon’s April 2017 influx was catalyzed by Sarah Jeong’s Mastodon is like Twitter without Nazis and the November 2022 wave was triggered by transphobic Apartheid Clyde’s acquisition of Twitter. And when Gab switched to Mastodon’s code in 2019, Mastodon BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) Eugen Rochko stated his opposition to Gab’s philosophy, which he accurately described as using “he pretense of free speech absolutism as an excuse to platform racist and otherwise dehumanizing content” … and virtually every Mastodon instance blocked Gab. This decisions remains widely popular; in a recent poll I did, over 90% of respondents thought that Gab should be blocked.
Of course, the policies aren’t enough. As Dr. Johnathan Flowers discusses in The Whiteness of Mastodon, “Mastodon has a history of being inhospitable to marginalized users.” Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy discusses several examples of racism and white supremacy on Mastodon in 2017. As a result, Mastodon’s got a problematic – although thoroughly deserved – reputation for anti-Blackness.
Lemmy also has a reputation.
I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time, but I’ve always been somewhat wary of it because it’s developed by tankies, and its flagship server (lemmy.ml) has a history of tolerating/encouraging tankie politics…. There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China. I’m far from the only one leery of Lemmy for this reason – the FediTips Mastodon account doesn’t recommend it , either.
– Jessica Smith, On Reddit and Its Federated Alternatives
You don’t have to scroll too far down the list of sites on joinlemmy.org to find more than one hosting anti-Muslim content. That’s not good. And posts from these sites show up on lemmy.ml, so there’s anti-Muslim content on the flagship instance. That’s also not good.
It’s possible that it’s a combination of understaffed or undertrained moderators and a few anti-Muslim instances, and once everybody improves their moderation and defederates the bad actors the problem will go away. Time will tell. And whether or not that happens, Lemmy’s developers are reportedly tankies, which is a problem for a lot of people. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a fork.
More positively, though, defederation from bigoted sites is one of the fediverse’s good features, and forks can have a very positive effect. And with Twitter’s transformation into an openly right-wing, racist, anti-LGBTQ+ pro-authoritarian, disinfo media network, whatever segment of the fediverse offers an alternative is going to continue to be very appealing!
This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity
There’s a lot more that can be said … but this is long enough already, so I’ll leave the rest to discussions in the fediverse and perhaps future posts. But since I spent so much of this post focusing on past screwups and likely problems, I’m going to wrap up on a positive note.
This is quite likely to be the biggest wave to the fediverse yet. It’ll be interesting to see how things go, especially during the June 12/13 blackout, but if even a small fraction of the people who want to check things out wind up staying around, the network could grow significantly. Not only that, the surge of interest is likely to be a shot in the arm for other fediverse software as well as KBin and Lemmy.
“For many of us, the details of the API changes are not the most important point anymore. This decision, and the subsequent interaction with users by admins to justify it, have eroded much of the confidence and trust in the management of reddit that they have been working so hard to regain.”
– BuckRowdy, Reddit held a call today with some developers regarding the API changes
And no matter what happens, this is far from the last opportunity. Reddit may well make enough concessions in the short term to keep people around for a while … but the writing’s on the wall, so as soon as alternatives fediverse are good enough for enough people, we’ll start to see significant movement.
Meanwhile Twitter’s doubling down on the “toxic hellscape” strategy, with Apartheid Clyde now talking about disalbing blocking. What could possibly go wrong? If he does that, there’s going to be another major exodus; even if he doesn’t, anybody who doesn’t want to spend their time in a racist, transphobic, hard-right-wing, disinfo-filled environment will continue to look for alternatives.. And while Facebook/Instagram/Meta’s new ActivityPub-compatible Twitter competitor will bring surveillance capitalism and an embrace-extend-dominate mindset to the fediverse, it could potentailly also bring connections with Oprah, the Dalai Lama, and 2 billion Instagram users. So that’s a huge opportunity as well.
As Ada says, it’s interesting times in the fediverse.
Notes
1 Mastodon: a partial history discusses the April 2017 and November 2022 waves; and lnks to some articles on the Qvitter/GnuSocial wave (2016).
2 Configurable message lengths are valuable for accessibility because assistive technology does better with one long message than multiple short ones, and were I believe first implemented by glitch-soc; underlined lines help people with color vision problems distinguish between links and were first implemented by toot.cafe.
![Most of the suggestions below are targeted at developers, admins, moderators … but I decided to lead with one that everybody can help with. For many people, very much including me, the Fediverse isn’t easy. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017 and I still find it very complex – and confusing, too, like when I click on a link and sometimes it opens me pu in a window that’s not logged in anywhere, or the way posts federate means I don’t see all of a conversation. Hopefully it’ll get easier over time but that hasn’t happened yet. And yet, you constantly hear people talking about how easy it is – which implies that anybody who doesn’t think it’s easy must be stupid, incompetent, or doing something wrong. This is not helpful. It’s annoying and drives people away. So don’t say it. And while you’re at it, also don’t say “it’s good that it’s hard to sign up, it keeps the quality high.” As well as being annoying, that’s elitist. And besides, think about it for a second: it’s gotten a lot easier recently to sign up for a blue check mark on Twitter. Has that made the quality higher? 2. Improve the getting-started experience Less than 20% of the accounts that have signed up on Mastodon in the last year are still active,. That’s actually better than it sounds: in Twitter’s or Google+’s early days, the number was less than 10%. Most people who check out a new social network don’t stick around. A good way to make it more likely that people will stay around is to focus on improving their initial experience. People are a lot more likely to stay around if things start off on a good note – and a lot less likely if they get frustrated or (as well’ll discuss below) greeted with hate speech or racist abuse. So while you’re never going to make everybody happy, putting work into improving the getting-started experience for new users can make a big difference. A couple of specific tactics that could be useful here: Make sure “getting started” guides are easy to find for new and potential users. The simple three-screen “welcome modal” Shel Raphen designed for Mastodon in 2017 had a big impact, and the joinmastodon.org “hub” site has also been helpful, but those certainly aren’t ot the only approach – templates for a well-written short pinned posts on communities and instances could also be very effective, and as long as reddit doesn’t censor it people could share it there to help people who haven’t yet moved get started. Lemmy already has joinlemmy.org (althogh like any website there’s room for improvement) and I’ve seen drafts of a couple short getting-started guides, so things are on the right track (although I’m not sure about the Kbin world), but more time and energy directed here is likely to pay a lot of dividends. Make it easy for people to avoid instances where racism, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Muslim bigotry, and other forms of bigotry hate speech are tolerated. In response to Gab, Mastodon introduced the Mastodon Server Covenant requiring sites to commit to “active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia” in order to be listed…. which is a good first step, although needs to be expanded to other forms of bigotry targeting Muslims, disabled people, immigrants and other groups. It also needs to be combined with good moderation – as I discuss in the section below on Values, there’s currently Islamophobic content on several prominent Lemmy sites, including the flagship lemmy.ml. As I said on lemmy.blahaj.zone, [A] we’ve seen on Mastodon, if a Black user goes to a site where racism is tolerated and quickly encounters racist sh*t, they leave and tell their friends; ditto for trans, queer, Muslim, etc. users having bad initial experiences. Once that happens a bunch of times the reputation becomes hard to shake. Give instance admins control over their “landing page” so they can give the right information to potential users. Just what information that is depends on the instance. For example, instances that so many communities that a list would be overwhelming might decide that it’s best to show a list of top local posts. Instances that host a handful of communities might be better off having a list of communities be the landing page. Instances with a single community, designed as a home for an individual subreddit, might want to show the community on the main page – or a welcome post, telling people how to log in. Mastodon’s often resistant to giving admins options like this, but “once size fits all” usually doesn’t fit everybody equally well. 3. Keep scalability and sustainability in mind Scaling is hard was probably the main lesson 😀 – Ryan Wild, admin of masodonapp.uk, on Mastodon When a surge happens, everybody’s overwhelmed. Instances allowing open registrations get so many signups that they have to add new hardware capacity, and often don’t have the moderation resources to keep up. Instances that screen registrations for new users want to turn things around as quickly as possible, but have to deal with hundreds or thousands a day. Dev teams need to deal with performance issues, critical bug fixes, and urgently-needed improvements – while also supporting instance admins and developers, who on the one hand are helping to spread the load but on the other hand are one more demand on already-scarce time. There isn’t any magic answer here: scaling is hard, and even large commercial sites can have problems keeping up with intense surges. Still, one key lesson is the importance of spreading people out to multiple well-moderated instances to overloading the flagship and other big instances. In principle, by allowing people from one instance to interact with each other instances, the fediverse makes this easy. In practice, it’s more complicated. Asking people to choose an instance right off the bat, before they’ve had any experience with the platform or even know what the implications of choosing an instance are, can be a huge barrier. So it’s tempting to try to simplify things by pointing everybody to a default instance but that doesn’t scale: every significant surge to Mastodon has led to mastodon.social having to close down signups for a while. So landing pages and guides that help people through the process of choosing an instance are crucial – and so are good instructions for how people can set up their own instances, community support for when they run into problems, and best practies for admins to scale their instances. More positively, since smaller fediverse instances tend to retain more active users, this is a great opportunity to shape the network; Marcel Costa’s analysis shows that Masotodon decentralized significantly as a result of the November 2017 surge. That’s good! But it was pretty exhausing for all concerned. As mas.to admin Rodti Macleary said in February’s The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump, “I loved Mastodon for fun. For a little while, Mastodon became work. I came quite close to burnout at the end of last year.” Which brings me to a few other key lessons for instance admins: build teams place to help with moderation, system administration, and support put a funding structure on place (via patreon, ko-fi, LiberaPay, or a sponsorship mechanism) to deal with ongoing costs. if things are starting to get overloaded, put the brakes on growth to keep from having to choose between burning out and giving people a bad experience. As long-time fediversian Michał “rysiek” Woźniak says Manage your spoons well. The wave of sign-ups will come and go, but burn-out or some bad moderation decisions will affect a community for a long, long time. It’s better to slowly but reliably build a small, resilient, safe space than to try to go hockey-stick on sign-ups only to have people get burnt, abandon their accounts, and tell their friends about it. [If you’re not familiar with “spoon theory”, it’s a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. The term was originally coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus and is now used widely in the disability community. What The ‘Spoon Theory’ Means for People Living With Chronic Illnesses, Disabilities is a good discussion.] 4. Prioritize accessibility “One of our moderators, u/itsthejoker, has had multiple hour-long calls with various Reddit employees. However, as of the current time, our concerns have gone unheard, and Reddit remains firm.” – r/Blind moderators in Reddit’s Recently Announced API Changes, and the future of the /r/blind subreddit, While reddit killing third-party apps is bad for users and moderators in general, it’s even worse for blind users and moderators. Reddit’s own software doesn’t play well with screenreaders and other assistive technologies. As a result, third-party apps like Apollo, Reddit for Blind, and Luna for Reddit are crucial for blind users to be able to participate. Reddit now says they’re going to continue to allow non-commercial accesibiity apps, although won’t give a list of criteria and it’s also demanding free labor from developers who want to help blind people so it is not by any means a good solution. Reddit not prioritizing the needs of blind users is nothing new. “We would also like to note that r/blind, u/rumster in particular, have continuously contacted Reddit over accessibility concerns, over the past 3 years, having received no substantive response.” – MostlyBlindGamer, in a reddit comment So now’s a great opportunity for KBin, Lemmy, and the fediverse to collectively show that they’re not like reddit – and attract a bunch of people who are tired of being ignored. KBin and Lemmy both have some accessibility problems now (as does most Fediverse software), but most of these problems are fairly easy if developers decide to take the time. It hasn’t been prioritized to date – but it’s easy enough to change that. The Accessibility section of Mastodon: a partial history has examples of successful community-driven development worth emulating, like Changeling’s Guide to Mastodon for Screen Reader Users and the highly-accessible Pinafore web client, created by Nolan Lawson. Lawson’s What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs talks about Marco Zehe’s “patient coaching” and comments on the Pinafore GitHub repo as a “treasure trove of knowledge,” and illustrates how much help and support can be available when people sincerely reach out. Then again Mastodon also provides example of what not to do here. The main dev team hasn’t prioritized implementing alt text on images: it took over a year to implement originally, so it wasn’t available during the April 2017 wave; configurable message lengths and underlined links, both valuable for accessibility, have been implemented for years in forks but aren’t well supported in the mainline branch.2 Hopefully Lemmy and KBin will do better on this front – and Mastodon and other fediverse software will also take the opportunity to start improving their own platforms’ accessibility. 5. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, spam, porn, and disinformation Yeah, all of those exist already – and on reddit too – but the scale’s likely to increase siginificantly. KBin and Lemmy have more tools than Diaspora or Mastodon did back in the day, ibut it’s not clear how much they’ve focused on these issues yet – there’s still a lot more that could be done here. For example: Provide individual users the abilty to block instances. Mastodon’s innovation of instance-level blocking – allowing instances or individual users can block everything from a site that’s a source of harassment, trolling, or just unwanted content – allowed users and sites wanted to avoid interactions with channer, shitposting, and Nazi instances. Lemmy currently doesn’t allow individual users to block instances (although admins can), and multiple people have already requested this functionality. Work out a process for community-curated instance block lists. If each new instance has to learn the hard way that there are some well-known bad actor sites out there, a lot of users and admins will have unnecessarily bad early experiences. But having the main dev team curate block lists (an approach Mastodon has wisely stayed away from) risks centralizing power even further. Community-led processes like the Oliphant.social block lists and The Bad Space are a good alternative – and may well be useful starting points, as long as there are good instructions for admins on how to adopt them and a process for subscribing to updates. Be ready to respond when spammers start to take advantage of open registrations or communities that anybody can share too. As Brian Krebs’ Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer highlights, the fediverse has gotten big enough that it’s worth spamming, and sites with open registration make spammers lives very easy. Mastodon responded by introducing a captcha on signup, which puts in a speed bump for spammers at the cost of making things more difficult for people with vision or motor challenges. Turning off open registrations, at least temporarily, may be a better option. “NSFW” flags aren’t enough. Porn is popular on reddit. Many fediverse instances don’t want to host porn, because of concern about legal liability or other reasons. Not only that, different jurisdictions and cultures often see things diffferently in terms of what is and isn’t legal or acceptable: in early 2017 Mastodon faced a dicey situation around sharing images that were completely legal in Japan but consider very risky by many Western sites,. Mastodon does have some tools like the “reject media” federation option and content warnings (CWs), althouth their far from sufficient and cause challenges of their own: CWs haven’t been improved signiicantly since it was first introduced in 2017 and have led to constant battles about norms and racialized CW abuse. A far as I can tell, Lemmy and KBin currently only have an optional NSFW flag to put on posts – even farther from sufficient. beehaw.org, currently the third-largest site after the flagsnhip lemmy.ml and the tankie lemmygrad.ml, has a NSFW policy, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they and other similar sites wind up developing a fork. 6. Invest in moderation tools “Reddit admins have had 8 years to build a stronger infrastructure to support moderators but have not. “ – Sarah Gilbert, AskHistorians and uncertainty surrounding the future of API access As Gilbert’s outstanding description of the situation discusses, Reddit’s underinvested in moderation tools for years. Alas, ever since 2017 , so has Mastodon. And so has every other fediverse software platform I can think of. Now’s a great opportunity to change that. In the short term, there could be a lot of leverage porting the moderation tools that have been developed for reddit – or finding ways to replicate their functionality in a federated environment. Moderator time is often the scarcest resource during a high-growth surge, and if moderators can’t keep up with the load there will be more spam, disinformation, racism, harassment, and people having bad experiences. Tools can amplify their efforts, and potentially let people who don’t have as much moderation experience help more effectively. And done right, these tools evolve to work on other fediverse software, where there’s certainly room for improvement. But why stop there? In this study, I perform a collaborative ethnography with moderators of r/AskHistorians, a community that uses an alternative moderation model, highlighting the importance of accounting for power in moderation.Drawing from Black feminist theory, I call this “intersectional moderation.”… To ensure the successful implementation of intersectional moderation, I argue that designers should support decision-making processes and policy makers should account for the impact of the sociotechnical systems in which moderators work. – Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model ofModeration Built on Care and Power, Sarah Gilbert, J . ACM, Vol. 37, No. 4, Article 111. Publication date: August 2023. New tools designed to center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes and prioritize the needs of the communites – and prioritizing accessibility from the beginning – could be truly transformational. Sure, easier said than done, but this is a good opportunity to make progress. 7. Values matter Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days. – Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017 It’s still true! Mastodon’s April 2017 influx was catalyzed by Sarah Jeong’s Mastodon is like Twitter without Nazis and the November 2022 wave was triggered by transphobic Apartheid Clyde’s acquisition of Twitter. And when Gab switched to Mastodon’s code in 2019, Mastodon BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) Eugen Rochko stated his opposition to Gab’s philosophy, which he accurately described as using “he pretense of free speech absolutism as an excuse to platform racist and otherwise dehumanizing content” … and virtually every Mastodon instance blocked Gab. This decisions remains widely popular; in a recent poll I did, over 90% of respondents thought that Gab should be blocked. Of course, the policies aren’t enough. As Dr. Johnathan Flowers discusses in The Whiteness of Mastodon, “Mastodon has a history of being inhospitable to marginalized users.” Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy discusses several examples of racism and white supremacy on Mastodon in 2017. As a result, Mastodon’s got a problematic – although thoroughly deserved – reputation for anti-Blackness. Lemmy also has a reputation. I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time, but I’ve always been somewhat wary of it because it’s developed by tankies, and its flagship server (lemmy.ml) has a history of tolerating/encouraging tankie politics…. There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China. I’m far from the only one leery of Lemmy for this reason – the FediTips Mastodon account doesn’t recommend it , either. – Jessica Smith, On Reddit and Its Federated Alternatives You don’t have to scroll too far down the list of sites on joinlemmy.org to find more than one hosting anti-Muslim content. That’s not good. And posts from these sites show up on lemmy.ml, so there’s anti-Muslim content on the flagship instance. That’s also not good. It’s possible that it’s a combination of understaffed or undertrained moderators and a few anti-Muslim instances, and once everybody improves their moderation and defederates the bad actors the problem will go away. Time will tell. And whether or not that happens, Lemmy’s developers are reportedly tankies, which is a problem for a lot of people. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there’s a fork. More positively, though, defederation from bigoted sites is one of the fediverse’s good features, and forks can have a very positive effect. And with Twitter’s transformation into an openly right-wing, racist, anti-LGBTQ+ pro-authoritarian, disinfo media network, whatever segment of the fediverse offers an alternative is going to continue to be very appealing! This is a great opportunity – and it won’t be the last great opportunity There’s a lot more that can be said … but this is long enough already, so I’ll leave the rest to discussions in the fediverse and perhaps future posts. But since I spent so much of this post focusing on past screwups and likely problems, I’m going to wrap up on a positive note. This is quite likely to be the biggest wave to the fediverse yet. It’ll be interesting to see how things go, especially during the June 12/13 blackout, but if even a small fraction of the people who want to check things out wind up staying around, the network could grow significantly. Not only that, the surge of interest is likely to be a shot in the arm for other fediverse software as well as KBin and Lemmy. “For many of us, the details of the API changes are not the most important point anymore. This decision, and the subsequent interaction with users by admins to justify it, have eroded much of the confidence and trust in the management of reddit that they have been working so hard to regain.” – BuckRowdy, Reddit held a call today with some developers regarding the API changes And no matter what happens, this is far from the last opportunity. Reddit may well make enough concessions in the short term to keep people around for a while … but the writing’s on the wall, so as soon as alternatives fediverse are good enough for enough people, we’ll start to see significant movement. Meanwhile Twitter’s doubling down on the “toxic hellscape” strategy, with Apartheid Clyde now talking about disalbing blocking. What could possibly go wrong? If he does that, there’s going to be another major exodus; even if he doesn’t, anybody who doesn’t want to spend their time in a racist, transphobic, hard-right-wing, disinfo-filled environment will continue to look for alternatives.. And while Facebook/Instagram/Meta’s new ActivityPub-compatible Twitter competitor will bring surveillance capitalism and an embrace-extend-dominate mindset to the fediverse, it could potentailly also bring connections with Oprah, the Dalai Lama, and 2 billion Instagram users. So that’s a huge opportunity as well. As Ada says, it’s interesting times in the fediverse. Notes 1 Mastodon: a partial history discusses the April 2017 and November 2022 waves; and lnks to some articles on the Qvitter/GnuSocial wave (2016). 2 Configurable message lengths are valuable for accessibility because assistive technology does better with one long message than multiple short ones, and were I believe first implemented by glitch-soc; underlined lines help people with color vision problems distinguish between links and were first implemented by toot.cafe.](https://2024.thenexus.today/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/kinda-like-email.png 1148w){kind=link}