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OK, let's get into it. Let's talk about anti-Blackness on this here Fediverse, "civility traps", and "why nazis wear suits."
First: there are some trans folk that love Black people, care about our safety, and want to see the Fediverse be more welcoming to Black users.
These kind folk volunteer considerable time, money, effort, and social capital, to make the Fediverse more welcoming for Black folk. We love them for this.
But there are some trans folk that are super fashy, and hate Black folk.
The (very few!) super fashy trans folk want the Fediverse to stay uncomfortable for Black folk. Some want to make it even more uncomfortable. Some are literal nazis.
Some trans folk pretend to be surprised that there are actively anti-Black trans folk, and ask questions like, "But isn't the Fediverse welcoming to all marginalized communities?"
I used to try to explain that being welcoming to one community isn't by default, welcoming to another.
Defining a term "civility trap," and explaining why nazis wear suits, and why Obama never gets angry:
A civility trap is where a Black person receives an intentional provocation. If the Black person responds with understandable frustration/anger, they are perceived as unreasonable / unhinged / untrustworthy. The original provocation is forgotten.
If they respond reasonably, another provocation will follow. And more. Hundreds more.
Nazis wear suits to try to make the contrast even greater.
There are kind trans folk involved with the FSEP project, from the approval of the project, to feedback on its design. There are also cis folk, queer folk, Black folk, white folk, Muslims, Jewish folk, Buddhists, atheists, etc. It's a big effort.
A big part of the project is collecting feedback and input, because this is far too important to get wrong.
So the initial design is being done in the open. There are a number of things that need to be improved before this is ready for prime time.
Most of this criticism is good and useful. Even if it's repetitive / something that's already covered in the proposal, it is good feedback.
All great questions:
* Who controls the blocklist? One dude? No new kings!
* Blocklist get weaponized! See [insert example].
* How do we audit reasons for blocks?
* What's the path back for blocked instances?
Knowledge of these harms didn't start with Twitter Blocklists. Years before GamerGate, those same bad actors targeted Black women.
This is not new.
But some of the criticism I'm seeing is not useful. It's just a targeted attack against one individual.
Quick history:
* There used to be an instance called Play Vicious.
* That instance was run off of the Fediverse by abusive fashy people, some of whom were trans
* Some of those abusers continue to harass the PV admin to this day
* Some of them tried to DDOS the hashtag that Black users and others use to stay safe on the Fediverse
(Obama would probably handle this with grace and composure)
If an instance is added to The Bad Space in error, that admin can reach out to have it removed. This happens. Admins do this every day.
The FSEP proposal makes a number of points:
* There needs to be more info about how/why an instance was added
* There needs to be more than one person making add / remove decisions
* The Bad Space won't be the only provider
* Human mods make mistakes
* The false negative/positive rate is as important as the weaponized abuse rate
None of this is controversial.
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.ioIf you say "Why is my instance on the Bad Space? Did I do something wrong?"
You might get a response like, "Sorry! There is an ongoing DB issue. No changes needed on your end. Should be fixed in an hour."
But if you say, "See! We don't need blocklists! The people that tried to stop Black people from using Fediblock were right!"
Then the Black person that's been fighting nazis on the fediverse for 6 years without much help or backup, might tell you about yourself, and where you can take that.
I've said this before but I'll say it again:
* I don't trust any one individual to run a blocklist. Whatever individual we choose, could turn bad. Consensus is required.
* Blocklists will be weaponized against the most marginalized communities (read: Black users). This is not a possibility. It's an eventuality. Good instances will wind up on the blocklist. The path back needs to be clear, and actionable.
* Reliability requirements are increased when thousands of instances depend on you.
If you take one thing away from this thread, it should be that you should always be suspicious when you think "That Black person seems so hostile!" Take a moment to dig into why. And become immune to racists in suits.
If you take 2 things away from this thread, the 2nd should be to think of a problem with the FSEP proposal (yes, even if you think it's probably already been raised before!), and bring it up. Criticize the idea. Point out flaws and ways it can be abused.
@mekkaokereke this is probably the best / most nuanced take on this situation i have seen
@mekkaokereke More a question than a criticism: have more decentralized models like Trustnet and other web-of-trust been explored? Trustnet specifically is also more gradual than a binary allow/deny choice, could that be useful, or does it overcomplicate things?
Tech criticism: the periodic pull based propagation of denylists might be suboptimal for both performance and latency. Why not something push based with explicit pulls as a fallback?
I don't want to mix her into all this Fedi drama, but a woman that knows *a lot* about Mastodon software, abuse mitigation software, transphobia online, protecting sex workers, navigating the space between anti-Blackness and transphobia, and the pain of false positives/unjust moderation, and the importance of transparent communication... has been looking at this.
In short, moving from allow/deny, to tags, and allowing the instance admin to configure how those tags are interpreted.
@mekkaokereke @csepp yes to this, reddit masstagger style and character references a la couchsurfing 20 years ago
@mekkaokereke having more than one block list like I suggested might help. Having those block lists hosted on github, accepting pull requests and discussions would provide history, wikipedia-discussion style. I hope I'm not stating the obvious. Thanks everyone involved to make this space a better place btw 
@philippe I mean, the tool in question *is* collated from multiple sources and its goal is less to function as an authoritative list and more to be a research resource for admins and mods (if I read the faq correctly).
@Sharksonaplane @philippe there's also at least one other tool that's been developed in this space (around research / intelligence collection, and sourcing data from many instances/sources — TheBad.Space isn't the only such project)
I'm also working on something related, which should hopefully be published next week.
@mekkaokereke a few immediate thoughts:
Auto updating seems like a vector for future bad actions (like bad actors getting a targeted server added to the blocklist & it then getting applied widely via auto updated blocklists) - documenting changes between versions might help (but likely only retroactively) and versions of the blocklist seems like it could be very helpful
Nuance seems hard under this scheme I don’t see a proposed way to track why a given site was added or how to remove it fully
@mekkaokereke I wonder (this is more brainstorming than criticism directly) if a scorefile vs binary list might be better - ie shared blocklist might capture all the events that lead to a block recommendation and log them along with responses/follow up actions. Then a score is calculated that leads to a recommendation & the score’s calculation is public.
But other sites might weigh actions differently and could then score differently to take different actions from the same shared dataset?
@mekkaokereke decades ago an approach like this was an early experiment in shared blocklists - for USENET via strn (scored threaded read news) which used a scorefile made up of rules to decide how to rank/display posts in a given Usenet group. Everyone has their own scorefile but people started sharing them & building upon them as an early means of dealing with early trolls and spammers. Nicely you could use the shared scorefile but tweak the thresholds for your specific personalized experience
Shhh! Stop telling the kids that we're all just slowly rebuilding / rewalking the path from Usenet -> LiveJournal, and correcting the centralizing sins of email blocklists along the way, because human civilization peaked in the 90s and it's all been downhill since then!
I want the youngins to feel like this is all new and innovative! Web4!
Some Friendica user boosted this into my timeline
Looks like y'all saw my "Why usenet must die" post from last Friday at https://idiomdrottning.org/usenet
Or from two weeks ago: https://idiomdrottning.org/fedi-is-like-email
@mekkaokereke @Rycaut I’ve personally seen the only two #MuslimInstances get out on block lists because white #Islamophobes have a problem with us being here.
At the same time, I’ve seen white run instances commit such amazingly horrible acts of #racism and #discrimination against Black and Muslim folks, and no one bats an eyelid.
@mekkaokereke @Rycaut That shit needs to change. We have documentation to back everything up. The people or person running the block list needs to prove why they’re doing what they’re doing.
@mekkaokereke Thanks for the in-depth explanation. I think at least part of the source of friction is that while many people heard of thebad.space, most have no idea about FSEP or the in-depth work being done or how thebad.space fits in with it. If someone encounters thebad.space without any of that context, all they will know about it is what is on the about page (https://thebad.space/about). Which paints a very different picture. I think much vituperation could be avoided with a single line at the top that referred people to FSEP and explained how thebad.space relates to that project.
It is worth reading the entirety of https://thebad.space/about with the mindset of a responsible server admin who has never heard of FSEP, but who landed on that page because they heard about a new block list.
@mekkaokereke this may be off-base and/or misunderstanding how ActivityPub replies work, but I wonder if the tools (Mastodon et al) need to take blocklists into account when processing replies.
Someone on here was commenting on the "traffic reflection" attacks that can happen when a bad person contextualizes a post in such a way as to land the problematic replies back in the original poster's inbox despite being directly blocked.
(This may be a duplicate concern or not part of FSEP)
@mekkaokereke What’s the best way to financially support the FSEP work?
Donate to Nivenly! Thank you!
And bonus: Nivenly is a co-op. That means that when we donate to Nivenly, the collective gets to decide how to support the project.
So please, also consider joining the co-op. Donating doesn't automatically get you membership in the co-op.
@mekkaokereke Excellent, thank you!
@mekkaokereke White tech bros like to think a computer can compute trust, but a computer simply can not. Trust is a fundamentally social human activity that requires people to be involved, in all scales and over time.
@mekkaokereke And democracy requires that power be diffuse and reasonably well-distributed. Anything, like capitalism, that consolidates and concentrates power, is simply antithetical to democracy.
@virtuous_sloth @mekkaokereke Engineers know that. "Tech bros" aren't engineers. They are marketing, sales, and venture (vulture) capitalists.
@andytiedye @mekkaokereke Obviously there are crypto true believers who are engineers. Engineers are not a monolith.
@mekkaokereke Yeah, weaponizing a blocklist is a pretty serious problem, and I'd argue that it's not so much "will be" as is "are being." Making a clear set of rules about what makes a site "bad" is essential, as well as publishing the evidence that supports the block.
@mekkaokereke I had a post removed. I have no idea why & I could not get an answer on my instance. Nor could I challenge it. So I moved. Your concerns are the same because there is no communication to the instance being added to the list nor is there a way to challenge the list makers. Transparency, communication, and challenge function could help with that. Then you have to decide what system to put in place for those moderators AND TRAIN THEM.
@mekkaokereke thank you for all your work to make Fedi a better place for everyone. I love it here, but I know it is because many hard working volunteers have shielded me from bad stuff.
Do people really say we (I don't even care who "we" means) don't need block lists? I know I should be immune to hot takes but jeez...
I don't personally use them but that's because I only talk to like 8 people. If anybody ever starts listening to me I am absolutely not going to want to start from scratch.
@mekkaokereke I am begging you to look more closely at the responses being given to reasonable questions about the site. Multiple people have tried saying exactly this, "why is my instance on the Bad Space?" and received answers like this. *None* of them have said the second thing.
Please understand that I see the utility in a shared block list for Fediverse. My concerns are that this *specific* site is not ready to be the standard, and Ro is *not* the one who should be in governance of this.
@mekkaokereke Again, I have read the proposal thoroughly, and I definitely see merit in "you may choose a blocklist at new setup". There are no doubts about this from me.
I have deep concerns about the FSEP so closely choosing The Bad Space as the MVP list. A better proposal would, I think, have a placeholder there until something could be worked out to fill that role.
It depends on the intended audience of the MVP. For example, if the likely early adopters are Black or instance admins who want to protect Black users, then a blocklist that's been developed by a Black person with years of experience on the fediverse makes a lot of sense -- espeically if the developer of the software is very familiar with it and can easily tweak it as needed.
@ExecGoofy@mastodon.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io I believe Mek address the human error in all of this. Plus, we lack significant context and history. If we are to use some screenshots to make determinations that’s dangerous and you are dangerous. I understand concerns but what you expressed is beyond a concern. Ro is very experienced. He’s also been harassed for years. But, he’s human and makes mistakes. Point us to the direction of the persons whom have gotten it right all of the time? Show us those that have consistently, not just since the Twitter migration have been working to make Fedi safe for minorities.
I look forward to your response because clearly many have gotten it wrong for YEARS! Mastodon has a poor reputation due to that vocal minority which were allowed to pervade the Fedi. If this wasn’t the case the behaviours wouldn’t have happened as consistently as people wouldn’t have felt comfortable to even do and behave in certain manners.
@damon @mekkaokereke No, I don't need someone to "get it right all the time", and I'm sure that the author is frustrated with the fallout of this. I'll accept a ton of "anger" in the replies... He was harassed off PV, that sucks! I'd be pissed off too!
What I AM asking for is basic accountability, sourcing, transparency, answers to reasonable questions about the project. That is not forthcoming. These screenshots are samples of a *pattern* and show why I think the project needs new leadership.
@ExecGoofy@mastodon.social @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io There has been mention made to the FSEP. IFTAS and others are putting in the work and TBS is just a part of that. With patience and some time what you are asking for will be available.
Also, stating that is sucks underscores what happened with PV. It’s not just about being pissed off. There were others on that team. People harmed in many ways due to people being upset their gross behaviours were being highlighted. Aggressors went to great lengths. Many of them are still on the Fedi today, making posts as if they’re good people that care about diversity, inclusion and all that other stuff.
Yet, they sit in silence disregarding the harm caused. People were traumatised.
Your response is “well that sucks…” but want to focus on the list. The list that no one has to even use to begin with.
Personally, I’d be more focused on the environment that allowed what happened to PV and how to make this place better and hold those responsible accountable.
@mekkaokereke my issue with the whole bad space thing is that what you descrihe isn't really what was happening.
Ro was just accusing anyone who was angry at him for the harms he'd negligently caused, or doubtful about the fundamental approach of the bad space (for the very reasons you list here!) racist and anti-Black, constantly, over and over, while tone-policing, downplaying, etc. It's not that the people he was responding to were actually saying "see! We don't need block lists!" He just wanted to paint it that way. In essence, he was creating a civility trap for anyone criticizing him — harm a bunch of trans women, then insist that anyone who is upset about that or questions the basics of how TheBadSpace approached blocklists was racist, while if you weren't racist you'd just be nice and just quietly contribute to his project without speaking up. (While of course being dismissive to people who actually did bring up even small points for improvement).
So this whole thread seems rhetorically suspect to me — the main actors here are not "fashy trans women," so your focus on them for several posts, starting the conversation with them, and then talking about the civility trap and people claiming block lists aren't needed, is false rhetorical framing designed to paint the other side of this controversy as "fashy trans." This is to exact sort of thing Ro was doing, sounding all nice and civil and calm and reasonable while using dirty rhetorical tricks to tar the trans people upset with or critical of his project as racist. And it's just so ironic you're doing the same kind of thing you're talking about with the civility trap.
Are you saying that there weren't any admins who simply asked Ro "Hey, why am I on this list?" And he told them that it's a bug, he was fixing it, and those admins just... went about their day, and their users didn't send an abuse wave in his direction?
And again, I shared a list of folks that have given critical feedback on TBS, and haven't been accused of being anti-Black.
There are real issues that need to be worked on, and I've seen no resistance to that feedback.
@mekkaokereke (it feels awful to argue this point bc I agree with your larger project and a lot of the stuff you've said about racism on the fedi, but I just can't let this rhetorical move slide)
sure, he did work with people that were sufficiently nice about his project by-default guilty-until-proven-innocent biasdly accusing them of things, but I really don't think setting up the conflict so that anyone who is upset with him and/or doesn't want to engage with him — because of his rhetoric and the bad practices that the bad space has already engaged in — is anti-black and a racist is a good way to frame things, its a civility trap and tone policing, and its a framing Ro has consistently over and over pushed (which is precisely why people don't want to engage with him!) and it's one you're continuing to push. The fact that he accepted quiet, meek contributions to the project doesn't actually change or undercut my point at all, in fact its specifically something I mentioned in my original point. It's just classic tone policing. You're not allowed to be upset at him.
Edit: Also, as it turns out, I'm right to not want to engage with him directly and so is everyone else, and I'm also right that he mostly doesn't take criticism normally and just immediately goes to accusations of racism. Here's an example: https://archive.ph/lHBEX
@mekkaokereke here he is again with the "anyone mad at me is racist" — as well as claiming that anti-Blackness permeates white queer spaces and how we're responsible for the *worst* abuse?
Honest questions, because you may just not be informed/aware:
1) Are you aware that Play Vicious (a Black and queer instance) was harassed and racially abused to the point of shutting down?
2) Do you know who orchestrated most of that abuse, and which instances that abuse came from?
3) Have you ever reported anyone that was part of the attacks on the PV admins for abuse? If so, what moderation action was taken?
@mekkaokereke oh geez yeah I was not aware of (1), I have no clue on (2) and am afraid to find out, and definitely not on (3)
OK great. I'm glad I asked!
@mekkaokereke sorry for making you have to ask 
@anarchopunk_girl @mekkaokereke I think it's fair to say that not everyone is going to know the full context to every development on the fedi.
Some folks may try to (like myself), but their knowledge is only as good as the information they consume, which even when it's comprehensive may not be the full story.