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@hrefna you know, during cohost, we had the realization at one point that... uh, the user base of cohost was larger than ... some other platform that was getting a lot of investor attention at the time, we can't remember which. the only reason it felt "small" was that capital wasn't part of the equation, so there wasn't a feeding frenzy surrounding it.

@hrefna and, like, platforms that aren't attempting to make a profit are never going to get breathless praise in the business press

@hrefna we could have a hundred million users on fedi and the only press attention fedi would get would be about how businesses can exploit fedi to maximize revenue

@ireneista Yep, I agree that we could and that's how it would be framed, but we also have in practice under a million users.

@hrefna yes, true

@hrefna hm. you know that thing about how, at any given point in history, about five percent of the world want to make things better, about five percent want to make things worst, and the rest will go along with whoever seems to be winning?

@hrefna we think the appeal of fedi to people who want to make the world better is clear. we think it is disproportionately full of said people.

@hrefna is the next challenge to make fedi appeal to people who are willing to go along with improving the world, though they would never themselves seek to and are not willing to invest any effort in it?

@hrefna or is that self-sabotage that we shouldn't want?

@ireneista I repeatedly see Black users talk about how hostile this space is for them.

I've seen servers go to war here against a group of transfemmes in a way where the damage persists years on. People giving up after their 2nd server in a row dies. Dogpiling that most closely resembles what we saw during GG. And, underlying it, a fundamental unwillingness to address it.

Some people are seriously Doing the Work™ here and that's great, but also I'm tired and the problems are structural.

@hrefna yes, we see these as very serious concerns and they do need structural fixes

Agreed all around.

One potential way around the structural issues is to give up on moving fedi as a whole forward, and focus on subsets that really want to move forward in an intersectionally inclusive and equity-focused way. There's an existing archipelago of instances, and adjacent people on other instances who would move in the right circumstances to build on -- imperfect of course but willing to try to improve.

And there are lots of people not currently here who also potentially align with that.
But the branding of the Fediverse = Mastodon as a Twitter alternative or the Fediverse = a protocol, and the entry path of Mastodon = mastodon.social hides all this, so people don't know about it or can't find it and their initial experiences are typically meah (or even bad) so why put the effort in anyhow?

Note that I'm castiing it in terms of subsets, plural. Trying to address the general "better social network" problem is hard, diffuses any possible advanges, and highlights fedi's deficitis -- areas where it lags existing large social networks. Trying to address the "good social network for a community that doesn't currently have any great solutions" is more achievable, can better leverage strengths as they relate to specific communities, and can focus on the specific deficits that need to be addressed. Hopefully some of it generalizes, and synergies across and between different communities can accelerate the process ... but that's not necessarily the first step.

@ireneista @hrefna

@thenexusofprivacy @hrefna yeah we think way too much effort is spent on trying to get Mastodon upstream to adopt stuff. it is clear to us at this point that Mastodon the organization enjoys and consciously reinforces its pseudo-corporate hegemony. we should not be treating them as a friendly upstream who has the same interests as the community they claim to serve.

@thenexusofprivacy @hrefna when we have to describe the fediverse to previously-uninvolved audiences, we tend to prefer constructions such as "the fediverse (using software such as gotosocial, misskey, or mastodon)"

that lets people link it up to their existing knowledge without inappropriately granting top billing to the bad actor

Yeah. I wrote https://privacy.thenexus.today/good-stuff-in-the-fediverses/ to emphasize that.

@ireneista @hrefna

@thenexusofprivacy @hrefna oh good, thanks :)

@hrefna that said, well, you know our view on shared block lists. we are so incredibly frustrated that there isn't a meaningful dialogue on what to do instead, just that repeated totalizing demand, because it's very zero-sum thinking... as if to get one marginalized group safe here we have to kick another off; as if those tools won't be weaponized against everyone the moment they're adopted.

And Bluesky is currently mostly relying on shared blocklists -- an implementation that addresses none of the known problems. There's a "crypto grifters" blocklist that includes Molly White. There's a CSAM blocklist run by somebody with a plausble-looking account which has a lot of trans people who don't share CSAM as well as some people who have critiqued the blocklist owner. Who, who could have predicted? Other than anybody who knows anything about blocklists that is.

But then again, their composable moderation approach also has all these problems, plus a really mediocre user interface, and some issues of its own. The best "transphobia" labeler ncludes a Black people (including some Black trans people) who I didn't see as transphobic, and even if you're willing to do manual work there's no way to override it. Sigh.

More positively, there's still plenty of room for us to do better! (And no I don't mean better blocklists.)

@ireneista @hrefna

@thenexusofprivacy @hrefna yeah. well, we have not successfully built bridges with any black community leaders on fedi who have opinions on this problem, so our clique may have to design something better ourselves. that's super frustrating though. it goes against everything we believe in to design something on behalf of a community without the involvement of that community.

@mehdi_benadel your profile seems at odds with your behavior, might want to look into that.

Peace.