Notices by Marco Rogers (polotek@social.polotek.net)

@Gargron @poswald @kissane @fediversereport feel free to explain the actual reason this is such a persistent problem. I don't mind being corrected. But please don’t let that be the only reason you pop in.

@poswald @kissane @fediversereport I should be more clear about which issue I'm referring to. There are many technical issues to solve. I'm talking specifically about an issue that is specific to the decentralized nature of the fediverse. There are many optimizations that a company like twitter can do to scale fanouts, because they control both the source and the destination. Fediverse servers do not have that advantage. And more so, many servers are likely to be under resourced.

@poswald @kissane @fediversereport As far as I understand, mastodon's implementation is particularly naive today. If you have 5000 followers, every post creates 5000 jobs. There are many optimizations they can make today that will help. But I believe the problem of scaling of decentralized message delivery is going to be a huge bugbear if the fediverse keeps growing.

@kissane @fediversereport I always thought of this as the fundamental technical problem to solve for distributed social networks. And we're just... not solving it. People are talking about everything else besides this. And it's so weird to me.

@dalias @EverydayMoggie what's the reasoning behind this setup? Why would I give a fuck about a report from a random instance about a random user?

I wish I could give more people some perspective into how things change on here when you are an instance administrator.

I just received a report against a user who isn't even a member of my instance. Remember, this is a single user instance. I am the only user.

This is a person of color who has been vocal in the current drama surrounding anti-Black racism on mastodon. The report comes from a very large and very prominent instance focused on LGBTQ+ communities.

The thing to understand is that this is politics. This Black user is not a member of that instance. They could block this user and go mind their business. But that's not what they want to do. This instance instead chooses to follow this person around the distributed fediverse and actively influence other instances against them. That is a choice.

Somehow, the thing that bothers me the most is how sloppy this is. If a real person had spent 2 seconds looking at who I am, they would see that I'm Black af, and non of that shit is likely to fly here. But they are sending these reports out indiscriminately. They can't even be bothered to be intentional about it. To me, that is the biggest indicator that this is bad faith rather than just them being misguided.

I can't imagine what it's like to be an instance administrator who is not prepared to navigate these cultural issues. Especially when you've actually agreed to be responsible for other people's experience on here. That's not a small thing. And a big part of the current discourse is that the mastodon ecosystem hasn't given instance admins and moderators enough tools and support.

I'm also still learning how mastodon works for admins. And I feel like I get surprised every time. Like this report doesn't come from a particular user. It's submitted from the instance as a whole? Does that mean it's from a person with admin or moderator privileges on that instance?

Or maybe it is an individual user. But it just looks this way in my UI because they've chosen to be anonymous? I don't know. It's not clear to me, and I would actually have to do work to find out.

Feel free to tell me what I'm missing here. I'll follow up later this week and share what I'm learning. I want to understand this for two reasons.

1. I want to learn more about the moderation tools and what controls mastodon gives to instance admins.

2. I still want to understand more about how federation impacts the performance of the system.

FYI @mastohost

I'm once again experiencing very slow read and write times since I dropped back to the lowest paid tier. Please let me know if there's something you can do.

@Gargron yes I understand the perspective. I still disagree with it. Explaining it again doesn't change anything.

I still maintain that the at protocol means that bluesky should be included in the definition of "the fediverse". I know it will take people some time to come around on that. And certainly bsky still has some promises to deliver on. But the actual fediverse will be so much messier than what people have in their heads right now. The lines will all be blurry and gray. By design.

@Gargron it's really slow. Seems to get confused a lot when trying to load data from various servers.

So this was my first time really trying to use mastodon to have discussions. It was rough. The official app is pretty bad. I've heard there are lots of other apps that provide better experiences. And I'm capable of finding them, so this isn't a request for recommendations. More so I'm thinking about how likely it is that mastodon will keep growing. The friction is still very high.