We could split the difference and users could get auto-notified if their vote was viewed and by whom. That way it’s a two-way street. The mod/admin can see your votes, the users know that their vote was accessed by that mod.

It would be pointless to do. Anyone can view your votes without notifying you. Just set up your own instance, download the data (that you need to do anyway because of how activitypub works) and then just open up the database with a different software to access the data. No notification can be sent because the application doesn’t know the data was accessed.

Second choice would be that all users are anonymized by a hash so that bad vote actors can be removed via their hash being associated with malicious or other bad acting, but to discover who individuals are the admin would have to do the legwork of follonf multiple posts/ comments to associate the hash.

This opens a door to vote manipulation. If you can’t verify users someone can send random hashes.

Otherwise hide the votes if trust of anonymity is paramount.

The votes still exist in the activitypub. They’re already publicly available, the question is how accessible they should be because right now if you want to track downvotes you need to put in some effort. Upvotes you can already easily check from any mbin instance

You could make the saame argument against commenting, say the wrong thing and you get harassed. But what do you do with someone harassing you? You block them. What do you do when someone is harassing you by downvoting you? You most likely suck it up because you don’t know who is downvoting you.

I would argue it’s more a tool against harassment than a tool for harassment, especially since anyone determined enough can already access that information.

I don’t want votes to be public

You don’t even need an account to see upvotes. Just look it up on an mbin instance

Your votes already aren’t private, they’re simply not easily accessible (by the average user). I won’t get into the technical details but the short version is that every instance owner who is federated with your instance already knows how you’ve voted. Someone could make a website right now that collects votes and shows how someone has voted or who upvoted/downvoted a post or comment. It’s already public information.

You missed to point. Compare instances to communities.

Instances are not isolated. It doesn’t matter much which instance you join because as long as your instance is federated with other instances you can still participate in the communities you want to participate in. If you don’t like your instances, you can join a different instance and as long as that other instance is federated the same way you can get get the exact same experience on a different instance. That means instances are decentralized.

Communities are isolated. It matters which community you join because each post and comment is contained within that community. If you join a small community and there’s a bigger community elsewhere you won’t be able to participate in the bigger community. If you dislike a community and join a different community you can’t get the exact same experience because you can’t interact with the same posts. All of that means communities are centralized.

The reason we have popular communities in the first place is because communities are centralized. Centralized communities also work against the decentralization as your example also pointed out, because instances can leverage their communities.

This is also what I alluded to my steering wheels analogy. We don’t have tools to decentralize communities. We have a steering wheel for each community instead of one wheel for all communities that are essentially the same.

I disagree. The decentralization is thought through at an instance level, not community level. If it was thought through at a community level we’d have tools to aggregate different communities. The current solution is the equivalent of having multiple steering wheels on a car, nobody thought how you’d actually steer the car so you were given the option to steer each wheel separately. It might make sense on a superficial level but if you thought about how users actually use the thing you’d know it’s not the best way to do things.

Maybe you should reread what you wrote? You said there’s no way GDPR would ever apply. I said it does. You said there are no enforceable actions, there are. the part you thought makes you right is the “criminal charges” part but that makes zero sense to begin with because GDPR, as an EU wide regulation, imposes only fines and no criminal charges.

GDPR applies to any entity that processes personal data. That includes instance owners. In fact of you look up GDPR enforcements you can that it’s also enforced against private persons.

Why would it? If they’re open for discussion there’s clearly something to discuss.

Actually, without any other context, I would. I would label them as misguided. Just because they believe in what I believe as the wrong thing doesn’t mean they’re automatically toxic. If they’re unwilling to even consider alternate perspectives or decide to just be antagonistic then they’re toxic.

to apply adequate pushback to erroneous understandings of the world. the goal isn’t to convince the interlocutor. it’s to encourage the people reading to investigate the topic. on many of the topics in question, the history and ideologies involved take entire books to deconstruct - doing so in an internet comment is extraordinarily difficult. the people we’re talking to don’t even agree with us on the meanings of basic words - there’s not even a basis for debate. because such debate is so unproductive, the aggressive tone encourages many people to stop and ask more serious questions. this undoubtedly works because so many of the posters on hexbear responded in exactly that way here or on reddit at some point in the past. and when they asked those questions, they got detailed answers, including links to sources so they could investigate for themselves. in actual fact, many of the people on hexbear received exactly the kind of aggressive pushback you’re decrying and ended up eventually convinced that our viewpoint had something to offer.

Maybe at one point but if recent events are of any indication that is hardly true anymore. The reason these defederation threads prop up if your aggressive presentation made people inquisitive. It’s an indication that people respond negatively to such behavior. And I’m inclined to believe people respond more negatively than positively because the responses I’ve seen about subject I know about have been less about making people inquisitive and more about just throwing in their face that they don’t understand something the same way you do without explaining anything.

lastly, civility is not an unmitigated good unto itself. civility is the false peace – it masks tensions, pretending they don’t exist. real peace is not civility – it’s a state in which tensions are brought to the fore so they can actually be resolved. civility is a white, middle class sensibility – our world is incredibly fucked up and the people affected by it do not owe anyone that masking of the horrors of our world.

I disagree. Yes, there’s no space for niceness as you need to be ready for conflict to test your ideas and beliefs. But it doesn’t mean we should completely disregard civility. Are you really going to take me seriously if I call you shitstain in this post, bitch lover the next, steamy turd the next etc? I know I wouldn’t take anything you say seriously if you came with such disrespect. Similarly I have no problem trolling the living shit out of you, but that already means I have zero respect for you or your beliefs and nothing you say or do will even get true critical examination, outside of how to better troll back. I could easily derail this discussion, drag you down into shit slinging contest and then sling shit until you stop responding but that’s pretty far from civil discourse and not at all constructive. Discourse needs to have some mutual respect and if none is given then none is received, which means the discussion will go nowhere. The world is fucked but slinging shit between eachother doesn’t really unfuck the world.

nor do we owe anyone an education they will neither ask for nor appreciate

And this is probably where we completely disagree. Your stance is that nobody asks or appreciates it so we shouldn’t give it unless they really ask. I believe we should give it regardless because it’s still a chance for them to open up to something new. I would’ve never familiarized myself with Das Kapital if not for someone else explaining to me that Marxist understanding of “capital” is not the same as “capital” taught to you in school. Had someone told me “How did they get the fucking money mf?” I would probably still believe capitalism is not that bad. Explaining socialism to someone who won’t listen doesn’t take a piece out of me, so why should I act like it does? To me it’s a net positive. If someone listens and becomes a socialist that’s good and if someone doesn’t listen then really nothing actually bad happens because as you said, the world is fucked regardless.

Let’s forget forget about the rest of our discussion and focus solely on the very first response you wrote to me. Based on that response I could’ve applied that same thought process you just described, decided that you’re here in bad faith and respond in the way Hexbear users tend to reply. And all this current discussion wouldn’t have ever happened because based on that response you’d believe I’m here in bad faith and responded in kind. In fact that way no discussion would’ve happened.

The way we communicate is prone to errors and misinterpretations. It’s why I’m focusing on your your first response because it’s an excellent example of miscommunication. You used “you” which implies it’s directed at me, but in a later response you clarify that it wasn’t directed at me. Thus discussions require a certain level of benefit of doubt, because it’s actually very easy to misrepresent what was said and just as easy to misinterpret what was said. I gave you that benefit of doubt and we seem to be having a rather civil discussion. And I’ve already somewhat explained what would’ve happened if I hadn’t given it. That benefit of doubt is crucial if you’re wanting to discuss in good faith, because you need to give a chance to correct miscommunications.

And that’s why I think the thought process you’ve described is a bad faith thought process, because it doesn’t give the benefit of the doubt. At least that is my general experience with Hexbear users. Someone says something disagreeable in a manner that could be misinterpreted in the way you described and it’s very rare to see a Hexbear user give the benefit of doubt. Instead you see, well everything here. One guy says Hexbear is a cesspool and seemingly only one of you gives him some benefit of doubt, the rest very much troll, antagonize, make snide remarks etc. The vast majority of you responded in the same way you’d claim someone else is responding in bad faith. What if he previously had a miscommunication that Hexbear users didn’t give benefit of the doubt either? He gets piled on in a manner you’ve described as bad faith. With those bad faith responses he now believes you are all acting bad faith, hence the cesspool remark. And what is the response he gets? More bad faith responses from Hexbear users because the vast majority don’t give him any benefit of doubt.

You think others act out in bad faith so you respond in bad faith which makes others believe you act in bad faith which prompts more of you to act in bad faith. It’s a a bad faith feedback loop. Genuine question, what’s the goal of such behavior?

Alright, so others are in “bad faith”? How do you know? Just based on one interaction with them?

And how do you know I’m not interested in the response?

It’s bad faith to automatically assume someone being critical is doing it in bad faith.

So as long as they don’t ideologically agree with you it’s acceptable to be toxic towards them, because their “wrong ideology” makes them toxic?

Are you also aware that most of the proletariats unknowingly uphold capitalism? Considering you say they’re toxic are you against the proletariat or are you a fake socialist trying to create a class divide, the ones who agree with you and the ones who don’t, within the proletariat?

You think collectively antagonizing, using “libs” in a derogatory form and calling others “imperialist running dogs” constitutes as defense and not toxic behavior?

What’s so revolutionary or ambitious about Starfield that it couldn’t be optimized to have “acceptable” framerate? Pretty much everything Starfield does has been done before and the creation engine isn’t some visual marvel that would burn down graphics cards. So where’s the performance going?

Maybe a Mastodon user? Mastodon automatically tags poster and commenter you’re replying to.

It’s definitely seems doable, but it’s a feature we don’t have right now and the lack of it negates the benefit of having the same community in multiple instances, because it’s just not usable.