experbia

Giving reddit exactly what they want, huh, a huge influx of traffic?

They know this shit hypes people up. It gets the app installed… then it’s not so bad to just keep it and browse it at that point. Then before you know it, spez was right. It blew over. He can treat his users like shit and they’ll just take it like good little idiots.

No thanks. I don’t intend to prove that asshole right.

This is great. This is how it always should have been.

Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.

All this talk of defederation and blocklists makes me generally uneasy. I understand how it’s easy to fall into. Nobody wants political extremists and criminals and bad actors and stuff on their instance, so it makes sense you might want to ban trollfactory dot xyz, nazihq dot us, and/or uncompromisingmarxist dot boats, or whatever.

But I think the stupidest shit I saw on reddit were the subreddits that would ban you for even posting on an ideologically competing subreddit, with no consideration for the message you’d written. This is worse than that because it’s the opposite, and includes even reading the content.

Imagine if when you went to post on /r/RestaurantOwners, and its AutoMod had the power to then immediately ban you from even looking at /r/antiwork and /r/WorkReform. Imagine posting to /r/conservative to correct someone’s error only to get permanently banned from viewing any “leftist” subs ever again. This is the vibe I get from this and as much as I want to avoid creating nodules of extremism and hatred, I want less to have people grabbing my head, taping my mouth, and averting my eyes from things they don’t like when they don’t even know what my thinking is.

I feel like widespread trigger happy banlists are the death of small instances, too. Maybe one small instance doesn’t catch some newly registered asshole for a day or two but it’s too late. The 16-hour a day lifestyle moderator on a massive instance who has gangstalking delusions over nebulous “trolls” has already blacklisted all 150 of your users permanently and listed your domain for defederation as officially owned by the Nazi party in a massive register shared by the top 100 largest instances. The number of times I’ve heard this story with small Mastodon instances is more than I care for.

please add a note to your donations to suggest he make an opencollective (or similar) so we can get some recurring money starting to flow his way. i have been in this position, of suddenly being a very in-demand person, and it can be pretty rough.