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Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity

21 comments

  • I can get people being cautious about for-profits trying to monetize user data, but trying to ruin this guy's life over it, regardless of whether or not he was actually trying to make money from their data, is just sick. Anyone who thinks this is an acceptable method of protest is fucked up in the head.

  • Very interesting article! Very much fits with my own experience. The following things I decided to take as lessons learned from the fedi so far:

    • stating novel concepts will get you ignored at best ans bullied at worst
    • lemmy lacks (at least afaik) a way to share blocklists for destructive people (not instances)
    • if you keep your posts on the constructive side, you will get a lot of positive replies but some will come at you no matter what

    Especially when in a bad mood I need to get off lemmy if I cant emotionally distance myself from the bad actors.

    Mastodon is a different kind of animal. They have centralized blocklists (like oliphant.social) to keep whole instances of trolls out. I havent had really bad situations since I implemented those but I have to report people nearly on a daily basis.

    The reasons I have to assume are very varied and as such probably the solutions should be varied as well. Reasons I concludes from many discussions:

    • lack of social skills on both sides
    • no explicit behavioral code on instances or communities
    • lack of active moderation and guidance
    • the fediverse kind of includes those unable to keep an account unbanned on corpo media
    • lack of (social) education, like biases and phallacies

    All these are solvable imo. Not all by the same thing and none of them immediately. Obviously people will disagree with me and I‘m fine with that. My personal thoughts on solutions are as follows:

    • Moderators get fixed shares of donations (x% over all moderators)
    • Sidebars and rules get more fleshed out with links to social resources and education, explanations for those not immediately understanding it
    • Explicit rules against ad hominem attacks and getting personal to win an argument

    Imo, these will be beneficial for lemmy. Mastodon might benefit from other ideas. Feel free to share those and discuss with me.

    Disclaimer: Ridicule and Ad hominem attacks will not be replied to but immediately blocked.

  • "Congratulations" for the trolls, who crashed Content Nation and for anyone condoning it. Now you have become the same bad actor you swore to destroy.

  • In general I think we can just say micro blogging platforms are toxic. You hear this of Twitter, Bluesky, and mastodon.

    • I don't think it's fair to write off the entire medium like that. They all share a common ancestor in Twitter and I think it's fair to say the toxicity is inherited from there.

  • Nah, fuck that. If you're not paying me for the data you're harvesting from me, with or without intent to monetize it, I'm going DEFCON 1, dumping the mag, and emptying the silos. I am not accepting that Zuckerbergian shit out of anybody, I don't care who they claim to be to me or what they claim to do. Too many capitalist pigs try too hard to put their trotters on my data for me to not anymore.

    • I think you missed a key part of the article. Content Nation was not harvesting data from the fediverse; it was just federating. It was a new project that had just spun up and didn't have a full feature set yet, but other than those missing features it was a normal fediverse instance.

  • I think the main issue with Content Nation, personally, was that it looked like an SEO spam site that was using the fediverse as its source for content scraping.

    That being said, that still doesn't justify the toxicity from the paranoid nerds that targeted this guy. I was quite surprised when the Bridgy Fed stuff happened, but now, I'm not surprised in the slightest.

21 comments