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@aral Genuine question, how is defederating threads protecting trans people?

@eatyourglory In the same way that defederating Gab is.

@aral @eatyourglory I’m not sure if I agree completely with this statement.

Defederating Gab, poa.st, cum.salon or RapeMeat was really a no-brainer.

Those were instances created by trolls/fascists/homophobic/misogynist admins, and specifically dedicated to people who share the same ideas and the same ways of treating others.

There’s literally no doubt of the ideology of a person who joins one of those instances: if you join Gab or poa.st, then it’s quite easy to identify your ideas as well.

Can we say the same about Threads? Can we say that everybody there is a transphobic, or a Nazi, or a troll? Can we say that the admins explicitly embrace and actively promote these ideologies?

When you have an instance with millions of accounts, you’re always statistically likely to get jerks. The questions that admins have to ask before defederating are:

1. Are jerks a clear majority there?

2. Are the failures at moderation due to the website administration actively promoting jerks (like it’s the case for Musk’s shithole), or are they due to the challenges of scaling up moderation, or to bars that are just set higher than many Fediverse admins?

3. If we defederate it, what are the risks of cutting out a lot of useful traffic (like institutional accounts, or harmless accounts that are followed by many users on our instances)? In other words, does the signal/noise ratio justify sacrificing the signal in order to protect users from the noise?

4. What are our thoughts about striking a balance between protecting our users from abuse vs. giving them a chance to connect to whoever they want to?

I have the impression that for Threads the response to these questions is negative, at least for now.

Of course, I’m monitoring the situation, and I’m ready to pull the drawbridge at the first signs that Threads has a negative net added value for the Fediverse.

But that doesn’t seem the case for now IMHO (I actually see a lot of nice/decent people on Threads that are genuinely curious about the Fediverse), and I’m not sure if I would handpick a few cases of moderation failures to make an argument in favour of defederation (rather than individual blocks/bans/mutes).

@fabio @eatyourglory Have you actually clicked the links in the post and read the articles?

(Because the issue here is that Facebook/Meta is a bad actor, that Facebook/Meta are not moderating transphobia, etc. And that Facebook/Meta should not be federated with in the same way that any other fediverse instance that does what they do would be. If they’re not being defederated then it’s for one reason alone: their size and what some people feel they can gain from that audience.)

@aral @eatyourglory I’m very well aware of Meta’s challenges with content moderation. And I definitely would like them to be called more accountable for this.

I’m just challenging the idea that full defederation of a platform with millions of people is the right way to respond to these failures, or if more granular measures (blocks/mutes) can be implemented.

Again, if the tree was rotten at its very roots (Gab, poa.st etc.), there would be no doubt about it.

If the head of the platform was actively engaging and promoting hateful ideologies (like Musk), there wouldn’t be any doubt either.

But for now I don’t see any such strong signals from Thread.

@fabio @eatyourglory So GLAAD’s year-long set of receipts are not enough. (First link.) You’re also OK federating with a company that literally bought a VPN service so they could man-in-the-middle attack the encrypted communications of their users while they were using the services of their competitors. (Second link.) This is who you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to?

@aral@mastodon.ar.al @fabio@manganiello.social @eatyourglory@mastodon.uno so because Zuckerberg isn’t enough of a pathetic, desperate, insecure narcissist like Musk but instead a quiet sociopathic piece of shit, he gets to spread unfettered hate? lmao

@aud @aral @eatyourglory far from it, I want him called accountable for his unethical business practices, for his failures at moderation and for being a sociopath.

It’s just that I don’t think that full defederation of a platform with millions of users, and giving up our chance of finally making the Fediverse more mainstream and stopping using other platforms to communicate with our friends and relatives, is the best solution.

@fabio @aud @aral @eatyourglory no server should have millions of followers. It goes against everything that makes the fediverse...well...diverse. The fact that servers can be held accountable is what drives the need for moderation, it's a tool in the arsenal of any decent admin. Threads takes a huge shit on all admins because they are monolithic.

Threads takes away tools for moderation from all servers, so that's why anyone with any sense should defederate now.