So, what would “Better Safety Tooling” on the Fediverse look like?
And, what would meaningfully help the Fediverse to serve more people?
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Tagging @laurenshof because you had some interesting insights I’d LOVE for you to expand on :)
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@benpate i think "better safety tooling" is a bit of a red herring, because the real problem is in figuring out who has the authority to set boundaries.
assume the current fediverse/mastodonishverse/whatever to be a "bounded space". exact boundaries and technical details dont matter yet. it is a shared "space", that has some boundaries and values that people want enforced within those boundaries.
(examples can be "no cloudflare" or "relays should be optin", or whatever)
/1
so now you want to improve this "bounded space" with some rule/tool/thing, that makes the space "safer" (for any definition of safer)
the core problem is that the functionality of this Thing are contested by its nature, but that there is no source of authority who can make the decision for the entire space (decentralisation yadiyada)
so any rule/tool/thing that matters cannot get community buy-in because it is contested and nobody can dissolve the contestation
/2
@laurenshof I love this line of thought. Thank you!
So far, I've naively assumed two boundaries: server (chosen by admins/mods) and user (my own personal blocklists)
But that doesn't really follow the way our natural communities cross-cut the Fediverse, does it?
@benpate yeah, my most radical opinion is that i dont think servers actually exist, in the sense that they dont actually meaningfully play a part in either how we understand the socially constructed object 'fediverse', nor in how this "fediverse" again shapes our social understanding (via the posts entering our feeds through which we create our social perception of the fediverse)
@benpate calling cloudflare fascist is very easy. figuring out a rule/thing/object that causes 'no cloudflare' in this bounded space is hard, and implementing that rule/thing/object is literally impossible
thats why were stuck in this endless cycle of discourse and yelling, because there is no structural way to break out of it
Cc: @oli I suspect you have thoughts on this. I hope you don't mind me tagging you in.
Thanks! And yes. FIRES looks like a fantastic part of the solution :)
