Do you think Mastodon has the chance to remain as a safe place on the Internet?
3 comments
Wow! Thanks for sharing it, I cannot believe things like this could happen.
I think that Mastodon is only having a rush of excitement because it feels compelling since it's "decentralized", and I believe that the people who is moving to Mastodon is tired of the abuse that happens on all Social Meida platforms, but if it grows enough, the same problems with Twitter will emerge or even new and very difficult ones.
I don't know if Mastodon is really a solution for content moderation because content is just a reflection of the human psychology, and people will always use this and other platforms to do their best and their worst, so, I hope that at some point the good things overcome the bad ones and things like what happened to you will be a matter of our current times and not a pattern of what the Internet allows.
I think that Mastodon is only having a rush of excitement because it feels compelling since it's "decentralized", and I believe that the people who is moving to Mastodon is tired of the abuse that happens on all Social Meida platforms, but if it grows enough, the same problems with Twitter will emerge or even new and very difficult ones.
I don't know if Mastodon is really a solution for content moderation because content is just a reflection of the human psychology, and people will always use this and other platforms to do their best and their worst, so, I hope that at some point the good things overcome the bad ones and things like what happened to you will be a matter of our current times and not a pattern of what the Internet allows.
Moderation when budget-constrained gets harder and harder.
Initially I had volunteers to help, but I couldn’t pay them (the site didn’t make enough money) and eventually the mods got tired of the constant drama on the site and tired of having to remain neutral and professional. The kudos of having privileges on the site tends to fade - or tends to attract the wrong type of individual to the role.
In my experience, running online discussion forums eventually becomes a living hell for the owner.
On my local community forums in South London, some users developed chips on their shoulder against me, either due to (guidelines-based) moderation interventions from me and my team, or due to me being in a different political tribe to them. Those disgruntled people rabble-roused. They deliberately “activated” one or two people with unstable personalities. They linked up with the admins of other “competing” local community sites whose traffic was hurt when my sites became popular. Between them they unleashed a tsunami against me: hundreds of social media posts spreading hate and conspiracy theories about me; loads of trolling on my forums; I even received a threatening email containing photos of the exterior of my home, photos of my extended family members, and an implied threat on my wife. I went to the police about it but they only gave a caution to the woman involved.
In the end I moved out of London - partly due to the horrendous and coordinated abuse I was receiving.
At the time I spoke to one or two other sympathetic local community admins and they’d also suffered some pretty horrible abuse too.
It’s for this reason I don’t think community-led, low budget social media sites are viable, sadly. You need an army of paid moderators. You need a legal team. A PR team. As the owner, you may even need a personal security detail (seriously!). There are some weird and very hateful people out there.
Apologies for the very long post but it felt quite cathartic to let it all out. I’m still incredibly frustrated about the whole situation, years later.