When community moderators—online or off—ask me for resources, my first pick is always Shawna Potter's book Making Spaces Safer. It's an invaluable read, because it goes beyond the nuts and bolts of moderation to look at the broader picture.

Moderation is more than (the admittedly important) task of deleting spam and blocking Nazis: moderation is about cultivating the culture you want to see flourish in a space.

On the centralized Big Social networks, moderation is inaccessible to normal users. Moderation is something done by Twitter employees (or, y'know, was). You can report posts and tag Support and appeal decisions, but moderation, like most of Twitter, exists behind a curtain. And because Big Social sites are walled-garden monoliths, you have no meaningful say in the moderation—and by extent, the culture—of the social network. You either put up with it or you leave entirely.

Federated social networks are different. Each server has its own moderators, and therefore its own culture. Here on my instance, for inst—for example, I maintain a Code of Conduct that excludes all sorts of behavior that I wouldn't want in my offline social circles. I don't keep company with crypto shills or obnoxious centrists or transphobes, so I cultivate an online space with the same ideals. Someone who disagrees with that is going to look for a different space.

And because of how federation works, leaving a server for another doesn't shut you out of the network altogether. You can hop to a server that better fits what you're looking for and still participate.

As a result, the average person using the Fediverse has a level of control over their experience that just isn't possible on Big Social sites.

Federated social media shows us how our online experiences don't have to look like the corporate, centralized models we've grown accustomed to.

Folks are migrating here again, so I'll share my #introduction once more.

Spencer

2022-04-26 00:48:40

There's a new influx of people to the #fediverse today, and rightly so! Figured that's as good a time as any to make a new #introduction.

I'm Spencer (he/they). I run Motley, which is my name for this little Friendica instance. It's mostly just me here these days, although I still have dreams of one day helping my friends find digital community here.

I made myself a home on the Fediverse because I wanted to distance myself from the big corporate services. I care about #decentralization and #selfhosting, as I believe more people running smaller personal servers will help break the stranglehold of big tech companies.

My ideal world is one much freer of coercive hierarchies. It's smaller-scale, more cooperative and communal, and more deeply connected to the earth. I'm kinda #solarpunk, I suppose. I care about freedom, tempered with an ethic of compassion for one another and the world we live in. I also practice #polyamory. I find that inextricable from my values.

I dabble in way too many hobbies, and it's delightful. I love #boardgames, especially #Netrunner, which I maintain is the best game ever. I'm a member of the volunteer fan organization keeping that game alive—ask me about it and I'll gladly talk your ear off. I enjoy amateur #mixology. I started learning #lockpicking last year, and am also working on becoming licensed as a #hamradio operator. I'm interested in community-focused approaches to #preparedness, because I don't think the odds are good for the uncomplicated continuation of this late-capitalist "normal", and when things start to fall apart, I don't want myself, my family, or my communities to be caught off-guard.

Over the last couple of years, my own spiritual growth has taken me in a location that might look bizarre from the outside: I still firmly identify as a secular humanist who does not believe in the supernatural, yet I'm also increasingly an intentional practitioner of "#magick". I occasionally read #tarot for myself, have cast a couple of spells in my time, and generally see the playful fantasy of magick as psychologically useful and spiritually rewarding. I run a Friendica forum about it, in fact, though, like many things here on Motley, it's fairly dried up.

My posting is eclectic, and I tend to share to a followers-only audience by default. I strongly believe that arguing with me is a privilege reserved for those I already have a relationship with, so I have very little patience for strangers who comment on my posts in an attempt to provoke a debate. I don't know you—why would I waste my time and energy in a fight I don't know is safe? This is my little corner of the Fediverse, and I choose not to spend it interacting with fascists, bigots, conspiracy theorists, Web3 shills, or generally anyone I find unpleasant. Because of that, I'm slow to accept follow requests until I can peruse your public profile and get a sense of who you are.

I'm sure I could go on forever (haha already have), but that probably gives a good start. I'm always down for new connections, since that's what makes the Fediverse thrive.

Cheers! 🍻

Okay, I need to figure out the actual issue here so I can troubleshoot it effectively, but for now, I'm going to just scream into the void.

I cannot, for the life of me, seem to get my #selfhosted home server to stop timing out. I want to set up the Friendica phpmailer addon so I can send emails via an external SMTP relay, but every time I send test emails, the server chokes and Cloudflare informs me a timeout occurred. If I try to update something from my YunoHost admin panel, the GET request usually leads to a timeout.

I've fiddled with Nginx settings. I've tried to increase PHP-FPM settings. FastCGI seems to be implicated. I'm messing with all these config files for programs I don't understand on multiple machines and I can't figure out, for the life of me, why sending a few emails via SMTP relay would be so resource-intensive that my server would not only think for several minutes, but choke up in doing so.

I just want a server that works reliably again, but I don't understand enough of what's going on to even understand the problem, let alone troubleshoot and fix it. 😩

Please boost and reshare!

I'm the Community Manager for Project NISEI, and I'm looking for a home for us on the Fediverse.

NISEI is a volunteer, non-profit fan collective dedicated to continuing the cyberpunk card game #Netrunner after its previous corporate publishers officially called it quits four years ago. We loved this game too much to let it die, so we banded together and formed an organization to keep it going.

We are legally incorporated as a non-profit, so while we sell products, not a single person is making a dime off of that. All the money we make goes back into operations and funding our next set. We're also a bunch of queer lefties with a strong radical bent—after all, we refused to accept a big board game corporation's cancellation of our favorite game and just kept it going on our own—so nothing we make is pay-gated; every one of our sets is available as a free print-and-play on our website.

We genuinely aren't aiming to make profit here, we just want to share this awesome game with people.

So. The point of this post:

I'm looking for a server with a #boardgames, #cyberpunk, or #anarchist focus and a strong Code of Conduct dedicated to combating harassment, where NISEI could set up an account. We'd definitely like to use our account on this server to spread the word about our sets and news, but we'd also just like to talk about Netrunner and cyberpunk with people who share those interests.

If you'd like to see our current social media usage on a similar site, check out our account on the birdsite (@ProjectNISEI).

If you think your server would be a good match for us, please let me know. While we'll likely keep using the birdsite and Facebook, I would personally love us to be a little more present here on the Fediverse, 'cause I think Fedi peeps are the kind of people who would love Netrunner.

Thanks!

For a couple months, I've been, against my usual better judgment, interacting with suggested posts on Instagram. Blame it on boredom. And for a brief moment, I was getting stuff I found interesting.

But it's way, way too focused on that content now. Instagram has decided I want nothing more than posts about mental health, especially issues of trauma and attachment, so it's serving me that every chance I get. So much so that when I opened the app just now, the very first post in my feed was a suggested post that read (I'm paraphrasing): "Things I didn't know about [a deeply traumatic experience] until it happened to me".

That was a really fun thing to be confronted with the moment I opened an app I use for mindless feel-good scrolling. 🙄

The effect now is so much worse than before I ever interacted with these suggested posts at all. The hyperspecific model that the algorithm has made of me looks nothing like my actual interests. I could retrain the algorithm by hiding posts, and I do some of that, but like so much of interacting with algorithms these days, that amounts to extra work and providing more information just to make the algorithm provide an experience that's not actively unpleasant.

This technology does nothing to make my life better than if it didn't exist at all, and requires considerable effort to prevent it from actually making my life worse.

I despise this.