Unfortunately, none of the Mastodon applications have a separate button for private messages. Formally, the “Direct messages” button is available in several applications. However, this is a standard input field for all messages where you need to mark with a special icon that you want to send a personal message that only the recipient can view. This is inconvenient and during intensive correspondence you may forget to mark “Only for the addressee” when sending the next message.
I want a simpler and clearer interface like in the Jerboa or Infinity for Reddit applications. However, no one is engaged in such development. All Mastodon applications are similar to one another to one degree or another.
It’s pretty easy. Nazis have a hard time sticking to real facts, and in the test of time, can’t resist reposting blatantly false information in progressively more and more JPGified memes.
Since I is decentralized, it is upto the intances. There is no central authority to eject an instance. Rather other instances individually block the instances they find objectionable to their own criterion.
At basic its that. Inpractice moderation federations and coalitions etc. have formed among instances of “we maintain joint blocking list and any of us can suggest new additions to it”.
Due to this one can get ejected from rather sizeable swath, if one one the moderation federations puts one on block list and that is pretty much as far as an “you have 24 hours or we boot you”. You get booted from all the instances part of that federation/coalition.
Plus stuff like just sources/authors trusted by various instances. “If this guy puts an instance on their published black list, we block. So far that guy has done good job with his list”. Ofcourse instance can at any point decide to not trust that list author anymore.
So there is no one “how mastodon does it”. Infact this is the one area where “on what instance are you” matters. Since how your home instance decides to do moderation and blocking, that is how your blocking happens. Plus ones personal additions on top.
Mastodon has a moderation action feature, where one can see listing of what instances and user have been blocked or other moderation action taken. There is explanation field there also for moderator to say “why” but obviously that is upto instance on what their policy is on how exacting their moderation documentation policy is.
Is there a way to see which instances a Mastodon instance has defederated with? For lemmy instances, for example, you can go to /instances to see a list of other connected and blocked instances.
On desktop there should be a small “about” link in the bottom left, from which there is a “moderated servers” dropdown menu where you can see defederated servers. I don’t see anywhere to view the servers you ARE federated with, but if it’s listed at Mastodon’s official website (whoops, I actually meant this)it’s probably in.
I don’t see anything on the official Masto app, but that app is just missing a ton of functionality in general.
iirc, that’s all down to what accounts your server’s users follow. If any users on server A follow users on server B, and neither A nor B block the other, then A is federated with B.
But how would a user on A find anyone on B before federation? I know Lemmy can initiate federation through the search function just in case you’re the first to look for something on another instance, but I don’t see how that would work on Masto.
It’s done through a similar mechanism, you can paste the URL of a user on a different Mastodon search which triggers the same style of search as it does on Lemmy. Mastodon has relays (an admin needs to add/subscribe to one, and the relay has to confirm/accept) however which can also help “kickstart” Federation so to speak as well - which is like blasting a firehose at an instance.
In addition, I believe that there might be a “viral” component to federation; if users on server A follow users on server B, and users on server B follow users on server C, then server C’s popular posts can show up on server A’s explore page. Is that correct?
If someone on server B were to boost that posts from server C, then yes they’d show up on server A as far as I know - but only if they’re boosted. The federation aspect works a lot like Lemmy’s, so while my instance my federates with lemmy.world (and vice versa), my instance doesn’t know about the communities on LW unless someone on my instance subscribes to that community in particular (and vice-versa for a community on my instance not showing up on LW until someone over there subscribes). At least, that’s how I understand it - to be honest I still don’t have my head completely wrapped around Mastodon’s federation aspect but since both Mastodon and Lemmy use ActivityPub I’d reckon that they’re very similar.
Lemmy uses a feature called “groups” to denote the community a post is in. Mastodon doesn’t support groups yet. Once it does, I would think those posts may federate with Lemmy.
My understanding is that the ‘all’ feed only shows posts that come from accounts followed by people on your instance. You can follow anyone from any federated instance; and when you do, their posts will appear in your personal feed, and also in the ‘all’ feed for everyone on your instance. People are aren’t followed by anyone on your instance won’t show up in the ‘all’ section.
I’ve believe I’ve seen something like that stated before, but we’re talking zero mastodon content showing up in ALL. Which happens to be the same instance as yours, btw, with Lemm.ee being the third largest instance in the Lemmysphere. You’d expect at least a little mastodon content showing up, but there’s just nothing.
So far the two resources just don’t seem to be mixing, so perhaps what the other person was saying is correct. Right now in order to search mastodon, I’m using this tool.
That list shows all instances that your instance is kinda sorta maybe aware of.
For example, if I searched the profile link for someone or some group from a Masto instance and didn’t do anything with it, that instance would still get on that list because it asked the Lemmy instance about info on that profile/community.
So… TBH I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.
From my POV, I’m envisioning a way where Mastodon content could populate the ALL feed of Fediverse users, for example us lemmings. Do you reckon that’s possible?
Note: I already know how to search mastodon content btw, via tools like this
Also I'm not being weird, when I worked on that ranch in California this thing happened literally. And when I tried to get that ANATOLIAN SHEPHERD DOG (greek) off the goat it growled at me like never before. I wasn't fucking with that beast...
also if you look at the main thread not on hexbear, you can see them complaining about lemmygrad being nazis ☠ im glad we have filtered idiots out of this instance
To those that know me, I’m a notorious emotional masochist (i.e. I spend a lot of time on dogshit), but even I wouldn’t go out of my way to see what defederated instances say about us under a throwaway post.
It basically depends who you follow. If you are following toxic people, that is your own fault with mastodon. On Twitter, the algorithm pushes it to you no matter what.
I have only followed a few people and they are from the suggested list. I picked Rochki, it’s FOSS, ars technica, and nixCraft. I just went to the search tab in Mastodon and the first two messages are about blocking people and nazis. Not sure how that’s my fault.
Is mastodon good? I use lemmy but as I never used twitter I also never use mastodon so idk if im losing something. I never understood the appeal of twitter.
It looks like Twitter, feels like Tumblr. Since its not very big, people will post the most raw, vulnerable moments in their life, both good and bad. My feed ping pongs between people learning to use Godot to make their first game ever and proudly sharing their work, to a anarchist TTRPG dev struggling with medical bills in the USian Healthcare hellscape. I love it. I am not looking forward to whenever it blows up in popularity.
I would describe it as “what if Tumblr decided to have the layout of Twitter?” The interface looks and feels like Twitter, but since there’s no algorithm people will post the most raw shit. My feed is one part guinea pig videos, one part OSR Dnd memes, one part people learning to code and sharing their early janky work with pride, and one part entirely from one queer anarchist TTRPG dev struggling with medical bills and the fucked USian Healthcare system.
The most trouble you’ll have is deciding which instance to settle down in. Self-hosting is really not reasonable for Mastodon, since the local feed is pretty important.
No I mean instances like mastodon.world who do ok moderating their own users, but are very poor at moderating the instances that federate with them. So any minority users who joins mastodon.world can still be (and is, I’ve seen it) subject to the worst bigotry on the fediverse.
I'm just so tired of watching green mods make the same mistakes. "It's not my job to weigh in on debates or tell people what to think." No, but it's your job to reduce disruption in a community. If someone comes in going "being gay is a choice if you ask me," they have about 30 seconds to clarify their position or they're gone from my discord server and generally that won't do it. We have a lot of LGBT folks who have NO desire to deal with those people in a the little corner of friends we've created. That person is not entitled to their time and attention. It is our job to look out for the best interests of all our users, yet we categorically see mods get bogged down by a handful of incredibly disruptive attention seekers/combative personalities that make it shitty for everyone else. It's so predictable at this point.
We banned someone a few months ago from our discord who had some of the best insights about gaming I've ever seen. The dude was remarkable. But my god he was such a jerk! He kept being such an ass to people who disagreed with him. "That's just a brain dead take." "People who like that have no taste so frankly I don't care what you or they think." Just constant antagonism that halted all conversation and made people feel like crap. So we booted him! We asked him to stop, he didn't, and his disruptions just became unwelcome. We didn't play rules lawyer with him or debate things. We said stop, he didn't, that was the end of it, and while I miss his insights the community is noticeably better without him.
Most mods aren't clueless. They know bigotry is occurring in their communities. Yet they too often just won't be proactive about it because the behavior doesn't overtly violate the rules. Don't let bad actors weaponize your own rules against you!
I've always thought that people should be able to hotly debate ideas all they want, but as soon as they leave the ideas out and begin disparaging people, good-bye.
Sure but some communities simply don’t want to be debating all the time and some people refuse to accept that lol like my LGBT friends constantly talk about how exhausting it is. Sometimes they just want to talk about a tv show.
They basically are tired of constantly justifying their existence, even if the questions are genuine/good faith.
“Off topic” is a legitimate reason to downvote a post or comment, even one made respectfully and in good faith.
I do sometimes wish more sites had adopted something like the system Slashdot used, with multiple categories of up or down votes (insightful, informative, off-topic, flamebait, etc.) which users could weight according to their own preferences. The simplistic “either up, down, or neutral” model is a rather blunt instrument.
That’s great but the talk in this thread isn’t about some communities, the demand is that mastodon.world should defederate more.
I find these opinions kind of antithetical to the whole fediverse idea, if you want a small gated community do your thing, but why should the biggest fediverse instance merrily defederate everything left and right
Another thing is that some people are loud specifically to drown out other’s voices.
That’s why true free speech can not be a free-for-all, you must put a dampener on those people and it doesn’t matter how closely they technically follow the rules if they do not follow the spirit and cause the quality and mood to degrade with their presence.
That’s one of the current weaknesses of the fediverse right now. Devs are working on more comprehensive moderation tools, but it’s all under development.
I think so many admins - many of which are the folks who would/could be helping improve the tools - are focused on keeping the car from breaking down that we won’t see any meaningful development of mod tools for quite some time unfortunately. Outside of mastodon, the fediverse just isn’t ready for prime time yet. Won’t stop me from using it though!
I’ve recently been added to the mastodon.world mod team. The amount of spam that gets posted makes it much harder than Lemmy to weed out the bigots. But it’s improving. And like on Lemmy.World we request Mastodon.World users to keep reporting…
Hey, sorry missed this reply. That’s good, the key issue is the bigot instances that boost a post to their own instance and then there’s a pile on, on that instance. I don’t know if that’s visible to mods, but it’s certainly visible to the user who is being abused. [email protected] cops A LOT of abuse.
There’s a fuck ton of cryptofash on mastodon, and you’ll get absolutely flooded with them if you say the wrong thing. Moderation is quick to snuff out those who overtly act hateful but is completely useless to those who mask their bigotry behind liberal politics.
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