I'm talking about all of the misogyny crap today because folks keep speaking for me and saying I'm one of Fedi's big boosters.

@vkc i've had a couple of posts blow up to genuinely large levels and have seen what you mean with the vile stuff. Makes me wonder if social media is a good idea at all.

@vkc How would you feel about sharing the really bad stuff too but with clear content warnings?

@sashin I get things that are illegal if I retransmit them

@vkc I'm sorry you have to go through that.

@vkc hey, thank you for posting here, I rediscovered your channel because of your Mastodon posts.

For me the moderation is a big reason to be on a managed instance

Question I had but reading your other comments suggests the answer ;D :
One thing I wondered, did your mastodon experience change when you moved from a moderated instance to your own?

@vkc @McNeely 100% accurate. I run a micro-instance that's likely to upset people and attract bother, and I have to set aside time to expose myself to some genuinely grotesque and upsetting stuff in order to keep on top of the servers I need to block, and we get far fewer eyeballs and interaction on us than Victoria.

@vkc sorry about all that crap. Some people are using their anonymity to reveal their real nature that can be awful. And because they may read you every day, they think they know you intimately so they suppose they're allowed to tell you anything they want. That's difficult to ignore these haters when you're their target. I hope you'll be able to get over it.

@vkc I'm sorry about how Fedi is treating you. I sometimes forget that my own Fedi bubble is benign not because Fedi as a whole is benign, but because I put in the effort to aggressively block any content I don't like, *and* I don't have a visible enough presence that would encourage the undesirables to circumvent my block list.

Social media can be garbage, and if you do need a break I will be sad because I enjoy your content, but please do put your own mental health first if you need to.

Best wishes...

@vkc Thanks for speaking openly about this, Veronica. I cannot fully understand your situation, but I can relate to being harassed in an invisible way and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else. I wouldn't want to see you leave Fedi, but I also wouldn't blame you if you did.

@vkc

You are surely frank and clear.

You sharing stuff like this is really valuable to me as a white, cisgendered, heterosexual, male, with a low volume account. My privileges stack in such a way that I see none of the bad actor interactions you do.

Thank you for sharing what those who aren't even the worst of us in the Fediverse are doing so we all can know at least that much.

@vkc This platform needs more editing (and anger) aimed at it. This is my third account because I get frustrated at what it is (then come back here for what it should be).

@vkc @sashin i wonder if fedi has a community block list feature

@Shadow_Glider @vkc @McNeely i do wonder if its more costly to manage federated or honepot blocking than the bad actors just creating more accounts

Thanks for being here, and thanks for speaking out. This won't ever get better without first acknowledging it's not good.
@vkc

@vkc @McNeely This highlights a need for more co-ordinated efforts like The Bad Space, but less manual. @Gargron How are those imported ban lists coming along?

@vkc I really appreciate your work here (as well as on YouTube), and I am glad that people like you contribute the Fediverse. Recently in German Mastodon another woman issued hate speech she is receiving on a regular basis. It‘s a shame, and it‘s simply against everything the Fediverse was built for. Please feel my/our support!

PS: And I apologize for my remark earlier today, which I made while not having understood well the things you were talking about.

@vkc I appreciate you. You're welcome here.

I feel that moderation tools on Fedi is lacking. There should be a way for smaller instances to follow the moderation decisions of larger, more well-moderated instances. Maybe in the form of a community blocked users and instances list that updates in real time, and instances can choose to follow that 100%, or apply whitelists and blacklists to it.

Maybe multiple block lists, like we do with ad blocking.

@vkc Do you think that things would be better if fedi worked more like a network of blogs and stored comments on the server of the person who made the original post? Then deciding which comments people see is the responsibility of the original post's server, and everyone can see the same comment list. This also would allow posters to delete other peoples' comments on their posts, and to prevent people who they have blocked from commenting.

@Bredroll @vkc @sashin
So black people tried / managed to create some because they get the shit fast and violent like really violent. I mean other people of color too but black people , especially black queers and black women spearheaded that.

They got harassed many many times over this.
Eg the bad place, but even the hashtag fediblock exists because they had to fight back, ...
Some people still continue to maintain some.
Some people left over that.
Some people left and came back.

AND the devs of most fediverse software actively préfèred working on other stuff than the features they asked for for their safety.
( Trying to remember the names I can think of Ro / at aroh and a Caribbean MarciaX I think who really led not sure , seyrin and oliphant also who proposed stuff there was many times this discussion, I think )

And yes part of it is that choosing an instance is choosing a moderation, but also the fact that instances safe for black people are harassed to the point of closing ( happened I saw it happen twice probably happened more ) , the fact that people are saying 'you should be fine with this couple of instances who care like it's not building fucking virtual ghettos to harass people out everywhere except there but also victim blaming' or plenty of other stuff. There needs to be a culture shift to not let the mysoginy , general racism, antiblackness and very specifically mysoginoir fly, there needs to be campaigns for actually paying the instances that do good moderation.

Because until people start acting generally like 'you see something you says something' instead of coddling piece of shits abusers. And until thats the culture going to continue. And actively looking for the abuse sometimes to protect their neighbors on those internet streets. It's going to continue.

Also 2 Pb : people recreating accounts ( how many times have I see a post on fediblock 'hey you remember this harasser, well they created another account with one letter changed into a number now that everyone has blocked them) - don't really know how to solve this one, when you block someone they can still see your public posts because of how the federation works and how it's open to the whole internet. That one I think there should be something developed in between public / shadowed public posts and people who follow you posts because that enables stalkers and harassers big time. And to fix this problem has been asked for 10 years by now.

Did I mention black people have been shouting into the void for the last 10 years from what I gathered ( I am here since 2022 but fediblock happened 2016 or 2017 because of harassment campaigns) ?

@vkc yeah there's a lot of fringe folks here. Both in the good sense and the bad sense. The Internet is a public space, and that means we get to experience all the stuff that comes with that.

I am mostly grateful even for the weird ugly sad parts, because that's how you know it's real.