One of the bonuses of being on Mastodon is the fediverse is actually strong about crushing bad actors. A shiny new newspaper out of Yorkshire trying to make it in an online world published a lazy, stupid opinion piece about trans people — it’s England, you know, the place is infested with transphobes — and got slammed hard for it.
Yeah, they tried to play the game of saying it didn’t break any of their rules, just like Twitter was always doing — using vague rules to allow clear-cut hatred to get a pass.
That didn’t go over at all well. The Yorkshire lights went out all over Mastodon as instance after instance killed their feed. You want to see the horror settling into the admin of this for-profit newspaper as they realize they may have just destroyed their audience? Look here.
That’s usually a good sign that you done fucked up when Nazis start camping on your doorstep. I wish more media could grasp that simple, straightforward clue.
Well, they’re now taking their moderating responsibilities seriously- after getting globally shitcanned.
Whoopsie!
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
“We’re new to Mastodon” is a fair excuse for not fully understanding the process of managing your instance. It’s not an excuse for publishing blatant transphobia in the first place. On top of that, a shocked “we were only smearing trans people, we never meant to attract Nazis!” is hardly a ringing endorsement. I hope this kills their site.
With Mastodon, decentralization strikes back
There’s the old line, ‘You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell him much.’
“We’re new to Mastodon”
So was I but I didn’t act like an asshat.
My standards are so damn low that they’re actually a dive bar in hell, but somehow people still can’t meet them. JFC. (My standards: be a decent human. Yet so many can’t do that…!!)
But that would me losing a sizable chunk of their audience which means less of their precious profits.
@2 chrislawson
Divide and conquer. Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCl33v5969M
There are two ways that can go. Either the community reacts and the a-hole gets on the national news to “explain why the community is protesting against them”, a.k.a spew their horrible rhetoric for bigger audience. Or the community doesn’t react, thus throwing the minority under the bus.
But it cuts both ways. If somebody plays the role of “white conservative reactionary provocateur” they get the audience of “white conservative reactionary provocateur” and that in essence often means actual Nazis. As the newspapers just found out. It is all alright while Nazis and their supporters are outnumbered by majority. It gets scary when one of the majority political parties starts courting that group, thus turning minority into a sort of majority.
“Those replies are being federated out through your instance…” This sort of jargon is why I’m never joining Mastodon. Ok, that, and I don’t do social media, but this makes me never want to even read anything there.
I’m disappointed to see one of the Bylines stable of news services doing this. It’s a useful and much needed approach to journalism in the UK.
@ Ridana
You can just join a well moderated instance and not worry about it all. The more open nature of Mastodon just means there is more discussion about the technical guts.
As a mod on an instance involved in this; i hope they sort their shit out so we can reverse the block.
Defederated and fediblocked don’t get good results from search engines. They don’t show up in Urban Dictionary.
The UK seems to be slooooowly realizing that transphobia is a bad thing.
I’m not sure what so complicated about the concept but it certainly is taking a while.
Off topic, but as a new mastodon user, testing to see if an on-topic link to mastodon.scot looks ok… (sending to an oldish thread to avoid thread-grabbing)
Scotland: atheist majority
Works fine, astringer.
@astringer wow those numbers are interesting. When I visited Glasgow a few years back I was surprised how many churches and even a huge synagogue were apparently abandoned. The synagogue had apparently been sold to a mosque, but that’s an indication of interest in keeping faith communities alive. Glasgow itself was a lovely town – I wished on many occasions that I lived there.