Ed Heil's Microblog

2 min read

I'm reading that https://mastodon.art , the best known art instance, has, not defederated, but "silenced" https://mastodon.social because of its lack of moderation and failure to defederate from instancs that mastodon.art wants nothing to do with.

(source - https://www.patreon.com/posts/silencing-social-74474015 and other recent posts)

This seems to be partly about specific choices the admin Gargron has made, but I think even if he'd made different choices, something like this would be an inevitable consequence of people piling on the biggest instances.

To have a good community you need moderation, which means that the ratio of moderators to people being moderated has to be high enough. If it isn't, the site will become the "Nazi Bar" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar

You can prevent this by limiting the number of users by some means or another... requiring invites or payment, or just shutting down new registrations.

You can prevent it if you have a lot of cash by hiring an army of PTSD'ed contractors to poorly moderate the horror (the Facebook / Youtube route). This is better than nothing but usually doesn't work that well.

I don't know what other options there are.

The best option for Mastodon would seem to be to divert people into small enough instances that it's an achievable task for the person running the instance to moderate well.

But at this point you may have the problem that there are so many instances that a form of meta-moderation becomes impossible -- the meta-moderation which is "moderating which instances are defederated and which aren't," which is the same kind of work as moderating which posts are allowed and which aren't, except on a grander scale.

I don't know how this is all going to work out. I hope it does.

This kinda speaks to me, especially about the artists. I've probably told this story before but I escaped a long bout of self-esteem-focused depression when I changed my focus on a few things. One was that I knew a lot of artists on social media, who were promoting their stuff and each other and seeming to have a lot of camaraderie and mutual appreciation. I wanted to be like them! I wanted to be one of them! I kept trying to draw and producing nothing I liked at all, much less anything I could show off on the internet so I could "be like them." It turns out that that's a terrible thing to focus on when you're trying to do art. I gave up on that and on a lot of other ego-related things and I was much happier. Also decided never to draw anything I wasn't enjoying drawing. Turns out when you do that, you make better art. I even posted some of that art and it was appreciated by some of those artists. I got a little of what I wanted, only when I stopped wanting it.

I have a hard time describing this turn because it's a bunch of things that are part of the same thing in my mind but when I try to write them down they don't seem as clearly connected.

But the relevance to influencer-ization is... I was looking not at the art, but at the halo of social media presence and self-presentation around it. And that's not the important part, the important part is the art. But it's not the most salient thing when you're flipping through social media; it's the self-presentation and cross-presentation. And that's just a show. There are people behind there doing art and appreciating art and having friendships and stuff, but thinking the stuff you see *is* that is a Plato's Cave thing. It's just shadows.

(Probably 18 or so times that I've tried to write about this change that got me out of a self-esteem trap, and I've done it differently every time and never coherently described it, I don't think.)

Ed Heil

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