Mastodon Good

man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)

sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to