Very interesting article! Very much fits with my own experience. The following things I decided to take as lessons learned from the fedi so far:

• stating novel concepts will get you ignored at best ans bullied at worst
• lemmy lacks (at least afaik) a way to share blocklists for destructive people (not instances)
• if you keep your posts on the constructive side, you will get a lot of positive replies but some will come at you no matter what

Especially when in a bad mood I need to get off lemmy if I cant emotionally distance myself from the bad actors.

Mastodon is a different kind of animal. They have centralized blocklists (like oliphant.social) to keep whole instances of trolls out. I havent had really bad situations since I implemented those but I have to report people nearly on a daily basis.

The reasons I have to assume are very varied and as such probably the solutions should be varied as well. Reasons I concludes from many discussions:

• lack of social skills on both sides
• no explicit behavioral code on instances or communities
• lack of active moderation and guidance
• the fediverse kind of includes those unable to keep an account unbanned on corpo media
• lack of (social) education, like biases and phallacies

All these are solvable imo. Not all by the same thing and none of them immediately. Obviously people will disagree with me and I‘m fine with that. My personal thoughts on solutions are as follows:

• Moderators get fixed shares of donations (x% over all moderators)
• Sidebars and rules get more fleshed out with links to social resources and education, explanations for those not immediately understanding it
• Explicit rules against ad hominem attacks and getting personal to win an argument

Imo, these will be beneficial for lemmy. Mastodon might benefit from other ideas. Feel free to share those and discuss with me.

Disclaimer: Ridicule and Ad hominem attacks will not be replied to but immediately blocked.

“Congratulations” for the trolls, who crashed Content Nation and for anyone condoning it. Now you have become the same bad actor you swore to destroy.

In general I think we can just say micro blogging platforms are toxic. You hear this of Twitter, Bluesky, and mastodon.

Damn. Poor guy! He didn’t deserve any of that. I hope this whole shit show results in positive changes and better documentation, but I don’t have high hopes, unfortunately. I hope Sascha is doing okay. Thank you for sharing this great article here!

I think the main issue with Content Nation, personally, was that it looked like an SEO spam site that was using the fediverse as its source for content scraping.

That being said, that still doesn’t justify the toxicity from the paranoid nerds that targeted this guy. I was quite surprised when the Bridgy Fed stuff happened, but now, I’m not surprised in the slightest.

I can get people being cautious about for-profits trying to monetize user data, but trying to ruin this guy’s life over it, regardless of whether or not he was actually trying to make money from their data, is just sick. Anyone who thinks this is an acceptable method of protest is fucked up in the head.

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