Hi theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) friends. Your friendly admin, @michael, here.

Currently, theATL.social blocks two domains from federation but does not utilize any block lists. the Lemmy yall.theATL.social does not block any domains.

My general admin philosophy is to let users decide what content they want to see, or not see. However, the Mastodon UI can make the adding/removing of domain block lists a bit tedious. (There are some tech/UI-related options to make this easier.)

On the other hand, I am personally not a free speech absolutist, and there are limits to what content could/should be relayed through theATL.social’s servers.

For example, illegal content, instances dedicated solely to hate speech/harassment, etc. To that end, the Oliphant Tier 0 block list offers a “floor” to remove literally the worst instances operating on the Fediverse: https://codeberg.org/oliphant/blocklists/src/branch/main/blocklists

As your admin, I don’t want to make any unilateral decisions - rather, I’d prefer a user/stakeholder conversation, with as many Q&As as helpful.

With that intro, let me know your thoughts:

  • michaelOPMAEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Thank you, @DecaturNature - earlier this evening, I conducted a careful review of reading the domain names of the blocked Tier 0 instances. Many instances’ names were self-describing the type of content hosted, and those descriptions were suffiicent criteria for exclusion. Others, as you mentioned, were banned for unclear or highly subjective reasons. The instanced that you mentioned were automatically not blocked or silenced because people on theATL.social were already following/engaged with them.

    With regards to auto-updating the Tier 0 list, I am in agreement that an automatic update procedure is not ideal, as instances may be again be blocked without cause.

    Perhaps it best, now that the worst of the worst are now blocked, to have a better documented review process for any future additions to the block list.

    And I know that we did have a moderation council before from our earlier meetings with Andy, but coordination with that council fell apart a bit - which I’ll take the blame for. Perhaps re-grouping that group would be helpful going forward.