I'm seeing many smart people expressing serious concerns over Mastadon's ability to function in the face of extensive abuse as the communities scale up, and I think I share them.
Basically, MAstadon is reliant on benevolent policy choices. It gives you great tools, but the open question is, what happens when you have rogue instances on the warpath doing stuff that requires law enforcement intervention?
What do you do about admins of instances faking logs? Can you just ban them all? Unfed all?
I think this might even be a central conflict in my Incandescent stuff... The failings of these sort of communal setups and how a bunch of smart people try to solve them and what befalls them along the way.
@Ghostpaw you can blacklist them all yeah
@trwnh Alright, so let's imagine someone on another instance is harassing me, but nothing I'd call the cops over. I don't need my instance admins to intervene, do I?
@trwnh But then, if it's harassment from someone using multiple accounts on that instance?
Or, what if it's a multi-user effort from a specific instance? Do I engage my admins to ban that instance, and what's the threshold for the local instance to de-federate?
I think people are thinking about these situations, but I want some reassurances, and I want to see how the technology helps, without relying on goodwill of several thousand, experience level ??? Instance admins
@Ghostpaw depends on the admins, yeah. as a user you can only block/mute individual accounts. admins can ban accounts or maybe IPs
@Ghostpaw just block/mute them as normal
This is a LOT like the problem with Sealand. That's the libertarian ideal of just building an island with no laws in the middle of nowhere.
Great! You're free from the modern tyranny of government coercion, good for you.
What do you do when the pirates show up? Got a navy to call on for help? Going to arm yourselves?
I think we're fine on small instances and while the community of global users is < 10 Mil or so. After that? I don't know.