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I'm serializing this as multiple posts, staring with the "unsafe by design and unsafe by default" section. There are updates in the published posts that I'll reintegrate back into here.  I also still need to do footnote cleanup (the bane of my existence) in the unpublished sections.

Contents

Intro

Part 1 –  published as Mastodon and today’s fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default – and instance blocking is a blunt but powerful safety tool

• Today's fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default
• Instance-level federation choices are a blunt but powerful safety tool
• Instance-level federation decisions reflect norms, policies, and interpretations

Part 2 – published as Blocklists in the fediverse

• Enter blocklists
• Widely shared blocklists can lead to significant harm
• Blocklists potentially centralize power -- although can also counter other power-centralizing tendencies
• Today's fediverse relies on instance blocking and blocklists
• Steps towards better instance blocking and blocklists

Part 3 – published as  It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds

• It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds
• The Bad Space and FSEP
• A bug leads to messy discussions, some of which are productive
• Nobody's perfect in situations like this
• These discussions aren't occurring in a vacuum
• Also: Black trans, queer, and non-binary people exist

Part 4

• Racialized disinformation and misinformation: a fediverse case study

Part 4 – published as Compare and contrast: Fediseer, FIRES, and The Bad Space

• Fediseer
• FIRES
• A difference in philosophies
• Looking forward

Part 5 – published as Steps towards a safer fediverse

• It's about people, not just the software and the protocol
• It's also about the software
• And it's about the protocol, too
• Threat modeling and privacy by design can play a big role here
• Design from the margins – and fund it!

Part 6

• Golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next

Notes

Part 1

Intro

"The Bad Space project was born from a need to effectively identify instances that house bad actors and are poorly moderated, which puts marginalized communities at risk.

It is an extension of the #fediblock hashtag created by Artist Marcia X with additional support from Ginger to provide a catalog of instances that seek to cause harm and reduce the quality of experience in the fediverse.

Technical support provided by Ro."

– thebad.space/about, September 2023

The ecosystem of interconnected social networks known as the fediverse has great potential as an alternative to centralized corporate networks. With Elmo transforming Twitter into a machine for fascism and disinformation, and Facebook continuing to allow propaganda and hate speech to thrive while censoring support for Palestinians, the need for alternatives is more critical than ever.

But even though millions of people left Twitter in 2023 – and millions more are ready to move as soon as there's a viable alternative – the fediverse isn't growing.¹ One reason why: Today's fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default – especially for Black and Indigenous people, women of color, LGBTAIQ2S+ people², Muslims, disabled people and other marginalized communities.  ‌

"The fediverse is an ecosystem of abuse."

– Artist Marcia X, Ecosystems of Abuse, December 2022

The 1.35 million active users in today's fediverse are spread across more than 20,000 instances (aka servers) running a wide variety of software. On instances with active and skilled moderators and admins it can be a great experience. But not all instances are like that. Some are bad instances, filled with nazis, racists, misogynists, anti-LGBTAIQ2S+ haters, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, and/or harassers. And even on the vast majority of instances whose policies prohibit racism (etc.), relatively few of the moderators in today's fediverse have much experience with anti-racist or intersectional moderation – so very often racism (etc.) is ignored or tolerated when it inevitably happens.  ‌

Not only that, widely-adopted fediverse software platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, et al, have historically prioritized connections and convenience over safety – and lack some of the basic tools that social networks like Twitter and Facebook give people to protect themselves.

Technologies like The Bad Space, designed with a focus on protecting marginalized communities, can play a big role in making the fediverse safer and more appealing for everybody (well except for harassers, racists, fascists, and terfs – but that's a good thing).

"After all, when your most at-risk and disenfranchised are covered by your product, we are all covered."‌
‌‌
‌– Afsenah Rigot, Design From the Margins

And taking an anti-racist, pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ approach is likely to be especially appealing to people who are are sick of the racist, anti-LGBTAIQ2S+ norms of other social networks.‌³

The Bad Space is still at an early stage. As the heated discussions over the last couple months about it and the Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP) requirements document (authored by Roland X. Pulliam, aka Ro, and funded by the Nivenly Foundation), there are certainly areas for improvement – as well as grounds for concern about tools like blocklists (aka denylists) that today's fediverse relies on, including potential anti-trans biases. These are all topics that I'll explore, along with the opportunities, in more detail in later posts in this series.

Still, the initial functionality combined with the focus on helping marginalized people protect themselves is a promising start.  And one important aspect of The Bad Space is that it's not just focused on a single software platform – or, in principle, even limited to the fediverse.⁴

Unfortunately, there's also a lot of resistance to this approach. The racist and anti-trans language and harassment during the heated discussions of The Bad Space over the last two months highlights the challenges.

• At the systemic level, technology that lets Black people protect themselves from racism is a threat to white supremacy; and an alliance between Black people (including Black queer, trans, and non-binary people) and anti-racist queer ant trans allies is doubly-threatening to cis white supremacy, which relies on preventing alliances like this.
• At the individual level, it’s threatening to racist white people (including racist white trans, queer, and non-binary) people – and to “non-racist”⁵ white people (including "non-racist" white trans, queer, and non-binary people) who don’t want to share power or impact their friendships with racist white people.⁶‌

And philosophically, many of the most prominent developers and influencers in today's fediverse prioritize connectivity, convenience, and reach over safety and consent.  

"[C]ommitments to safer spaces in some ways run counter to certain interpretations and norms of openness on which open source rests."‌
‌‌
‌– Christina Dunbar-Hester, in Hacking Diversity

But despite the depressingly familiar racist dynamics,with echoes for so many people of past experiences of traumatic harassment and abuse on the fediverse or elsewhere,  there are also some very encouraging differences – especially the increased visibility and power of Black and Indigenous people and allies, thanks to the influx from Twitter over the last year reinforcing the efforts of long-time fediversians.  If the fediverse decides to to really start prioritizing the safety of marginalized communities, there are plenty of other opportunities for short-term progress – especially if fundipng materializes.  For example:

• More resources going to new projects as well as Mastodon and Lemmy forks with diverse teams, led by marginalized people, and prioritizing safety of marginalized people
• More education for moderators and individual fedizens interested in creating a more anti-racist approach, sharing best practices and "positive deviance" examples
• Fediverse equivalents of valuable tools on other platform like Block Party ⁷ and FilterBuddy that have also been built in conjunction with people who are at risk from harassment.

Then again, like I said, there's a lot of resistance.  ‌

So it's quite possible that we're seeing a fork in the fediverse, with some regions of the fediverse moving in an anti-racist direction ... while others shrugging their collective shoulders, trying to maintain today's power dynamics, or moving in different directions. If so, then that's a good thing. Tindall's "Social Archipelago" of communities interacting (and not interacting) and forming "strands and islands and gulfs," Kat Marchán's caracoles (concentric federations of instances, combined with more intentional federation), and ophiocephalic's somewhat-similar fedifams are three possible geographies of how this could play out.⁸

‌"The existing “fediverse” is a two-edged sword for a social network with an anti-harassment and anti-racism focus."

–  Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017/8

And we're also likely to see new post-fediverses, potentially compatible (at least to some extent) with the fediverse and other networks but focusing on safety and anti-racism and developed by diverse teams working with diverse communities from the beginning.

"One way to look at today's fediverse is a prototype at scale, big enough to get experience with the complexities of federation, usable enough for many people that it's enjoyable for social network activities but with big holes including privacy and other aspects of safety, equity, accessibility, usability, sustainability and ...."

Today's fediverse is prototyping at scale

In any case there’s a lot of potential learning that’s relevant both for the fediverse and for whatever comes next.

So it's worth digging into the details of the situation: the fediverse's long-standing problems with abuse and harassment, the strengths and weaknesses of current tools; the approaches tools like The Bad Space, Fediseer, and FSEP take; and how the fediverse as a whole can seize the moment and build on the progress that's being made.  

There’s a lot to talk about!

Today's fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default

The most obvious source of anti-Blackness and other forms of identity-based hate speech and harassment in today's fediverse is the hundreds of bad instances run by nazis, other white supremacists, channers, or trolls who allow and even encourage -based hate speech and other forms of harassment.  

This isn't new.  In a 2022 discussion, Lady described GNU Social's late-2016 culture as "a bunch of channer shit and blatantly anti-gay and anti-trans memes", and notes that "the instance we saw most often on the federated timeline in those days was shitposter.club, a place which virtually every respectable instance now has blocked."  clacke agrees that "the famous channer-culture and freezepeach instances came up only months before Mastodon's "Show HN"" in 2016.  Creatrix Tiara's August 2018 Twitter thread discusses a 2017 racist dogpiling led by an instance hosted by an alt-right podcaster.  

But just like Nazis and card-carrying TERFs aren't the only source of racism and transhpobia and other bigotry in society, bad instances are far from the only source of racism, transphobia, and other bigotry in the fediverse. Some instances – including some of the largest, like pawoo.net – are essentially unmoderated. Others have moderators who don't particularly care about moderating from an anti-racist and pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ perspective.  And even on instances where moderators are trying do the right thing, most don't have the training or experience needed to do effective intersectional moderation.  So finding ways to deal with bad instances is necessary, but by no means sufficient.

This also isn't new. Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy looks at the state of Mastodon in early 2017, and quotes to Margaret KIBI's The Beginnings description of how of content warnings (CWs) were "weaponized" when "white, trans users—who, for the record, posted un‐CWed trans shit in their timeline all the time—started taking it to the mentions of people of colour whenever the subject of race came up." Creatrix Tiara's November 2022 Twitter thread has plenty of examples from BIPOC fediversians about similar racialized CW discourse.  

"we made this space our own through months of work and a fuckton of drama and infighting. but we did a good enough job that when mastodon took off, OUR culture was the one everybody associated it with"

– Lady, November 2022‌

In Mastodon's early days of 2016-2017, queer and trans community members drove improvements to the software and developed tools which – while very imperfect – help individuals and instance admins and moderators address these problem, at least to some extent.  Unfortunately, as I discuss in The Battle of the Welcome Modal, A breaking point for the queer community, The patterns continue ..., and Ongoing contributions – often without credit, hostile responses from Mastodon's Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) Eugen Rochko (aka Gargron) and a pattern of failing to credit people for their work drove many key contributors away.  ‌

Others remain active – and forks like glitch-soc continue to provide additional tools for people to protect themselves – but Mastodon's pace of innovation had slowed dramatically by 2018.⁹ Other software platforms like Akkoma, Streams, and Bonfire have some much more powerful tools ... but over 80% of the active users in today's fediverse are on instances running Mastodon.  Worse, some of the newer platforms like Lemmy (a federated reddit alternative) have even fewer tools than Mastodon.

Not only that, some of the protections that Mastodon provides aren't turned on by default – or are only available in forks, not the official release. For example:

• while Mastodon does offer the ability to ignore private messages from people who you aren't following – great for cutting down on harassment as well as spam – that's not the default.  Instead, by default your inbox is open to nazis, spammers, and everybody else until you've found and updated the appropriate setting on one of the many settings screens.¹⁰
• by default blocking on Mastodon isn't particularly effective unless the instance admin has turned on a configuration option¹¹
• by default all follow requests are automatically approved, unless you've found and updated the appropriate setting on one of the many settings screens.
• local-only posts (originally developed by the glitch-soc fork in 2017 and also implemented in Hometown and other forks) give people the ability to prevent their posts from shared with other instances (who might have harassers, terfs, nazis, and/or admins or software that doesn't respect privacy) ... but Rochko has refused to include this functionality in the main Mastodon release.¹²
• Mastodon supports "allow-list" federation,¹³ allowing admins to choose whether or not to agree federate with nazi instances; but Mastodon's documentation describes this as "contrary to Mastodon’s mission of decentralization", so by default, all federation requests are accepted.

And the underlying ActivityPub protocol the fediverse is built on doesn't design in safety.

"Unfortunately from a security and social threat perspective, the way ActivityPub is currently rolled out is under-prepared to protect its users."

– OcapPub: Towards networks of consent, Christine Lemmer-Webber

"The basics of ActivityPub are that, to send you something, a person POSTs  a message to your Inbox.

This raises the obvious question: Who can do that? And, well, the default answer is anybody."

– Erin Shepherd, in A better moderation system is possible for the social web, November 2022

Despite these problems, many people on well-moderated instances have very positive experiences in today's fediverse.   Especially for small-to-medium-size instances, for experienced moderators even Mastodon's tools can be good enough.

However, many instances aren't well-moderated. So many people have very negative experiences in today's fediverse.  For example ...

"During the big waves of Twitter-to-Mastodon migrations, tons of people joined little local servers ... and were instantly overwhelmed with gore and identity-based hate."

– Erin Kissane, Blue skies over Mastodon (May 2023)

"It took me eight hours to get a pile of racist vitriol in response to some critiques of Mastodon."

– Dr. Johnathan Flowers, The Whiteness of Mastodon (December 2022)

"I truly wish #Mastodon did not bomb it with BIPOC during the Twitter migration.... I can't even invite people here b/c of what they have experienced or heard about others experiencing."

– Damon Outlaw, May 2023

Instance-level federation choices are a blunt but powerful safety tool

"Instance-level federation choices are an important tool for sites that want to create a safer environment (although need to be complemented by user-level control and other functionality)."

–  Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, originally written May 2017

For people who do have good experience, one of the key reasons is a powerful tool Mastodon first developed back in 2017: instance-level blocking, the ability to

• defederate (aka suspend) another instance, preventing future communications and removing all existing connections between accounts on the two instances
• limit (aka silence) another instance, limiting the visibility of posts and notifications from that instance to some extent (although not completely) unless people are following the account that makes them.

Terminology note: yes, it's confusing. Different people use different terms for similar things, and sometimes the same term for different things ... and the "official" terminology has changed over the years. See the soon-to-be-written "Terminology" section at the end for details.

Of course, instance-level blocking is a very blunt tool, and can have significant costs as well. Mastodon unhelpfully magnifies the costs by not giving an option to restore any connections that are severed by defederation,¹⁴ not letting people know when they've lost connections because of defederation, and making the experience of moving between instances unpleasant and awkward.

Opinions differ on how to balance the costs and benefits, especially in situations where are some bad actors on an instance as well as also lots of people who aren't bad actors. ‌

Instance blocking decisions often spark heated discussions.  For example, suppose an instance's admin makes a series of jokes that some people consider perfectly fine but others consider racist, and then verbally attacks people who report the posts or call them out. Others on their instance join in as well, defending somebody they see as unfairly accused, and in the process make some comments that they think are just fine but others consider racist. When those comments are reported, the moderators (who thinks they're just fine) doesn't take action. Depending on how you look at it, it's either

• a pattern of racist behavior by the admin and members of the instance, failure to moderate racist posts, and brigading by the members of the instance,
• or a pattern of false accusations and malicious reporting from people on other instances

Is defederation (or limiting) appropriate?  If so, who should be defederated or limited – the instance with the comments that some find racist, or the instances reporting comments as racist that others think are just fine?  Unsurprisingly, opinions differ. In situations like this, white people are more likely to be forgiving of the posts and behavior that people of color see as racist – and, more likely to see any resulting defederation or limiting as a punishment.

I'll delve more into the other scenarios where opinions differ on whether defederation or limiting is or isn't appropriate in the next session.  First though I really want to emphasize the value of instance-level blocking.

• Defederating from a few hundred "worst-of-the-worst" instances makes a huge difference.  
• Defederating or limiting large loosely-moderated instances (like the "flagship" mastodon.social) that are frequent sources of racism, misogyny, and transmisia² means even less harassment and bigotry (as well as less spam).
• Mass defederation can also send a powerful message.  When far-right social network Gab started using Mastodon software in 2019, most fediverse instances swiftly defederated from it.  Bye!!!!!!!

Instance-level blocking really is a very powerful tool.  

¹ As I said a few months ago describing an incident where an admin defederated an instance and then on further reflection decided it had been an overreaction,

"[A]fter six years why wasn't there an option of defederating in a way that allows connections to be reestablished when the situation changes and refederation is possible?  If you look in inga-lovinde 's Improve defederation UX March 2021 feature request on Github, it's pretty clear that it's not the first time stuff like this happened."  

And it wasn't the last time stuff like this happened either.  In mid-October, a tech.lgbt moderator decided to briefly suspend and unsuspend connections to servers that had been critical of tech.lgbt, in hopes that it would "break the tension and hostility the team had seen between these connections."  Oops.  As the tech.lgbt moderators commented afterwards, "severing connections is NOT a way to break hostility in threads and DMs."

² transmisia – hate for trans people – is increasingly used as an alternative to transphobia.

Instance-level federation decisions reflect norms, policies, and interpretations

For some instances, defederating from Gab was based on norms: we don't tolerate white supremacists, Gab embodies white supremacy, so we want nothing to do with them. For others, it was more a matter of safety: defederating from Gab cuts down on harassment. And for some, it was both.

Even when there's apparent agreement on a norm, interpretations are likely to differ. For example, there's wide agreement on the fediverse that anti-Semitism is bad. But what happens when somebody makes a post about the situation in Gaza that Zionist Jews see as anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist Jews don’t? If the moderators don’t take the posts down, are they being anti-Semitic? Conversely, if the moderators do take them down, are they being anti-Palestinian? Is defederation (or limiting) appropriate – or is calling for defederation anti-Semitic? To me, as an anti-Zionist Jew, the answers seem clear;¹⁶ once again, though, opinions differ.

And (at the risk of sounding like a broken record) in many situations, moderators – or people discussing moderator decisions – don't have the knowledge to understand why something is racist.  Consider this example, from @futurebird@sauropod.win's excellent Mastodon Moderation Puzzles.

"You get 4 reports from users who all seem to be friends all pointing to a series of posts where the account is having an argument with one of the 4 reporters. The conversation is hostile, but contains no obvious slurs. The 4 reports say that the poster was being very racist, but it's not obvious to you how."

As a mod what do you do?

I saw a spectacular example of this several months ago, with a series of posts from white people questioning an Indigenous person's identity, culture, and lived experiences. Even though it didn't include slurs, multiple Indigenous people described it as racist ... but the original posters, and many other white people who defended them, didn't see it that way. The posts eventually got taken down, but even today I see other white people characterizing the descriptions of racism as defamatory.

So discussions about whether defederation (or limiting) is appropriate often become contentious in situations when ...

• an instance's moderators frequently don't take action when racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or casteist posts are reported.
• an instance's moderators frequently only take action after significant pressure and a long delay when racist, misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or casteist posts are reported.
• an instance hosts a known racist, misogynistic, or anti-LGBTQ+ harasser
• an instance's admin or moderator is engaging in – or has a history of engaging in – harassment
• an instance's admin or moderator has a history of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, or anti-trans activity
• an instance's members repeatedly make false accusations that somebody is racist or anti-trans
• an instance's members try to suppress discussions of racist or anti-trans behavior by brigading people who bring the topics up or spamming the #FediBlock hashtag
• an instance's moderators retaliate against people who report racist or anti-trans posts
• an instance's moderator, from a marginalized background, is accused of having a history of sexual assult – but claims that it's a false accusation, based on a case of mistaken identity
• an instance's members don't always put content warnings (CWs) on posts with sexual images for content from their everyday lives¹⁷

Similarly, there's often debate about if and when it's approprate to re-federate. What if an instance has been defederated because of concerns that an admin or moderator is a harasser who can't be trusted, and then the person steps down? Or suppose an multiple admittedly-mistaken decisions by an instance's moderators that impacted other instances leads to them being silenced, but then a problematic moderator leaves the instance and they work to improve their processes. At what point does it make sense to unsilence them? What if it turns out the processes haven't improved, and/or more mistakes get made?

Transitive defederation – defederating from all the instances that federate with a toxic instance – is particularly controversial. Is it grounds for defederation if an instance federates with a white supremacist instance like Stormfront or Gab, or an anti-trans hate instance like kiwiframs?  Many see federating with an instance that tolerates white supremacists as tolerating white supremacists, others don’t – and others agree that it’s tolerating white supremacists but don’t see that as grounds for defederation. What about if an instance federates with channer shiposting instances?

Norm-based transitive defederation can be especially contentious, but there can also be disagreements about safety-based transitive defederation.  In Why just blocking Meta’s Threads won’t be enough to protect your privacy once they join the fediverse, for example, I describe how indirect data flows could leave people at risk without transitive defederation, but opinions differ on whether this is a severe enough safety risk to justify what some see as the "nuclear option" of transitive defederation.

Part 2

Enter blocklists

With 20,000 instances in the fediverse, how to know which ones are bad actors that should be defederated or so loosely moderated that they should be limited?  

Back in 2017, Artist Marcia X created the #FediBlock hashtag, and Ginger helped spread it via faer networks, to make it easier for admins and users to share information about instances spreading harassment and hate – instances that admins may want to defederate or limit.  

#FediBlock continues to be a useful channel for sharing this information, although it has its limits. For one thing, anybody can post to a hashtag, so without knowing the reputation of the person making a post to the hashtag it's hard to know how much credibility to give the recommendation. And Mastodon's search functionality has historically been very weak, so there's no easy way to search the #FediBlock hashtag to see whether specific instances have been mentioned. Multiple attempts to provide collections of #FediBlock references (without involving or crediting its creators) have been abandoned; without curation, a collection isn't particularly useful – and can easily be subverted.

Long-time admins know about a few low-profile well-curated sites that record some vetted #FediBlock entries, and Google and other search engines have partial information, but it's all very time-consuming and hit-or-miss.  And with hundreds of problematic instances out there, blocking them individually can be tedious and error-prone – and new admins often don't know to do it.

Starting in early 2023, Mastodon began providing the ability for admins to protect themselves from hundreds of problematic instances at a time by uploading blocklists (aka denylists): lists of instances to suspend or limit.

Terminology note: blocklist or denylist is preferred to the older blacklist and whitelist, which embed the racialized assumption that black is bad and white is good. Blocklist is more common today, but close enough to blacklist that denylist is gaining popularity.

As of late 2023, many instances make their blocklists available for others to upload, and blocklists from Seirdy (Rohan Kumar), Gardenfence, and Oliphant all have significant adoption.  Here's how Seirdy's My Fediverse blocklists: describes the 140+ instances on his FediNuke.txt blocklist:

"It’s kind of hard to overlook how shitty each instance on the FediNuke.txt subset is. Common themes tend to be repeated unwelcome sui-bait² from instance staff against individuals, creating or spreading dox materials against other users, unapologetic bigotry, uncensored shock content, and a complete lack of moderation."

Seirdy's Receipts section gives plenty of examples of just how shitty these instances are. For froth.zone, for example, Seirdy has links including "Blatant racism, racist homophobia", and notes that "Reporting is unlikely to help given the lack of rules against this, some ableism from the admin and some racism from the admin." Seirdy also links to another instance's about page which boasts that "racial pejoratives, NSFW images & videos, insensitivity and contempt toward differences in sexual orientation and gender identification, and so-called “cyberbullying” are all commonplace on this instance." Nice.

Of course, blocklists aren't limited to shitty instances. Oliphant's git blocklists page highlight the range of approaches.  Oliphant's "tier 0 council" (which he recommends as a "bare minimum" blocklist for new servers) has 240 instances, Seirdy's Tier 0 (which he describes as "a decent place to start" if you’re starting a well-moderated instance) has 400+, and Oliphant's "tier 3" has over 1000 instances.

The Oliphant and Gardenfence blocklists are based on combining the results of multiple instances' blocklists, with some threshold for inclusion on the "consensus" (or "aggregate") blocklist; Seirdy similarly uses a combination of multiple blocklists as the first step in his process. On the one hand, a purely algorithmic approach reduces the direct impact of bias and mistakes by the person or organization providing the blocklist. Then again, it introduces the possibility of mistakes or bias by one or more of the sources, selecting which sources to use, or the algorithm combining the various blocklists. Seirdy's Mistakes made analysis documents a challenge with this kind of approach.

"One of Oliphant’s sources was a single-user instance with many blocks made for personal reasons: the admin was uncomfortable with topics related to sex and romance. Blocking for personal reasons on a personal instance is totally fine, but those blocks shouldn’t make their way onto a list intended for others to use....

Tyr from pettingzoo.co raised important issues in a thread after noticing his instance’s inclusion in the unified-max blocklist. He pointed out that offering a unified-max list containing these blocks is a form of homophobia: it risks hurting sex-positive queer spaces."

Requiring more agreement between the sources reduces the impact of bias from any individual source, although also increases the number of block-worthy instances that aren't on the list. Gardenfence, for example, requires agreement of six of its seven sources, and has 136 entries; as the documentation notes, "there are surely other servers that you may wish to block that are not listed."  As Seirdy notes, no matter what blocklist your starting with

"if your instance grows larger (or if you intend to grow): you should be intentional about your moderation decisions, present and past. Your members ostensibly trust you, but not me."

Any blocklist, for an individual instance intended to be shared between instances, reflects the creators' perspectives on this and dozens of other ways in which there isn't any fediverse-wide agreements on when it's appropriate to defederate or silence other instances. Since any blocklist by definition takes a position on all these issues, any blocklist is likely to be supported by those who have similar perspectives as the creators – and vehemently opposed by those who see things differently.  

And some people vehemently oppose the entire of idea of blocklists, either on philosophical grounds or because of the risks of harms and abuse of power.  

Widely shared blocklists can lead to significant harm

Blocklists have a long history. Usenet killfiles have existed since the 1980s, email DNSBLs since the late 90s, and Twitter users created The Block Bot in 2012.  The perspective of a Block Bot user who Saughan Jhaver et al quote in Online harassment and content moderation: The case of blocklists (2018) is a good example of the value blocklists can provide to marginalized people:

"I certainly had a lot of transgender people say they wouldn’t be on the platform if they didn’t have The Block Bot blocking groups like trans-exclusionary radical feminists –TERFs.”

That said, widely-shared blocklists introduce risks of major harms – harms that are especially likely to fall on already-marginalized communities.  

workingdog_'s thread from 2018 (written during the Battle of Wil Wheaton) describes a situation involving a different Twitter blocklist that many current Mastodonians had first-hand experience with: a cis white person arbitrarily put many trans people who had done nothing wrong on his widely-adopted blocklist of "most abusive Twitter scum" and as a result ...

"Tons of independent trans artists who earn their primary income off selling music on bandcamp, Patreon, selling art commissions, etc. got added to this block list and saw their income drop to 0. Because they made a Star Trek reference at a celebrity. Or for doing nothing at all.

Email blocklists have seen similar abuses; RFC 6471: Overview of Best Email DNS-Based List (DNSBL) Operational Practices (2012) notes that

“some DNSBL operators have been known to include "spite listings" in the lists they administer -- listings of IP addresses or domain names associated with someone who has insulted them, rather than actually violating technical criteria for inclusion in the list.”

And intentional abuse isn’t the only potential issue. RFC 6471 mentions a scenario where making a certain mistake on a DNSBL could lead to everybody using the list rejecting all email ... and mentions in passing that this is something that's actually happened. Oops.

"The trust one must place in the creator of a blocklist is enormous; the most dangerous failure mode isn’t that it doesn’t block who it says it does, but that it blocks who it says it doesn’t and they just disappear."

– Erin Sheperd, A better moderation system is possible for the social web

"Blocklists can be done carefully and accountably! But almost none of them ARE."

– Adrienne, a veteran of The Block Bot

People involved in creating and using blocklists can take steps to limit the harms. An oversight and review process can reduce the risk of instances getting placed on a blocklist by mistake – or due to the creators' biases. Appeals processes can help deal with the situation when they almost-inevitably do. Sometimes problematic instances clean up their act, so blocklists need to have a process for being updated. Admins considering using a blocklist can double-check the entries to make sure they’re accurate and aligned with their instances’ norms.  The upcoming section on steps towards better blocklists disucsses these and other improvements in more detail.

However, today's fediverse blocklists often have very informal review and appeals processes – basically relying on instances who have been blocked by mistake (or people with friends on those instances) to surface problems and kick off discussions by private messages or email.  Some, like Seirdy's FediNuke, make it easier for admins to double-check them by including reasons and receipts (links or screenshots documenting specific incidents) for why instances appear on them. Others don't, or have only vague explanations ("poor moderation") for most instances.

To be clear, receipts aren't a panacea. In some situations, providing receipts can open up the blocklist maintainer (or people who had reported problems or previously been targeted) to additional harassment or legal risk. Some of the incidents that lead to instances being blocked can be quite complex, so receipts are likely to be incomplete at best. And even when receipts exist, it’s likely to take an admin a long time to check all the entries on a blocklist – and there are still likely to be disagreements about how receipts should be interpreted.  Still, today's fediverse blocklists certainly ample room for improvement on this front – and many others.

Blocklists potentially centralize power – although can also counter other power-centralizing tendencies

Another big concern about widely-adopted blocklists is their tendency to centralize power. Imagine a hypothetical situation where every fediverse instance had one of a small number of blocklists that had been approved by a central authority. That would give so much power to the central authority and the blocklist curator(s) that it would almost certainly be a recipe for disaster.  

And even in more less-extreme situations, blocklists can centralize power. In the email world, for example, blocklists have contributed to a situation where despite a decentralized protocol a very small number of email providers have over 90% of the installed base. You can certainly imagine large providers using a similar market-dominance technique in the fediverse. Even today, I've seen several people suggest that people should choose large instances like mastodon.social which many regard as "too big to block."  And looking forward, what happens if and when Facebook parent company Meta's new Threads product adds fediverse integration?

Then again, blocklists can also counter other centralizing market-dominance tactics. Earlier this year, for example, Mastodon BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) Rochko changed  the onboarding of the official release to sign newcomers up by default to mastodon.social, the largest instance in the fediverse – a clear example of centralization, especially since Rochko is also CEO of Mastodon gGmbH, which runs mastodon.social.  One of the justifications for this is that otherwise newcomers could wind up on an instance that doesn't block known actors and have a really horrible experience. Broad adoption of "worst-of-the-worst" blocklists would provide a decentralized way of addressing this concern.

For that matter, broader adoption of blocklists that silence or block mastodon.social could directly undercut Mastdon gGmbH's centralizing power in a way that was never tried (and is no longer feasible) with gmail.  The FediPact – hundreds of instances agreeing to block the hell out of any Meta instances – is another obvious example of using a blocklist to counter dominance.  

Today's fediverse relies on instance blocking and blocklists

It would be great if Mastodon and other fediverse software had other good tools for dealing with harassment and abuse to complement instance-level blocking – and, ideally, reduce the need for blocklists.

But it doesn't, at least not yet.  

That needs to change, and in an upcoming installment I'll talk about some straightforward short-term improvements that could have big impact. Realistically, though, it's not going to change overnight – and a heck of a lot of people want alternatives to Twitter right now.  

So despite the costs of instance-level blocking, and the potential harms of blocklists, they're the only currently-available solution for dealing with the hundreds of Nazi instances – and thousands of weakly-moderated instances, including some of the biggest, where moderators frequently don't take action on racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, etc content.  As a result, today's fediverse is very reliant on them.  

Steps towards better instance blocking and blocklists

"Notify users when relationships (follows, followers) are severed, due to a server block, display the list of impacted relationships, and have a button to restore them if the remote server is unblocked"

– Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput, discussing the tentative roadmap for the upcoming Mastodon 4.3 release

Since the fediverse is likely to continue to rely on instance blocking and blocklists at least for a while, how to improve them?  Mastodon 4.3's planned improvements to instance blocking are an important step. Improvements in the announcements feature (currently a "maybe" for 4.3) would also make it easier for admins to notify people about upcoming instance blocks.  Hopefully other fediverse software will follow suit.

Another straightforward improvement along these lines would be an option to have new federation requests initially accepted in "limited" mode. By reducing exposure to racist content, this would likely reduce the need for blocking.  

For blocklists themselves, one extremely important step is to let new instance admins know that they should consider initially blocking worst-of-the-worst instances (and their members are likely to get hit with a lot of abuse if they don't) and offering them some choices of blocklists to use as a starting point. This is especially important for friends-and-family instances which don't have paid admins or moderators. Hosting companies play a critical role here – especially if Mastodon, Lemmy, and other software platforms continue not to support this functionality directly (although obviously it would be better if they do!)

Since people from marginalized communities are likely to face the most harm from blocklist abuse, involvement of people from different marginalized communities in creating and reviewing blocklists is vital. One obvious short-term step is for blocklist curators – and instance admins whose blocklists are used as inputs to aggregated blocklists – to provide reasons instances are on the list, checking to see where receipts exist (and potentially providing access to them, at least in some circumstances), re-calibrating suspension vs. silencing in some cases, and so on. Independent reviews are likely to catch problems that a blocklist creator misses, and an audit trail of bias and accuracy reviews could make it much easier for instances to check whether a blocklist has known biases and mistakes before deploying it.  Of course, this is a lot of work; asking marginalized people to do it as volunteers is relying on free labor, so who's going to pay for it?  

A few other directions worth considering:

• More nuanced control over when to automatically apply blocklist updates could limit the damage from bugs or mistakes
• Providing tags for the different reasons that instances are on on blocklists could make it much easier for admins to use blocklists as a starting point, for example by distinguishing between instances that are on a blocklist for racist and anti-trans harassment from instances that are there only because of CW or bot policies that the blocklist curator considers overly lax.
• Providing some access to receipts and an attribution trail of who has independently decided an instance should be blocked help admins and independent reviewers make better judgments about which blocklist entries they agree with. As discussed above, receipts are a complicated topic, and in many situations may be only partial and/or not broadly shareable; but as Seirdy’s FediNuke.txt list shows, there are quite a few situations where they are likely to be available.
• Shifting to a view of a blocklist as a collection of advisories or recommendations, and providing tools for instances to better analyze them, could help mitigate harm in situations where biases do occur.  Emelia Smith's work in progress on FIRES (Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server) is a valuable step in this direction.
• Learning from experiences with email blocking and IP blocking – and, where possible, building on infrastructure that already exists

Algorithmic systems tend to magnify biases, so "consensus" blocklists require extra scrutiny.  Algorithmic audits (a structured approach to detecting biases and inaccuracies) are one good way to reduce risks – although again, who's going to pay for it  Adding elements of manual curation (by an intersectionally-diverse team of people from various marginalized perspectives) could also be helpful. Hrefna has some excellent suggestions as well, such as preprocessing inputs to add additional metadata and treating connected sources (for example blocklists from instances with shared moderators) as a single source. And there are a lot of algorithmic justice experts in the fediverse, so it's also worth exploring different anti-oppressive algorithms specifically designed to detect and reduce biases.

Of course, none of these approaches are panaceas, and they’ve all got complexities of their own. When trying to analyze a blocklist for bias against trans people, for example, there's no census of the demographics of instances in the fediverse, so it's not clear how to determine whether trans-led instances are overrepresented. The outsized role of large instances like mastodon.social that are sources of a lot of racism (etc) is another example; if a blocklist doesn't block mastodon.social, does that mean it's inherently biased against Black people?  When looking at whether a blocklist is biased against Jews or Muslims, whose definitions of anti-Semitism get used? What about situations where differing norms (for example whether spamming #FediBlock as grounds for defederation, or whether certain jokes are racist or just good clean fun) disproportionately affect BIPOC and/or trans people?

Which brings us back to a point I made earlier:

"It would be great if Mastodon and other fediverse software had other good tools for dealing with harassment and abuse to complement instance-level blocking – and, ideally, reduce the need for blocklists."

Part 3

It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds

The problem The Bad Space is focusing on is certainly a critical one – as the widespread racist and anti-trans bigotry and harassment in the messy discussions of The Bad Space over the last few months highlight.  And Ro's certainly got the right background to work on fediverse safety tools. As well as coding skills and years of experience in the fediverse, he and Artist Marcia X were admins of Play Vicious, which as one of the few Black-led instances in the fediverse was the target of vicious harassment until it shut down in 2020. And The Bad Space's approach of designing from the perspective of marginalized communities is a great path to creating a fediverse that's safer and more appealing for everybody (well except for harassers, racists, fascists, and terfs – but that's a good thing).  As Afsenah Rigot says in Design From the Margins

"After all, when your most at-risk and disenfranchised are covered by your product, we are all covered."‌

The Bad Space is still at an early stage, and like all early-stage software has bugs and limitations. Many of the sites listed don't have descriptions; some of the descriptions may be out-of-date; there's no obvious appeals process for sites that think they shouldn't be listed. A mid-September bug led to some instances being listed by mistake, and the user interface at the time didn't provide any information about whether instances were limited (aka silenced) or suspended (aka defederated) by other instances. The bug's been fixed, the UI's been improved ... but of course there may well be other false positives, bugs, etc etc etc.  It's software!

Still, The Bad Space is useful today, and has the potential to be the basis of other useful safety tools – for Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse,² and potentially for other decentralized social networks as well.  Many people did find ways to have productive discussions about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans, highlighting areas for improvement and potential future tools. So from that perspective quite a few people (including me) see it as off to a promising start.

Then again, opinions differ. For example, some of the posts I'll discuss in the next installment of this series (tentatively titled Racialized disinformation and misinformation: a fediverse case study) describe The Bad Space as "pure concentrated transphobia" that "people want to hardcode into new Mastodon installations"  in a plot involving somebody who's very likely a "right wing troll" working with an "AI art foundation aiming to police Mastodon" as part of a "deliberate attempt to silence LGBTQ+ voices."

Alarming if true!

"[D]isinformation in the current age is highly sophisticated in terms of how effectively a kernel of truth can be twisted, exaggerated, and then used to amplify and spread lies."

– Shireen Mitchell of Stop Online Violence Against Women, in Disinformation: A Racist Tactic, from Slave Revolts to Elections

Another way to look at it ...

At the same time, the messy discussions around The Bad Space are also a case study of the resistance in today's fediverse to technology created by a Black person (working with a diverse team of collaborators that includes trans and queer people) that allows people to better protect themselves.³

Many people misleadingly describe reactions to The Bad Space in terms of tensions between trans people and Black people – and coincidentally enough that's how some of the racialized disinformation and misinformation I'll be writing about in the next installment frames it, too.⁴ That's unfortunate in many ways. For one thing, Black trans people exist. Also, the "Black vs. trans" framing ignores the differences between trans femmes, trans mascs, and agender people.  And the alternate framing of tensions between white trans femmes and Black people is no better, erasing trans people who are neither white nor Black,⁵ multiracial trans people, white agender people, white trans mascs (and many others) while ignoring the impact of cis white people, colorism, ableism, etc etc etc.

Besides, none of these communities are monolithic. There's a range of opinion on The Bad Space in Black communities, trans communities, and different intersectional perspectives (white trans femmes, disabled trans people) – a continuum between some people helping create it and/or actively supporting it, others strongly opposing it, with many somewhere in between.

More positively though, these dynamics – and the racist and anti-trans language in the discussions about The Bad Space – also make it a good case study of how cis white supremacy creates wedges (and the appearance of wedges) between and within marginalized groups – and erases people at the intersections and falling through. And with luck it'll also turn out to be a larger case study about how anti-racist and pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ people work together as part of an intersectional coalition to create something that's very different from today's fediverse.

The fediverse's technology problems do need to be fixed, and I'll return to that in an upcoming installment in this series.  But if the fediverse – or a fork of today's fediverse – is going to move forward in an anti-racist and pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ direction, understanding these dynamics are vital. And whether or not the fediverse moves forward and fixes its technology problems ... well, understanding these dynamics is vital for whatever comes next, because these same problems occur on every social network platform.

The Bad Space and FSEP

The work-in-progress version of The Bad Space's web site (currently at tweaking.thebad.space provides a web interface that makes it easy to look up an instance to see whether concerns have been raised about its moderation, and an API (application programming interface) making the information available to software as well.  The Bad Space currently has over 3300 entries – roughly 14% of the  24,000+ instances in today's fediverse.  Entries are added using the blocklists of multiple sources as input. Here's how the about page describes it:

"The Bad Space is a collaboration of instances committed to actively moderating against racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, casteism, or religion.

These instances have permitted The Bad Space to read their respective blocklists to create a composite directory of sites tagged for the behavior above that can be searched and, through a public API, can be integrated into external services."

An instance appears on The Bad Space if it's on the blocklists of at least two of the sources. The web interface and API make it easy to see how many sources have silenced or defederated an instance. Other information potentially available for each instance includes a description and links to screens for receipts; screens are not currently available on the public site, and only a subset of instances currently have descriptions.  Here's what the page for one well-known bad actor looks like.

The Bad Space also provides downloadable "heat rating" files, showing instances that have been acted on by some percentage of the sources.  As of late November October, the 90% heat rating lists 131 instances, and has descriptions for the vast majority. The 50% heat rating  lists 650+, and the 20% heat rating (2 or more) has over 1600.

FSEP

The Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP) requirements document (authored by Ro, and funded by Nivenly Foundation via a direct donation Nivenly board member Mekka Okereke) provides a couple of examples of how The Bad Space could be leveraged to improve safety on the fediverse.⁸  One is a tool that gives individual users the ability to vet incoming connection requests to validate that they are not from problematic sites.

This matters from a safety perspective because if somebody follows you they can see your followers-only posts.  People who value their privacy – and/or are the likely targets of harassment or hate speech and don't want to let just anybody follow them – can turn off the "Automatically accept new followers" option in their profile if they're using the web interface (although Mastodon's default app doesn't allow this, another great example of Mastodon not giving people tools to protect each other).  FSEP goes further by providing users with information about the instance the follow request is coming from – useful information if they're coming from an instance that has a track record of bad behavior.

The other tools discussed in FSEP help admins manage blocklists, and address weaknesses in current fediverse support for blocklists.⁹ As Blocklists in the fediverse discusses at length, blocklists can have significant downsides; but in the absence of other good tools for dealing with harassment and abuse, the fediverse currently relies on them.  FSEP's "following UI" is a great example of the kind of tool that complements blocklists, but the need isn't likely to go away anytime soon.

While FSEP's proposed design allows blocklists from arbitrary sources, the implementation plan proposed initially using The Bad Space to fill that role in the minimum viable product (MVP).¹⁰  But sometimes products never get beyond the MVP.  So what would happens if FSEP gets implemented, and then adopted as a default by the entire fediverse, and never gets to the stage of adding another blocklist?

Realistically, of course, there's no chance this will happen. The Bad Space includes mastodon.social on its default blocklist – and mastodon.social is run by Mastodon gGmbH, who also maintains the Mastodon code base. Mastodon's not going to adopt a default blocklist that blocks mastodon.social, and Mastodon is currently over 80% of the fediverse.  So The Bad Space isn't going to get adopted as a default by the entire fediverse.

But what if it did?????????

A bug leads to messy discussions, some of which are productive

The alpha version of The Bad Space had been available for a while (I remember looking up an instance on it early in the summer after an unpleasant interaction with a racist user), and the conversations about it were relatively positive.  The FSEP requirements doc was published in mid-August, and got some feedback, but there wasn't a lot of broad discussion of it. That all changed after the mid-September bug, which led to dozens of sites temporarily getting listed on The Bad Space by mistake – including girlcock.club (an instance run by trans women for trans folk) and tech.lgbt.

Of course when it was first noticed nobody knew it was a bug.  And other trans- and queer-friendly sites also appeared on the The Bad Space. Especially given the ways Twitter blocklists had impacted the trans community, it's not surprising that this very quickly led to a lot of discussion.

Even though nobody was using The Bad Space as a blocklist at the time, the bug certainly highlights the potential risks of using automatically-generated blocklists without double-checking. If an instance had been using "every instance listed on The Bad Space" as a blocklist, then thousands of connections would have been severed without notice – and instance-level defederation on Mastodon currently doesn't allow connections to be re-established if the defederation happens by mistake, so it would have been hard to recover.

Sometimes, messiness can be productive

Ro quickly acknowledged the bug and started working on a fix. A helpful admin quickly connected with the source that had limited girlcock.club because of "unfortunate branding" and resolved the issue – and the source was removed from The Bad Space's "trusted source" list.  A week later Ro deployed a new version of the code that fixed the bug, and soon after that implemented UI improvements that provide additional information about how many of the sources have take action against a specific instance and which actions have been taken.

From a software engineering perspective, this kind of messiness can be productive. Many people found ways to raise questions about, criticisms of, and suggestions for improvements to FSEP and The Bad Space without saying racist or anti-trans things.  dclements' detailed questions on github are an excellent example, and I saw lots of other good discussion in the fediverse as well.

Discussions about bugs can highlight patterns¹⁰ and point to opportunities for improvements. For example, bugs aren't the only reason that entries are likely to appear on blocklists by mistake; other blocklists have had similar problems. What's a good appeal process?  How to reduce the impact of mistakes?  In a github discussion, Rich Felker suggested that blocklist management tools should have safeguards to prevent automated block actions from severing relationships without notice. If something like that is implemented, it'll help people using any blocklist.

But as interesting as the software engineering aspects are to some of us, much more of the discussion focused on the question of whether the presence of multiple queer and trans instances on The Bad Space reflect bias – or transphobia. As Steps towards better blocklists discusses, these kinds of questions are important to take into account on any blocklist – just as biases against Black, Indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, and disabled people need to be considered (as well as intersectional biases). It's a hard question to answer!

In some alternate universe this too could have been a mostly productively messy discussion.  It really is a hard problem – and not just for blocklists, for recommendation systems in general – and the fediverse is home to experts in algorithmic analysis and bias like Timnit Gebru and Alex Hanna of Distributed AI Research Center, Damien P. Williams, Emily Bender as well as lots people with a lot of first-hand experience.

But alas, in this universe today's fediverse is not particularly good at having discussions like this.

Sometimes messiness is just messy

It might still turn out that this part of this discussion becomes productive ... for now let's just say the jury's out. It sure is messy though.  For example:

• racists (including folks who have been harassing Ro and other Black people for years) taking the opportunity to harass Ro and other Black people
• a post that tech.lgbt's Retrospective On thebad.space Situation describes as being made in a state of "unfettered panic" left out "various critical but obscure details" and "unwittingly provided additional credibility" for the racist harassment campaign.
• waves of anti-Black and anti-trans language – and racialized disinfo and racialized misinfo – sweeping though the fediverse.
• a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack targeting Ro's site and The Bad Space).
• instances (including some led by trans and queer people) who saw The Bad Space as a self-defense tool for Black people and Ro and other Black people as the target of racist harassment defederating from instances where moderators and admins allowed, participated in, or enabled attacks – which people who saw The Bad Space as "pure concentrated transphobia" took as unjust and an attempt to isolate trans and queer people.

It still isn't clear who was behind the DDOS and anonymous and pseudonymous racialized disinfo. For the DDOS, my guess is that it was some of the people who harassed Play Vicious in the past and/or nazis, terfs, and white supremacists trying to drive wedges between Black people and trans people and block an effort to reduce racism in the fediverse. With the DDOS attack, for example, they were probably hoping that Black supporters of The Bad Space would blame trans critics, and the trans critics would blame Ro or his supporters for a "false flag" operation to garner sympathy for his cause. But who knows, maybe it really was over-zealous critics – or channers doing it  for the lulz.

Nobody's perfect in situations like this

In fraught and emotional situations like this, it's very easy for people to say things that echo racist and/or transphobic stereotypes and dogwhistles, come from a place of privilege and entitlement, embed double standards, or reflect underlying racist assumptions that so many of us (certainly including me!) have absorbed without realizing.

The anti-trans language I saw came from a variety of sources: supporters of The Bad Space making statements about trans critics or trans people in general, critics attacking (or erasing) trans supporters, and opportunistic anti-trans bigots. Calling white trans people out on their racism isn't anti-trans; using dogwhistles, stereotypes, or other problematic language is, and so is intentionally misgendering. Suggesting that trans supporters of The Bad Space are ignoring the potential harms to trans people isn't anti-trans; suggesting that trans people who support The Bad Space "aren't really trans" (or implying that no trans people support The Bad Space) is, and so is intentionally misgendering or calling somebody a "theyfab".

By contrast, the anti-Black langauge I saw was primarily from people opposing The Bad Space (impersonating a supporter) – although opportunistic racist bigots got involved as well. Some was blatant, although not necessarily intentional: stereotypes, amplifying false accusations, dogwhistles and veiled slurs.  Another common form was criticisms of The Bad Space that don't acknowledge (or just pay lip service to) Black people's legitimate need to protect themselves on the fediverse, reflecting a racist societal assumption that Black people's safety has less value than white people's comfort. Black people (including Black trans, queer, and non-binary people) have been the target of vicious harassment for years on Mastodon and the fediverse, so no matter the intent, accusations that Ro or The Bad Space are causing division and hate ignore the fediverse's long history of whiteness and racism – and blame a Black person or Black-led project.

And some people managed to be anti-Black and anti-trans simultaneously. One especially clear example: a false accusation about a Black trans person, inaccurately claiming they had gotten a white person fired for criticizing The Bad Space.¹¹  A false accusation against a Black person is anti-Black; a false accusation against a trans person is anti-trans; a false accusation against a Black trans person is both.

Just as in past waves of intense anti-Blackness in the fediverse, one incident built on another. The false accusation occurred after weeks of anti-Black harassment by multiple people on the harasser's instance (with the admin refusing to take action). When the Black trans person who had been falsely accused made a bluntly worded post warning the harassers to knock it off or there would be consequences, the harassers described it as an unprovoked death threat – and demanded that other Black and trans people criticize the Black trans person who was trying to end the harassment. It's almost like they think Black trans people don't have the right to protect themselves! And Black people are stereotypically associated with danger and violence, so it's not surprising many who only saw the decontextualized claim of a "death threat" assumed it was the whole story and proceeded to amplify the anti-Black, anti-trans framing.

Nobody's perfect in situations like this, and while some people making unintentionally unfortunate anti-trans or anti-Black statements acknowledged the problems and apologized, you can't unring a bell. And many didn't acknowledge the problems or apologize, or apologized but continued making unfortunate statements, at which point you really have to question just how "unintentional" they were.

These discussions aren't occurring in a vacuum

"Until we admit that white queers were part of the initial Mastodon "HOA" squad that helped run the initial Black Twitter diaspora off the site - and are also complicit in the abuse targeted at the person in question here - we're not going to make real progress."

– Dana Fried, September 13

The fediverse has a long history of racism, and of marginalizing trans people; see Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon or my Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy, The patterns continue ..., and Ongoing contributions – often without credit for some of it.  And some of the racism has come from white queer and trans people. Margaret KIBI's The Beginnings, for example, describes how soon after content warnings (CWs) were first introduced in 2017

"this community standard was weaponized, as white, trans users—who, for the record, posted un‐CWed trans shit in their timeline all the time—started taking it to the mentions of people of colour whenever the subject of race came up."

And the fediverse is still dealing with the aftermath of the Play Vicious episode. Here's how weirder.earth's Goodbye Playvicious.social statement from early 2021 describes it:

"Playvicious was harrassed off the Fediverse.... The Fediverse is anti-Black. That doesn't mean every single person in it is intentionally anti-Black, but the structure of the Fediverse works in a way that harrassment can go on and on and it is often not visible to people who aren't at the receiving end of it. People whom "everyone likes" get away with a ton of stuff before finally *some* instances will isolate their circles. Always not all. And a lot of harrassment is going on behind the scenes, too."

As Artist Marcia X says in Ecosystems of Abuse,

“Misgendering, white women/femmes making comments to Black men that make them uncomfortable, the politics of white passing people as they engage with darker folks, and slurs as they are used intracommunally—these are not easy topics but at some point, they do become necessary to discuss.”

Also: Black trans, queer, and non-binary people exist

"[T]he Black vs. Trans argument really pisses me off because it erases Black Trans people like me, but is also based on the assumption of Trans whiteness"

– Terra Kestrel, September 12

Black trans, queer, and non-binary people are at the intersection of the fediverse's long history of racism and of marginalizing trans people – as well as marginalization within queer communities and in society as a whole.  One way this marginalization manifests itself is by erasure.  How many of the people criticizing The Bad Space as anti-trans, or framing the discussions is pitting Black people's need to protect themselves as in tension with trans people's concern about being targeted, even acknowledged the existence of Black trans people?

"I think if you included Black trans folk and anti-racist white trans folk in your list of "trans folk to listen to," you'd have a more complete picture, and you'd understand why there are so few Black people on the Fediverse."

– Mekka Okereke, September 13

Black trans, queer, and non-binary people have lived experience with anti-Blackness as well as transphobia.  They also have lived experience with intersectional and intra-community oppressions: racism and transphobia in LGBTQIA2S+ communities, transphobia and colorism in Black communities. And they're the ones who are most affected by transphobia in society.  For example, trans people in general face a significantly higher risk of violence – and over 50% of the trans people killed each year are Black.  Trans people on average don't live as long as cis people  – and Black trans and non-binary people are significantly more likely to die than White trans and non-binary people.

Of course, no community is monolithic, and there are a range of opinions on Ro and The Bad Space from Black trans, queer, and non-binary people.  That said, most if not all the Black trans, queer, and non-binary people I've seen expressing opinions publicly have expressed support for Ro and his efforts with The Bad Space, while also acknowledging the need for improvements.

"To be completely honest, any discussions about transphobia and the recent meta?

That has to come from Black trans and nonbinary folks."

– TakeV, September 16

Notes

² Today, Mastodon has by far the largest installed base in the fediverse but (as I'll discuss in the upcoming Mastodon: the partial history continues) is likely to lose its dominant position. Other platforms like Streams, Akkoma, Bonfire, and GoToSocial have devoted more thought to privacy and other aspects of safety, and big players are getting involved – like WordPress, who recently released now offers official support for ActivityPub.

That said, The Bad Space and FSEP also fit in well with the architectural vision new Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput sketches in Evolving Mastodon’s Trust & Safety Features, so will be useful for instances running Mastodon as well.  Mastodon – or a fork – has an opportunity to complement these tools by with giving individuals more ability to protect themselves, shifting to a "safety by default" philosophy, adding quote boosts, and integrating ideas from other decentralized networks like BlackSky.

³ From this perspective, the reaction to The Bad Space is an interesting complement to the multi-year history of Mastodon's refusal to support local-only posts, a safety tool created by trans and queer people that allows trans and queer people (and everybody else) to better protect themselves. Hey wait a second, I'm noticing a pattern here! Does Mastodon really prioritize stopping harassment? has more -- although note that the Glitch and Hometown forks of Mastodon, and most other fediverse platforms, do support local-only posts.

⁴ OK it's not really coincidental. As Disinfo Defense League points out, using wedge issues to divide groups is a common tactive of racialized disinformation.

⁵ Thanks to Octavia con Amore for pointing out to me the erasure of trans people who are neither white nor Black from so many of these dicussions.

⁶ There is currently no footnote #6 or #7.  Ghost, the blogging/newsletter software I'm using, doesn't have a good solution for auto-numbering footnotes unless you write your whole post in Markdown, and it's a huge pain to manually edit them, so my footnotes often wind up very strange-looking.

⁸ Nivenly's response in the github Discussion of the FSEP proposal, from mid-September, has a lot of clarifications and context on FSEP, and Nivenly's October/November update has the current status of FSEP:

Unfortunately due to a few factors, including the unexpected passing of our founder Kris Nóva days after the release of the product requirements document as well as the author and original maintainer Ro needing to take a step back due to a torrent of racism that he received over The Bad Space, the originally planned Q&A that was supposed to happen shortly after FSEP was published did not have the opportunity to happen.... The status of this project is on hold, pending the return of either the original maintainer or a handoff to a new one.

⁹ From the FSEP document:

• Allowing blocklists to be automatically imported during onboarding dramatically reduces the opportunity to be exposed to harmful content unnecessarily.
• The ability to request an updated blocklist or automate the process to check on its own periodically.
• Expand blocklist management by listing why a site is blocked, access to available examples, and when the site was last updated.

These all address points Shepherd characterizes in The Hell of Shared Blocklists as "vitally important to mitigate harms".

¹⁰ For example: The Bad Space mid-September bug resulted in instances getting listed on The Bad Space if even one of sources had taken action against them; the correct behavior is that only sources with two or more actions should be listed. So the similarity of the bug's effect on girlcock.club and tech.lgbt with the issue with Oliphant's now-discontinued unified max list Seirdy discusses in Mistakes made reinforces that blocklist "consensus" algorithms that only require a single source are likely to affect sex-positive queer space so should be avoided.

¹¹ Why am I so convinced that it was a false accusation? For one thing, the accuser admitted it: "I fucked up." Also, facts are facts. Nobody had been fired. Two volunteers had left the Tusky team, and both of them said that it was unrelated to the Black trans person's comment.

The false accuser says it wasn't intentional. They just happened to stumble upon a post by a Black trans person who had blocked them, flipped out (because tech.lgbt was being held accountable for the post I mentioned above where their moderator had ignored crucial details and added credibility to a racist harassment against a Black person), and thought the situation was so urgent that they needed to make a post that (in their own description) "rushed to conclusions" and "speculated on what I couldn't see under the hood" and was wrong.

Part 4

Coming soon

Part 5

Compare-and-contrast: Fediseer, FIRES, and The Bad Space

It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds went into detail on one tool designed to help address the lack of safety in Mastodon and today’s fediverse's and move beyond today's fediverse's reliance on blocklists.  In this installment in the series, I'll compare and contrast The Bad Space with some other emerging somewhat-similar projects.

• Fediseer is another instance catalog, including endorsements as well as negative judgments about instances.
• FIRES (an acronym for Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server) is infrastructure for moderation advisories and recommendations.

One big contrast is that The Bad Space is the only one of these projects with an explicit focus on protecting marginalized people – and, not so coincidentally, the only one of the projects that's done in collaboration only with instances committed to actively moderating against racism, transphobia, ableism, etc.  As I'll discuss in the next few sections, haht's far from the only difference ... but it's a critical one, and I'll return to it in the final section of this article.

On the other hand, there are also some important similarities, especially at the architectural level:

• a separation between a database (or catalog) of information about instances and moderation decisions about whether to suspend or silence them. Blocklists, by contrast, explicitly embed a moderation decision. As The Bad Space's "heat maps" (which can be used as blocklists) illustrate, it's possible to use the data in the catalog to generate a blocklist ... but as the FSEP user-focused follower-approval tool illustrates, that's far from the only way to use this information. So all of these projects can help reduce today's fediverse's dependency on blocklists.
• the ability for people or instances can use the software to host their own services.  This fits in well with the fediverse's decentralized approach, and at least potentially avoids the problem of concentrating power.

So let's drill down into the details of the these other projects.  If you're not familiar with The Bad Space and FSEP, here's a short overview.

Fediseer

"The fediseer is a service for the fediverse which attempts to provide a crowdsourced human-curated spam/ham classification of fediverse instances as well as provide a public space to specify approval/disapproval of other instances."

– The Fediseer FAQ

Fediseer started with a focus on spam, which is a huge problem on Lemmy. But spam is far from the only huge moderation problem on Lemmy, so Fediseer's general approval/disapproval mechanism (and the availability of scripts that let it automatically update lists of blocked instances) means that many instances use it to help blocking sites with CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and as a basis for blocklists.

Fediseer uses a "chain of trust" model in which admins of any participating instance to guarantee other instances, which allows them to participate. Instances can also provide endorsements ("completely subjective positive judgments") as well as censures (completely subjective negative judgments) and hesitations (milder versions of censures) for other instances.  Judgments can include optional reasons (aka tags) and evidence. Including positive as well as negative reviews is a good example of moving beyond relying on blocklists; it's easy to imagine how this could be part of an instance recommendation tool for new users.

Fediseer's UI makes it easy to see the judgments that have been made on an instance.

You can also see the judgments an instance has shared and made public, as well as lists of "safelisted" and "suspicious" instances.  And you can filter the judgments by which instances have made them, which makes it easy to narrow your focus to a few instances whose judgment you trust. For example, if all the sources for The Bad Space participated in Fediseer, then filtering to judgements only from those sources would (at least in theory) give similar results to The Bad Space.⁰

Fediseer is currently playing a very valuable role in the Lemmyverse, including making it much easier for instances to respond quickly when CSAM is detected. The most common objection I've heard to it is the risk that it could become a centralized catalog; that would be bad, but it's not clear to me that it's a realistic threat – founder db0 is explicit that he doesn't want that to happen, and the software is open-source and so can also be used by people creating their own sites as an antitdote to centralization.  

On the other hand, some of Fediseer's challenges stem from its "open" approach of allowing all non-spamming instances to participate.  

• How to deal with harassers starting up one-person instances just to give their targets' instances bad reviews – or good reviews?  
• The demographics of today's English-language fediverse are overwhelmingly white. So what prevents Fediseer from being dominated by white people's opinions – which are likely to be much more tolerant of racism than POC opinions?
• It's easy for really nasty instances to wind up on Fediseer's "safelist" page.   As of early December, for example, shitposter.club -- for which Seirdy has receipts including racism transhobia, anti semitic dogwhistles, and blatant white supremacy -- is safelisted.   If Gab were still active in the Fediverse, they'd very likely be safelisted too.¹  Isn't that likely to be a barrier to broad adoption?  

Still, Fediseer's still at an early stage, so it may well find ways to respond to these issues.  could be possible to build a view on top of it that ignores bad actors and prioritizes instances that actively moderate against racism and transphobia.² And (just like The Bad Space's software) people can host their own version, so it could potentially also be used as a basis for organizations – or groups of instances – to set up their own similar site that limits or weights participation.

⁰ Assuming that suspending is treated as a censure and silencing as a hesitation.

¹ Fediseer's safelisted page by default requires no endorsements and one guarantor, so if Gab could find somebody to guarantee that they weren't spamming then they'd be good to go -- and as long as they resisted the urge to spam their wouldn't be any reason to remove them.

FIRES

"Our present infrastructure of denylists (née “blocklists”) will only get us so far: we need more structured data so we can make informed decisions, we need more options for moderating than just defederating, and the ability to subscribe to changes in efficient & resumable ways."

– Emilia Smith, October 2023 update

FIRES architect Emilia Smith has a long history of working on trust and safety work in the fediverse (including contributions to Mastodon and Pixelfed as well as moderation work at Switter.at), and describes this project as "thinking two steps ahead of where we are currently."  It's at an earlier stage than Fediseer or The Bad Space: Nivenly Foundation announced its sponsorship for FIRES in October (funded, like FSEP, via a direct donation from Nivenly board member Mekka Okereke), and Emilia's currently working on a detailed technical proposal. I've based this description off the information in Emilia's public updates and an early draft of the proposal – so it may well change as the project evolves!

FIRES goes beyond the other tools by supporting a wide range of moderation advisories and recommendations – and providing information about how they've changed over time. The Bad Space records suspensions and silencing; Fediseer supports judgements including endorsements, censures, and hesitations; FIRES is designed to allow for much more precise specifications, for example automatically putting a CW on posts from a site (functionality supported by Akkoma and Pleroma) or rejecting media.  And FIRES provides a log of how recommendations have changed, which is particularly important for dealing with situations where instances have cleaned up their act (so past decisions to block or silence potentially should be revisited).

Another important distinction is that that FIRES' recommendations and advisories aren't necessarily limited to instances.  As I mentioned in What about blocklists for individuals (instead of instances)?, it's kind of surprising that Twitter-like blocklists and tools like Block Party haven't emerged yet on the fediverse ... my guess is that's likely to change in 2024, so this is a great example of thinking ahead. As Johannes Ernst mentions in Meta/Threads Interoperating in the Fediverse Data Dialogue Meeting yesterday, it might well be "helpful for Fediverse instances (including Threads) to share reputation information with other instances that each instance might maintain on individual ActivityPub actors for its own purposes already." FIRES could be a good mechanism for this whether or not Threads is involved.

Finally, unlike The Bad Space and Fediseer, FIRES doesn't have a web user interface.  Instead, it's intended as the basis for small servers that provides data to various consumers – including tools with their own user interfaces, either for users or instance admins.

A difference in philosophies

From a software engineering perspective, FIRES' general infrastructure could well serve as the underpinnings for a reimplementation of Fediseer and The Bad Space – providing additional functionality like more precise information about recommendations and history. Similarly, The Bad Space could be reimplemented (with a far less colorful user interface) as an installation of Fediseer where the only participants are The Bad Space's current sources, and only censures and hesitations are tracked.  And while the three projects currently have somewhat different APIs, there's no reason they couldn't converge on a standard – which would allow tools built on top of them to be interoperaable. So when taken together, the projects clearly highlight some similar thinking.

But those similarities are only part of the story.  There's also the huge difference in design philosophy I discussed at the beginning of this article:

• With its explicit focus on protecting marginalized people, The Bad Space's listings are curated by a fixed number of sources that actively moderate against racism, transphobia, and other bigotries.
• Fediseer and FIRES, by contrast, are designed to be open to everybody – even racists and trasphobes.  

I certainly don't mean this as a criticism of either of the approaches!  Just as it's healthy to have multiple independent implementations exploring different variations on functionality or user interface, it's healthy to have different philosophies.  Still, it's a very interesting contrast. Here's a good illustration of how this plays out in practice:

• On The Bad Space, berserker.town's description is currently "Hate speech, Federating with 'free speech' instances, hosting ableist, transphobic, fascist content, Edgelord",  and all of The Bad Space's sources taken action against it – not surprising since it's on Seirdy's, gardenfence's, and Oliphant's Tier-0 blocklists).  
• On Fediseer, by contrast, berserker.town appears on the "safelisted" pages, and berserker.town's fediseer Fediseer page, by contrast, has endorsements including "active moderators," "cool admin," and "respectful users" as well as censures including "sealioning," "harassment," and "transphobia." Opinions differ!  

Of course, Fediseer's ability to filter censures and endorsements provides a way to ignore berserker.town's opinions for those who want to – or see just what instances think sealioning, harassment, and transphobia are "respectful". It's clearly possible to build a view on top of Fediseer that ignores bad actors and prioritizes instances that actively moderate against racism and transphobia.

But then again, by default berserker.town's opinion counts just as much as anybody else on Fediseer – and they're on the "safelist", as is shitposter.club and who knows who else. So what's the incentive for instances that actively moderate against racism and transphobia to participate in a system where racist and anti-trans instances are on the safelist, and the opinions or nazis, white supremacists, terfs, racists, and misogynists are welcomed?

Looking forward

The Bad Space and Fediseer both have some initial traction, and as FIRES moves forward I'd expect it to get adoption as well. Even though there are already several decent sllutions for instances and individuals that just want a  “worst-of-the-worst” blocklist (including Seirdy’s FediNuke, gardenfence, and Oliphants’ Tier0), but after the messy discussions around The Bad Space and FSEP there's broad awareness of the limitations and downsides of relying too much on instance-level blocklists. Even in their current form, these projects have a lot of value.  For example, individuals who are at risk because their instance's blocklists don't protect them are very likely to find The Bad Space quite useful, for screening follow requests and as their own personal blocklist.

Over time, it'll be interesting to see how the projects evolve – and what tools are built on top of them. The projects have enough similarities that there are some major potential synergies ... and are different enough that they're likely to prove valuable in different ways.

Of course, instance catalogs and reputation systems are only one aspect of the improvements that are needed to create a safer fediverse.  I'll discuss some of the others in the next installment of the series, tentative titled Steps to a safer fediverse.  Also still to come: a discussion of the golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next.

Some sneak previews:

But these tools are only the start of what's needed to change the dynamic more completely. To start with, fediverse developers, "influencers," admins, and funders need to start prioritizing investments in safety.  The IFTAS Fediverse Moderator Needs Assessment Results highlight one good place to start: provide resources for anti-racist and intersectional moderation.  Sharing and distilling "positive deviance" examples of instances that do a good job, documentation of best practices, training, mentoring, templates for policies and process, workshops, and cross-instance teams of expert moderators who can provide help in tricky situations. Resources developed and delivered with funded involvement of multiply-marginalized people who are the targets of so much of this harassment today are likely to be the most effective.

Plenty of people in the fediverse today are just fine with its white-dominated and cis-dominated power structure – or say they want something different but in practice don't act that way.  So maybe we'll see a split, with a regions of the fediverse moving in an anti-racist, pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ and "safety by default" direction. As I said about another potential split in There are many fediverses, if it happens, it'll be a good thing.  

Or who knows, maybe we'll see a bunch of anti-racist and pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ instances saying fine, whatever, bye-bye fediverse, it's time to do something else. If it happens, that too will be a good thing.

Part 6

Steps towards a safer fediverse

At least in the short term, today's fediverse is likely to continue to rely on the actually existing tools of instance blocking and blocklists. Mastodon 4.3's blocklist-related improvements are helpful; FIRES, Fediseer, The Bad Space and new tools based on them and similar infrastructure is likely to move forward.  Hopefully hosting providers and software platform providers will find a way to encourage new instance admins to install at least a worst-of-the-worst blocklist.  It seems pretty obvious to me that most people would rather be on instances that block known nazis, white supremacists, anti-LGBTQIA2S+ bigots and harassers, so it really should be the default ... and yet, here we are.

But these tools are only the start of what's needed to change the dynamic more completely.

Prioritize investing in safety

"There’s a lot more that can be done to counter harassment, Nazism, racism, sexism, transphobia, and other hate online. Mastodon’s current functionality only scratches the surface of what’s possible — and has generally been introduced in reaction to events in the network."

– Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017-8

"With the surging popularity of federating tools, how do we make it easier to make safety the default?"

– Roland X. Pulliam FSEP Product Requirements Document, August 2023

For one thing, fediverse developers, "influencers," admins, and funders need to start prioritizing investing in safety. The IFTAS Fediverse Moderator Needs Assessment Results highlights one good place to start: provide resources for anti-racist and intersectional moderation.  A few suggestions here:

• Training and mentoring, including dealing with different aspects of intersectional moderation.
• Sharing and distilling "positive deviance" examples of instances that do a good job
• Documentation of best practices, including templates for policies and process
• Cross-instance teams of expert moderators who can provide help in tricky situations
• Workshops, conferences, and ongoing disussions between moderators, software developers, and community members

Resources developed and delivered with funded involvement of multiply-marginalized people who are the targets of so much of this harassment today are likely to be the most effective.

Developers, instance admins, and hosting companies can also play a big role. People who are targets of harassment are clear about the kind of functionality they want: local-only posts,^2.1 the ability to control who can reply to posts,² other finer-grained controls over visibility and interaction. Fediverse software platforms like GoToSocial, Bonfire, Akkoma, and Streams already provide these tools; Mastodon forks like Glitch and Hometown at least provide local-only posts, which makes a big difference.

Broader adoption of this software today could have an impact today, as could hosted offerings that combine more-safety-oriented software with privacy-friendly default settings that are known to reduce risks of harassment and hate speech^2.5   and basic blocklists. People volunteering for platforms that don't have this functionality yet should encourage the developers to implement it, quickly – or shift their efforts to forks and platforms that do prioritze safety.  Funders should follow suit.  

A complementary approach, also worth funding, is to investigate tools from other platforms like Block Party and FilterBuddy that allow for collaborative defense against harassment and toxic content can apply in a federated context. This work is also likely to be relevant (perhaps with modifications) to Bluesky-based networks.

Revisiting some core assumptions

To do: integrate material from Focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety, Emphasize networked communities,  Support concentric federations of instances and communities as well as the "Big Fedi" discussion

Just as important, though, the fediverse will need to revisit some core assumptions, including shifting to a consent-based model and a less-absolutist definition of "open" that prioritizes safety over connection and reach.  

For example, most fediverse software today accepts all request for federation unless the instance is explicitly blocked. This isn't affirmative consent.  And as I mentioned above, Mastodon views the alternative consent-based approach of allow-list federation as "contrary to Mastodon’s mission of decentralization."

Fortunately, even with today's software more intentional approaches are possible. , Mastodon does implement basic allow-list federation; blocklist-oriented tools could be adapted to work with allow-lists. And Mastodon's not the only software in the fediverse: PeerTube has an option for manual approval of federation requests, and Bonfire's got a sophisticated system of circles and boundaries.  

A purely allow-list system might well be cumbersome, but there are intriguing ideas for other approaches that also invert today's fediverse's core assumption that harassers, nazis, terfs, and anybody else who wants should be able to spew hate at you unless you block them.  Three examples:

• The "letters of introduction" Erin Shepherd proposes in A better moderation system is possible for the social web
• Kat Marchán's proposal of caracoles (concentric federations of instances, combined with more intentional federation)
• ophiocephalic's somewhat-similar proposal of fedifams

Design from the margins – and fund it

"The decentered include subpopulations who are the most impacted and least supported; they are often those that face highest marginalization in society... Communities in several different contexts that lack official infrastructures of protection and support adopt methods of self-protection in order to navigate the threats and risks they face. "

– Afsenah Rigot, Design From the Margins, 2022

"[T]he messy discussions around The Bad Space are also a case study of the resistance in today's fediverse to technology created by a Black person (working with a diverse team of collaborators that includes trans and queer people) that allows people to better protect themselves"

– It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds

One way to look at The Bad Space is as a technology developed from the margins in response to the lack of interest from the "official" (cis white dominated) power structure of the fediverse in protecting Black people who are at risk from harassment and racist content.  As Rigot points out, tools developed to protect the most at-risk and disenfranchised also protect everybody else.

So probably the single most important way for the fediverse to move forward is to fund more work by multiply-marginalized Black and Indigenous people – and other multiply-marginalized people from other decentered communities.  As LeslieMac said back in 2017 after Twitter introduced some bone-headed feature that led to increased harassment, "literally 10 (paid) Black Women with > 5K followers would head this crap off at the pass".  

This isn't the first time I've mentioned funding here.  It's important!  Volunteers may well wind up doing the bulk of the work here: as moderators, as members of open-source software projects.  People want to be safer online, and want to be able to invite their friends and relatives to communities where they won't be explosted to hate speech and harassment, so many people will help out in various ways. That said, paid positions and project-based funding are important as well.  Unless people are paid for their work, participation is restricted to those who can afford to volunteer.  

Where will the money come from?  As well as crowdfunding and civil society organizations (the primary funding mechanism for today's fediverse), businesses looking at the fediverse are an obvious source.  Larger corporations such as Wordpress, Flipboard, Vivaldi, and Medium looking at the business opportunities of providing infrastructure, apps, hosting, or services to the fediverse are much more likely to be successful if the fediverse is safer – and so are startups. Media organizations considering the fediverse, progressive and social justice organizers looking for alternatives now that Twitter's turned into a machine for fascism have smaller budgets but just as much interest in improvement.  

So if  you're somebody from a tech or media company looking at the fediverse, a foundation or non-profit concerned about disinformation or corporate control of media, a progressive or racial justice organization hoping to build a counter to fascist-controlled social networks like Xitter,  or an affluent techie feeling guilty about having made your money from surveillance capitalism ... now's a good time to invest.

Golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next

As EFF says, The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (If We Don’t Screw It Up).  At least so far, though, the fediverse keeps screwing up – and in depressingly familiar ways.  Still, big centralized social networks with their surveillance capitalism business models keep getting worse and worse, and in today's world most venture-funded startups are likely to continue to chase after the lucrative racist / sexist / fascist market.  It would have been great if the fediverse had started focusing on safety a while ago, but oh well.  

If priorities and attitudes change, there's a still a golden opportunity.

Black Twitter and Native/Indigenous Twitter became vibrant communities despite the racism of Twitter's previous management, and the same pattern is playing out in the fediverse despite the whitess of the current power structure.⁴ The big difference, though, is that the fediverse's decentralized structure and open-source code creates the possibility of creating a new power structure that isn't white dominated.

"Seriously, BIPOC can rule the Fediverse.

There are more BIPOC than white people in the world. There is no reason to be on the run & harassed on the Fediverse, except lack of organization.

So organize!"

– Yehuda Rothschild, October 2023

From a strategy perspective, the fediverse has a golden opportunity for a sustainable competitive advantage by taking an actively anti-racist approach.  After all, the market for white-dominated social networks is already very well served; but plenty of people aren't looking for that, and right now they don't have a lot of options.

Similarly, the fediverse also has a golden opportunity for a sustainable advantage by taking an actively pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ approach.³  The market for cis-dominated social networks is also already very well served; but plenty of people aren't looking for that, and right now they also don't have a lot of options.

“Queer people built the Fediverse”

Christine Lemmer-Webber, January 2023

You’d think this would be obvious but a few months ago I was in a Fediverse Marketing chat room and when I made this suggestion in response to a question about how the fediverse could be more successful, the well-known fediverse influencer running the room immediately asked for other suggestions – and a fediverse developer in the room described queer and trans people as deviants (and then doubled down with “cis is a slur”).  So maybe it’s not obvious to everybody.  

"Even with an explicit anti-harassment, anti-fascism, and anti-racism focus, people of color are likely to be marginalized if the most influential people are white.... Rapid growth will tend to dilute a LGBTQ+ focus, unless there’s an effort to keep LGBTQ+ people centered and give them real authority."

– Lessons (so far) from Mastodon, 2017/8

Plenty of people in the fediverse today are just fine with its white-dominated and cis-dominated power structure – or say they want something different but in practice don't act that way.  So maybe we'll see a split, with a regions of the fediverse moving in an anti-racist, pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ and "safety by default" direction. As I said about another potential split in There are many fediverses, if it happens, it'll be a good thing.  

"Many advocates pursue both mainstream intervention and separate spaces simultaneously, recognizing that each has utility and that it is not an either/or situation. As Liane, a forty-something conference organizer, said in an interview, “We change the culture by starting our own space. It’s not a binary of work within or fit into [the culture], or just be separate.”"

– Christina Dunbar-Hester in Hacking Diversity

Or who knows, maybe we'll see a bunch of anti-racist and pro-LGBTAIQ2S+ instances saying fine, whatever, bye-bye fediverse, it's time to do something else. If it happens, that too will be a good thing.

Today's fediverse is prototyping at scale.  Sometimes, prototypes become the basis for great solutions. Sometimes, though, the key learning from a prototype is "great idea but this isn't the right approach, let's start again and build it for real."⁵

It's certainly possible to imagine decentralized social networks that are actively anti-racist and anti-oppressive, running software and protocols designed and build by an intersectionally diverse project team working with a diverse community and prioritizing safety and equity – as well as accessibility, usability and sustainability.

It's still an open question as to whether the fediverse will seize this opportunity. If not, it'll be interesting to see who does.

______________

² Streams has a flexible commentPolicy, defaulting to only allow comments from existing connections.  Glitch-soc maintainer Claire proposed a standard for per-object reply policies as FEP 5264 back in November 2022; here's the current version and the discussion.  There's no need to wait for the standards discussion to converge, though; a big reason for Mastodon's success back in 2016 was their willingness to ignore the existing OStatus standard and compatibility with other implementations, for example by introducing post visibility.  Mastodon itself isn't currently working on this (it continues to be listed in the "exploring" category on their roadmap as opposed to "planned", let alone "in progress"), so it's a great opportunity for forks and other platforms to take the lead.  

^2.1 Yes, I know I keep bringing this up, but come on.  As I said in Does Mastodon really prioritize stopping harassment?

And not to sound like a broken record, but Mastodon intentionally doesn't support local-only posts. By allowing people to prevent their posts from shared with other instances (who might have harassers, terfs, nazis, and/or admins or software that doesn't respect privacy), local-only posts significantally reduce the risk of harassment and pileons – and avoid the privacy risk of messages being shared with other instances. As Hometown maintiner Darius Kazemi notes on Run Your Own Social , local-only posts are also useful from an enforcement perspective because they create "serious social repercussions for violating rules to the point where you're kicked off of a server."  This functionality has been available in forks since 2017, but Mastodon's BDFL has blocked them from the main codebase – and admis of almost every large instance (with the exception of infosec.exchange) choose not to run forks with this anti-harassment protection, so it's not available to most users.

Talk about low-hanging fruit!  VALUABLE SAFETY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN BEEN IMPLEMENTED SINCE 2017 AND MASTODON AND MOST HOSTING PROVIDERS AND MOST OF THE LARGEST INSTANCES STILL WON'T SUPPORT IT!!!!   Grr.

^2.5 For example: enable authorized fetch by default, disable DMs from people you're not following by default, require approval for following by default ... see, their really is some low-hanging fruit!

³  As I said in A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse

"[D]espite all the major contributions they’ve made, queer, trans, and non-binary people of all colors have also been marginalized in Mastodon."

⁴ and on Bluesky, but that's another story.

⁵ At the tenical level, tying people's data to the instance they created it on is clearly a bad idea. joinmastodon.org's claim that "your data and your time are yours and yours alone" is a great aspirational goal, but clearly untrue today. Still, that's fixable; in fact, Hubzilla and Streams have supported nomadic identity since 2017, and the ActivityPods project provides framework to create ActivityPub-compatible apps allowing people to store all there own data in a Solid pods.  Similarly, the challenges of building a new ActivityPub server – Jennifer++'s picture here really is worth a thousand words – and quirks and complexities of federation need to be addressed, and very frankly, the jury's still out on whether the idea of instances that's so central to the fediverse is or isn't a great idea.  

Notes

¹ According to Fediverse Observer, the number of monthly active fediverse users is roughly the same today as it was in January 2023. According to fedidb.org, monthly active users have decreased by about 20% over the source of the year.

² I'm using LGBTQIA2S+ as a shorthand for lesbian, gay, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, bi, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, agender, two-sprit, and others who are not straight, cis, and heteronormative. Julia Serrano's trans, gender, sexuality, and activism glossary has definitions for most of terms, and discusses the tensions between ever-growing and always incomplete acronyms and more abstract terms like "gender and sexual minorities". OACAS Library Guides' Two-spirit identities page goes into more detail on this often-overlooked intersectional aspect of non-cis identity.

³ Also a product differentiator and a sustainable competitive advantage for people who don't want to constantly have to deal with racism and anti-LGBTAIQ2S+ bigotry. How many other social networks offer that?

⁴ Today, Mastodon has by far the largest installed base in the fediverse but (as I'll discuss in the upcoming Mastodon: the partial history continues) is likely to lose its dominant position. Newer platforms like Akkoma, Bonfire, and GoToSocial have devoted more thought to privacy and other aspects of safety, and big players are getting involved – like WordPress, who recently released now offers official support for ActivityPub.

That said, The Bad Space and FSEP also fit in well with the architectural vision new Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput sketches in Evolving Mastodon’s Trust & Safety Features, so will be useful for instances running Mastodon as well.  Mastodon – or a fork – has an opportunity to complement these tools by with giving individuals more ability to protect themselves, shifting to a "safety by default" philosophy, adding quote boosts, and integrating ideas from other decentralized networks like BlackSky.

⁵ By which I mean white people who don't see themselves as racists but aren't anti-racist. As Angela Davis says, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist” ... and it's just as true on social networks!

⁶ Most of the people with the most influence over fediverse development today are white – and so are most of the people running the largest instances, most of the people running hosting services, and most of the people on the W3C Social Working Group that's currently discussing ways to improve the ActivityPub protocol.

⁷ When Block Party's Tracy Chou joined mastodon.social last fall she was greeted by ... having a post taken down for racism and sexism!?!?!?! As Timnit Gebru says, WTAF.

⁸ One way to look at the different instances' reactions to The Bad Space is as the messy process of caracoles / fedifams organically forming and gulfs getting acknowledged without yet having much support in the underlying technologies.

⁹ Virtually all the issues and obvious next steps I discussed in 2017-18's Lessons (so far) from Mastodon remain issues and obvious next steps today.

¹⁰ It's on the new privacy and reach screen, recently introduced in version 4.2. This screen isn't available in Mastodon's official iOS app (not sure about Android), so I'm not sure how many users even know about it.

¹¹ authorized fetch

¹² That's right: this valuable anti-harassment functionality has been implemented for six years but Rochko refuses to make it broadly avaiable. Does Mastodon really prioritize stopping harassment? has more, and I'll probably rant about it at least one more time over the couse of this series

¹³ LIMITED_FEDERATION_MODE

¹⁴ As I said a few months ago, describing an incident where an admin defederated an instance and then on further reflection decided it had been an overreaction,

"[A]fter six years why wasn't there an option of defederating in a way that allows connections to be reestablished when the situation changes and refederation is possible? If you look in inga-lovinde 's Improve defederation UX March 2021 feature request on Github, it's pretty clear that it's not the first time stuff like this happened."

And it wasn't the last time stuff like this happened either. In mid-October, a tech.lgbt moderator decided to briefly suspend and unsuspend connections to servers that had been critical of tech.lgbt, in hopes that it would "break the tension and hostility the team had seen between these connections." Oops. As the tech.lgbt moderators commented afterwards, "severing connections is NOT a way to break hostility in threads and DMs."

¹⁵ transmisia – hate for trans people – is increasingly used as an alternative to transphobia. More on the use of -misia instead of phobia, see the discussion in Simmons University's Anti-oppression guide

¹⁶ For an in-depth exploration of this topic, see Judith Butler's Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, which engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism.

¹⁷ woof.group's guidelines, for example, don't require CW's on textual posts unless "it's likely to cause emotional distress for a general leather audience" – but others may have different standards for what causes emotional distress.