In the last few days we’ve had an outburst of painful, intelligent, useful conversation about racism and abuse in the world of Mastodon and the Fediverse. I certainly learned things I hadn’t known, and I’m going to walk you through the recent drama and toss in ideas on how to improve safety.

For me, the story started back in early 2023 when Timnit Gebru (the person fired by Google for questioning the LLM-is-great orthodoxy, co-author of Stochastic Parrots) shouted loudly and eloquently that her arrival on Mastodon was greeted by a volley of racist abuse. This shocked a lot of hyperoverprivileged people like me who don’t experience that stuff. As the months went on after that, my perception was that the Mastodon community had pulled up its moderation socks and things were getting better.

July 2024 · Then, just this week, Kim Crayton issued a passionate invitation to the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” event, followed immediately by examples of the racist trolling that she saw in response. With a content warning that this is not pretty stuff, here are two of her posts: 1, 2.

Let me quote Ms Crayton:

She quite appropriately shouted at the community generally and the Mastodon developers specifically. Her voice was reinforced by many others, some of whom sharpened the criticism by calling the Mastodon team whiteness-afflicted at best and racist at worst.

People asked a lot of questions and we learned a few things. First of all, It turns out that some attackers came from instances that are known to be toxic and should long-since have been defederated by Ms Crayton’s. Defederation is the Fediverse’s nuclear weapon, our best tool for keeping even the sloppiest admins on their toes. To the extent our tools work at all, they’re useless if they’re not applied.

But on the other hand it’s cheap and fast to spin up a single-user Mastodon instance that won’t get defederated until the slime-thrower has thrown slime.

Invisibility · What I’ve only now come to understand is that Mastodon helps griefers hide. Suppose you’re on instance A and looking at a post from instance B, which has a comment from an account on instance C. Whether or not you can see that comment… is complicated. But lots of times, you can’t. Let me excerpt a couple of remarks from someone who wishes to remain anonymous.

Take-away 1 · This is a problem that the Masto/Fedi community can’t ignore. We can honestly say that up till now, we didn’t realize how serious it was. Now we know.

Take-away 2 · Let’s try to cut the Mastodon developers some slack. Here’s a quote from one, in a private chat:

I think it is entirely reasonable to disagree with the team, which is tiny and underfunded, on their development priorities. Especially after these last few days, it looks like a lot of people — me, for sure — failed to dive deep into the narrated experience of racist abuse. In the team’s defense, they’re getting yelled at all the time by many people, all of whom have strong opinions about their feature that needs to ship right now!

Conversations · One of the Black Fedi voices that most influences me is Mekka Okereke, who weighed in intelligently, from which this, on the subject of Ms Crayton:

Mekka has set up a meeting with the Mastodon team and says Ms Crayton will be coming along. I hope that turns out to be useful.

More good input · Let’s start with Marco Rogers, also known as @[email protected]. I followed Marco for ages on Twitter, not always agreeing with his strong opinions on Web/Cloud technology, but always enjoying them. He’s been on Mastodon in recent months and, as usual, offers long-form opinions that are worth reading.

He waded into the furore around our abuse problem, starting here, from which a few highlights.

Mekka, previously mentioned, re-entered the fray:

And more; this is from Jerry Bell, one of the longest-lasting Fediverse builders (and I think the only person I’m quoting here who doesn’t present as Black). These are short excerpts from a long and excellent piece.

What next? · I don’t know. But I feel a buzz of energy, and smart people getting their teeth into the meat of the problem.

Now I have thoughts to offer about moving forward.

Who are the enemy? · They fall into two baskets: Professional and amateur. I think the current Mastodon attackers are mostly amateurs. These are lonely Nazis, incels, channers, your basic scummy online assholes. Their organization is loose at best (“He’s pointing at her, so I will too”), and they’re typically not well-funded or well-armed.

Then there are the pros, people doing doing this as their day job. I suspect most of those are working for nation states, and yes, we all know which nation states those probably are. They have sophisticated automation to help them launch armies of bots.

Here are some suggestions about potential fight-backs, mostly aimed at amateurs.

Countermeasure: Money · There’s this nonprofit called IFTAS which is working on tools and support structures for moderation. How about they start offering a curated whitelist of servers that it’s safe to federate with? How do you get on that list? Pay $50 to IFTAS, which will add you to the watchlist, and also to a scanning service scanning your members’ posts for abusive stuff for your first month or so of operation.

Cue the howls of outrage saying “Many oppressed people can’t afford $50, you’re discriminating against the victims!” I suppose, but they can still get online at any of the (many) free-to-use instances. I think it’s totally reasonable to throw a $50 roadblock in the process of setting up a server.

In this world, what happens? Joe Incel sets up an instance at ownthelibs.nazi or wherever, pays his $50, and starts throwing slime. This gets reported and pretty soon, he’s defederated. Sure, he can do it again. But how many times is this basement-dweller willing to spend $50, leaving a paper trail each time just in case he says something that’s illegal to say in the jurisdiction where he lives? Not that many, I think?

Countermeasure: Steal from Pleroma · It turns out Mastodon isn’t the only Fediverse software. One of the competitors is Pleroma. Unfortunately, it seems to be the server of choice for our attackers, because it’s easy and cheap to set up. Having said that, its moderation facilities are generally regarded as superior to Mastodon’s, and a subsystem called Message Rewrite Facility (MRF) which I haven’t been near but is frequently brought up as something that would be useful.

Countermeasure: Make reporting better · I report abusive posts sometimes, and, as a moderator for CoSocial.ca I see reports too. I think the “Report post” interface on many clients is weak, asking you unnecessary questions.

And when I get a report, it seems like half the time none of the abusive material is attached, and it takes me multiple clicks to look at the reported account’s feed, which feels like a pretty essential step.

Here’s how I’d like reporting to work.

1. There’s a single button labeled “Report this post”. When you click it, a popup says “Reported, thanks” and you’re done. Maybe it could query whether you want to block the user or instance, but it’s super important that the process be lightweight.

2. The software should pull together a report package including the reported post’s text and graphics. (Not just the URLs, because the attackers like to cover their tracks.) Also the attacker’s profile page. No report should ever be filed without evidence.

Countermeasure: Rules of thumb · Lauren offered this: Suppose a reply or mention comes in for someone on Instance A from someone on Instance B. Suppose Instance A could check whether anyone else on A follows anyone on B. If not, reject the incoming message. This would have to be a per-user not global setting, and I see it as a placeholder for a whole class of heuristics that could usefully get in the attackers’ way.

Wish us luck · Obviously I’m not claiming that any of these ideas are the magic bullet that’s going to slay the online-abuse monster. But we do need ideas to work with, because it’s not a monster that we can afford to ignore.

I care intensely about this, because I think decentralization is an essential ingredient of online conversation, and online conversation is valuable, and if we can’t make it safe we won’t have it.