Tootfinder

What happens when you don't vet sign-ups is that mods on other instances who value the safety of their users have to pick up your slack.
The extensive work illustrated in the linked post (from @…) is also taking place to varying degrees on every other instance which still federates with mastodon.social and the other open-sign-up ones.
This is like house-sharing with someone who repeatedly leaves the front door unlocked.
Yes of course there are much horribler instances, but those tend to be blocked wholesale in my part of Fedi. Among the instances we do federate with, the spam & scam accounts I see are nearly always on m.s.
If mastodon.social mods (who apparently are paid!) were to make people introduce themselves before approving new accounts, then a lot of this spam wouldn't be getting in the door. Quash once at source, save multiple other people from having to repeat the same work.
I appreciate that they're trying to make it easy for newcomers to join, but at what cost? And is an intro message really beyond the typical non-techie person? I think there are some considerably higher barriers to adoption than that. Not convinced it's a good tradeoff.
I don't actually want this instance to defederate from m.s, because lots of the people I follow are on there. But I can really see why people sometimes do.
#FediMeta #moderation #OpenSignups

Apparently the US government departments are starting to join Bluesky and are getting ratioed in that the accounts are being blocked more than they are followed.
Doesn't really seem to make sense at first. The US Department Of Transportation isn't going to show up as a reply guy in your mentions and the spooks aren't going to use that account to spy on your posts.
Is the blocking then entirely performative? Because blocks are public they are votes?
I guess really it's people deliberately reading the recommended-for-you AI-driven slop feeds.
Blocked users won't show up in your machine-learning robot-recommended feeds that people apparently must be reading over there.
Just not-following would be enough for me, I don't see things I don't follow. But if you read the robot-DJ feeds then anything can show up, so you have to preemptively block it. If only to train the robot shuffle.
#blueSky #fediverse #aiSlopFeed