Tootfinder

In the interests of starting a more productive dialogue than yesterday's main character was interested in, let's make a #brainstorm thread about design changes to ActivityPub and/or client UI that could actually help address drive-by (often racist) harassment on the fediverse.
Feel free to discuss pros/cons but don't feel an idea needs to be perfect to suggest it. Also since this is a brainstorm don't worry about complexity/implementation cost. If you have a great-but-hard-to-implement idea someone else may think of a way to simplify it.
Note that the underlying problem *is* a social one, do there won't be a technological fix! But tech changes can make social remedies easier/harder.
I've got some to start:
1. Have a "protected mode" that users can voluntarily turn on. Some servers might turn it on by default. In protected mode, users whose accounts are less than D days old and/or who have fewer than F followers can't reply to or DM you. F and D could have different values for same-sever vs. different-server accounts, and could be customized by each user. Obviously a dedicated harasser can get around this, but it ups the activation energy for block evasion and pile-ons a bit. Would be interesting to review moderation records to estimate how helpful this might or might not be. Could also have a setting to require "follows-from-my-server" although that might be too limiting on private servers. Restriction would be turned off for people you mention within that thread and could be set to unlimit anyone you've ever mentioned. Would this lock new users out of engagement entirely? If everyone had it on via a default, you'd have you post your own stuff until someone followed you (assuming F=1). One could add "R non-moderated replies" and/or "F favorites" options to soften things; those experiencing more harassment could set higher limits. When muting/blocking/reporting someone who replied to your post, protected mode could be suggested with settings that would have filtered the post you're reporting.
2. Enable some form of public moderation info to be displayed when both moderator and local server opt-in. Obviously each server would be able to ignore federated public tags. I'm imagining "banned from X server for R reason (optional link to evidence)" appearing on someone's profile & an icon on their PFP in each post viewed by someone on server Y *if* the mods of server X decide it's appropriate *and* server Y opts in to displaying such tags from server X specifically. Alliances of servers with similar moderation preferences could then have moderation action on one server result in clear warning propagation to others without the other mods needing to decide whether to also take action immediately. In some cases different moderation preferences would mean you wouldn't take action yourself but would keep the notice up for your users to consider. Obviously the "Scarlet Letter" vibe ain't great, but in some cases it's deserved, and when there's disagreement between servers about that, mods on server Y could either disable a specific tag or disable federation of mod tags from that server in general. Even better shared moderation tools are of course possible.
3. Different people/groups have different norms around boosting. Currently we only have a locked/public binary. Without any big protocol changes, adding a "prefers boosts/doesn't" setting which would warn in the UI before a viewer chooses to boost if the preference is "doesn't" could help. This could be set per-post, but could also have defaults and could have different values for same-server or not, or for particular servers. For example, I could say "default to prefer boosts from users on my server but not from users on other servers" or "default to prefer boosting on all servers except mastodon.social." Last option might be harder to implement I guess.
#ActivityPub #Meta #Harassment

In today's Coding Black Mirror episode: what if AI code generators get sped up to emit tens of thousands of tokens per second?
For now we're pretending LLMs are just sloppy devs and try to review the output, which is already exhausting.
When it gets to the point of being able to rewrite the whole project on every keystroke, source code won't be the source any more, but a discardable compiler output. Switching languages will be like applying Photoshop filters?

In today's Coding Black Mirror episode: what if AI code generators get sped up to emit tens of thousands of tokens per second?
For now we're pretending LLMs are just sloppy devs and try to review the output, which is already exhausting.
When it gets to the point of being able to rewrite the whole project on every keystroke, source code won't be the source any more, but a discardable compiler output. Switching languages will be like applying Photoshop filters?

Reading algorithmic feeds is a crazy thing to do: abandoning control over your own influences to a robot programmed by advertisers to manipulate you?
Madness.
I will not allow a robot programmed by advertisers and surveillance capitalists to determine what I read.
I don’t read any robo-feeds and don’t recommend anyone else does.
But people do:
Top five highest reaching smart phone apps:
All designed to harvest data from your phone, three of them owned by one creepy billionaire, and most people use them by looking at a robo-feed suggesting to them what to read and watch or filter.
I don’t use any of them.
I watch some Youtube, but not though their app. Uninstalled that from my phone as soon as I got it. It’s an awful downgrade of just playing in a browser page. I subscribe to some channels there in my RSS reader like a boss. Never watch what their recommendation algorithms suggests.
I tell them what I want to watch, I don’t let them tell ME what to watch, and frankly I wish all those videographers would start a peertube instance or something instead of posting their work on a corporate surveillance site.
I say you should avoid that algorithm stuff, it’s crazy manipulative.
But people should be free to do what they want.
I’m free to block Facebook! And I do: and I encourage everyone else to do so too.
Edit your DNS, block their domain names. Do it.
But if governments or corporations have the power to mandate those choices for everyone, it will go badly.
Prohibitions always do.