arcanicanis on Nostr: It’s so grating how the lesson of #fediblock and such still hasn’t been ...

It’s so grating how the lesson of #fediblock and such still hasn’t been learned/intuited by a majority of furry fandom yet. Everyone’s so quick to jump on the soapbox and complain about ineffectiveness of applying broad-sweeping blocklists when they’re negatively impacted by it, and try to speak in a noble manner of morals and principles. Yet, typically in barely a few posts/days later, are still defending much of it as a necessity to ‘solve the Nazi problem’, when it does absolutely nothing of the sort. Blocking “Nazis” (whereas that term is used in such a broad spectrum from: actual non-sockpuppet neo-Nazis, to ‘people I disagree with’, that it makes it meaningless) does not make them disappear, it’s no more than the logic of a child hiding under their bedsheets hoping for the imagined monster to go away.

If you look back into history of the fediverse, even back before ActivityPub became a thing (back in OStatus days): it’s a pattern where a lot of the heavily blocked instances ended up continuing to live on, while the over-moderated instances killed themselves off by crippling their user’s ability to intercommunicate per overprotective moderation. In fact, in the present day it’s where a lot of the ‘most active’ fediverse instances are the most blocked, and yet fediblock puts very little of any dent in it. You know what happens when you list an instance in a fediblock list? You irrevocably start to put them in the “banned” side of the fediverse, the space where people don’t have to walk on eggshells nor try to soften their words to appease the sensitivities of the more overmoderated instances.

On the “banned” side, there’s no point to try to cater to the fediblock crowd anymore, because that’s already been irrevocably severed. If you’re listed once, it’s just blindly recirculated to other lists, and never resolvable. So instead of “keeping the Nazis out”, whereas the practices of fediblock–you’re actually pushing more people to ‘that side’ of the internet, and causing the opposite of whatever ‘social justice’ endeavor you’re on. I’ve actually made far more genuine and authentic friends from fedi than I have from Discord and Telegram by far, majority of friends which are on the ‘banned’ side, versus being around the people that’ll ditch out from you at the moment of getting any ‘cancel culture’ labeling.

I almost feel bad for these people that wrap themselves so deep into such fleeting, fickle online associations (usually also chasing after parasocial relationships too). Always so quick to startle, offend, or whatever. The ever-moving ‘chase’ of jumping from Twitter, to fedi, to Bluesky just to ‘not literally be in a Nazi bar’, like some neverending Scooby-Doo monster chase scene. What is so staggering and harmful in witnessing word choices you disagree with? You can just shrug it off, ignore, and move about your day. It’s no surprise that anxiety disorders are so profoundly ubiquitous in the present, if people can’t de-condition themselves from going panic mode in stumbling across something they weren’t expecting. But yet people believe it’s a responsibility to hide any level of provoking content, as if it’s “protecting” them, instead of realizing it grows their phobias.

A fediverse server is not a private Discord guild, it is not a Telegram group, it’s to be handled as internet infrastructure like an email server, a backbone router, etc–you don’t interfere with legitimate traffic just because you disagree with differing viewpoints or lexicon, otherwise you greatly reduce the effectiveness of the network and just push people back to centralized services. If you want a moderated community then start a centralized forum, a chat server, or any other variety of closed-space communities.

If you routinely have problems being a center of negative attention, then: stop virtue signaling, stop acting as ‘internet tough guy’, stop doing ‘callout’ posts to provoke drama, stop openly virtuing every block you make, stop trying to make anything mundane to be political, and you will start to be virtually invisible to these people. This isn’t even just exclusive to posting online, some of it applies to in-person interaction as well. Generally only the miserable prefer to be around the miserable, and usually it’s the most miserable people that exhibit most of the aforementioned behaviors. Stop trying to act as some different personality online, and instead talk how you genuinely would in-person.

Self-reflect. Sometimes you may have character flaws that you can improve on; don’t fall into the bait of “feel good” content, or the narcissistic “you’re absolutely perfect the way you are, don’t change a thing”, else you stunt yourself from self-improvement.