This was an interesting read for me; a guy sets up on mastodon, starts posting, then gets what is, from his account of events, a false positive moderation hit that gets his account deleted.

And it’s interesting to me because he presents this as a Mastodon problem.

I feel like a lot of women and minorities, especially LGBT people, kind of regard this as a normal social media experience. It’s entirely common for us to randomly find ourselves restricted on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook for simply talking about our own lives. Sometimes we get outright banned, and appeals tend to not work.

The only social media I pay for is Mastodon (I have a cloud server) and Reddit, and I nearly got banned from Reddit for talking about reclamation of terms user against LGBT people. Lesson learned: no “shop talk” on Reddit.

Even private Facebook posts are not safe. They’re safe from malicious reporting, as long as you haven’t gone too broad with your friends group, but Facebook has a lot of automated moderation that scans everything, and if it doesn’t like what you say, into Facebook jail you go.

In this light, it comes as no surprise that queer, and especially trans people, are congregating on majority LGBT instances or, in increasingly large numbers, rolling our own. I have a cloud Mastodon server which I’m paying for, but @zoeimogen and I have also been experimenting with a #Friendica server running on our own home network. We are safe in our own servers: from malicious reporting, and from automated keyword auto-bans.

The worst that can happen to us is defederation, and we aren’t particularly at risk of being defederated by our own community.

And the micro-instance fediverse is a fun place, with a lot of camaraderie and, I think, quite a different and more intimate experience than even being somewhere like mastodon.social, let alone commercial social media.

To all the malicious reporters out there, all you did is encourage us to get stronger and build a fortress. Joke’s on you.

@zoeimogen @goatsarah dude didn’t mark the content as sensitive, or be clear that it wasn’t dodge. He shows no awareness that the server has rules.

I like that the mod of my instance is transparent about why they block instances so I know they also apply that thinking to users.

Honestly, I think this is where smaller instances shine: the moderation has a personal touch, and if you’ve been there a while you’re probably on familiar terms.

@goatsarah @zoeimogen @Mabande it’s interesting; I hear many people say they’ve been hounded by moderation etc but I’ve used every major social media platform, some of them extensively, and never experienced it myself. Maybe they don’t speak Swedish?

Before I left twitter, I learned that the way to tell people to "get in the fucking sea" safely was to do it in Portuguese.