Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It's incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines.
As Reddit now and tomorrow reveals more weaknesses, where will the OnlyFans creators, porn posters, and all those grassroots porn communities go? The creators need to make money by showing to a large and interested user base. The users need lots of content to choose from and be fed constantly, with very few hindrances between them and their...goals. Many of the niches actually have respectful and healthy communities, too. Those people deserve an easy to use platform, just as much as people that want to look at cats, some of those groups, arguably more.
The thought of how to pose this to the Fediverse, now, has been on my mind for weeks:
Can the fediverse rise to the task? Does it even want to? Should it?
Personally, I think it should absolutely try, but I'm not sure it can do so without several deep strides in tech and development. I'm aware this is a hot af take, but it's undeniable that the internet IS for porn, and denying that would be a huge opportunity loss for inevitably winning this popularity context.
I don't see how you could effectively block people seeing you if the person wanted to, because even if a system is made so you can only be seen by logged in users, that user could make an alt. Heck, they could have an alt that they don't use for commenting, so one wouldn't even know to block it.
well I wouldn't expect it to in that circumstance. I just want the most out of what it could do. Stalkers going to that extreme will always get the way around to some degree. I just don't want it easy for them to notice and honestly I would prefer in the long run they not exactly advertise that stuff but just have it be the way it is and someone would have to look into it to know blocking works both ways. It will certainly cut down on the casual jerk. Jerk being a realtive term to the individual. To me a system like that would approach more what organically happens in life. You hang with those you like and avoid those you don't.
I think the idea of shadow-banning yourself on other people's accounts is something that only makes sense in extreme cases.
It could easily make a mess in comment threads if it is used too much.
It's already personal when it's needed, so I doubt it would stop trolls, stalkers or harassment very much.
See thats the thing. I don't block individuals willy nilly. I curate heaviest from the top down. Also I think what your talking about only happens at the point of the block. In the long run it just curates the content. The real problem, like pretty much all the problems, is folks doing wierd stuff like making multiple accounts and playing around with the system. But that kinda thing has issues all the time. Individuals can act like their own bots with multiple accounts upvoting/boosting and downvoting and having discusions among themselvs. Our really only defense against it is the individuals ability to currate to the max. At least in my opinion. I wonder how much this comes down to viewpoint. I am thinking of this very much selfishly from my own experience and what I want to get out of this. Thinking just now are you thinking more in terms of the community at large? My hope with the federation is instance allow for both theoretically. So I could ultimately live in my shadow banning heaven that federates with every thing while some folks will have less extreme things but the instance will defederate content to protevt them a bit and whatever. Maybe some better form of up and downvoting will happen too.
I think a lot of it comes down to what value you (or any user) puts in the votes.
Personally I do not care about downvotes. On Reddit it was a bit of an issue since the default would be to hide comments with negative votes, so someone could easily be muted from the conversation by coordinating or alt accounts. As of now, I don't see this problem here.
Also, I don't fear being harassed or stalked by random people online. I had a stalker on Reddit who'd message me every cakeday for several years. I found it funny and just gave them a bit of shit talk until they went away. I can see how some people might be more scared of stuff like that.
The only accounts I've blocked on Reddit were spam accounts, and I frankly I don't care if they can see my posts. They probably don't even read any posts.
Stalking on real life is lot more dangerous and nuanced. I know some who have had issues with this, and their online presence was the least of their concerns.
Anyway, I generally agree that the federated networks should use this opportunity to do better than Reddit or other social media whenever possible, and if it being customised hiding, then fine by me.
yeah honestly I see the communities votes as somewhat a tool if there is a lot to go through but another aspect I would like is for it to weight votes. I can't login in anymore so I have no idea how the project is going but wts2 had where you can put a trust score for users 0-100 based on how your like their content or comments. That is exciting to me to as I would prefer the feed to be based on my opinion of the quality of peoples stuff rather they have generally garned through gamification on the community system.