uhhh.... https://twitter.com/leashless/status/930563910679322629

is us being described as "free speech fundamentalists" related to %wNsKCx9...?

/cc @vinay

@vinay: Gab should be apprehensive. We will not be good hosts. Fork off! Or use Secure Scuttlebutt or something, they're free speech fundamentalists I believe. But not Ethereum. We are all communists.

@dinosaur: hey @vinay, those of us building Secure Scuttlebutt are not free speech fundamentalists, we're mostly communists too. 😊 we will not be good hosts to fascists either, they should build their own infrastructure.

@vinay: Ooooops. Fuck. I am so sorry about that! Well, gay on comrade!

@gab

So that's two "open" "decentralized" projects proclaiming that they will not support a pro-1A protected free speech and pro individual liberty application?

Once again: please try and stop us from using your open-source software.

How are you people engineers? Honestly.

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/930618071810686976

Time to lock down those pubs, folks!

my response: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/04/gardens-need-walls-on-boundaries-ritual-and-beauty/. happy for feedback.

@dinosaur we're engineers with empathy who understand the "paradox of tolerance" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance ) and healthy community boundaries ( https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/04/gardens-need-walls-on-boundaries-ritual-and-beauty/ ). you're free to fork our open source software, you're not free to act however you want and expect no consequences.

also, i think it's about time to shutdown @ssb.rootsystems.nz and reboot it as a private pub, in case Scuttlebutt becomes infested with frogs. i recommend other public pub operators do the same. it'd be unfortunate if it becomes adversarial, but maybe it's time we learned how to better protect our community boundaries.

oops: https://twitter.com/ahdinosaur/status/930620308553265153

wow, that escalated quickly.

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/930618323137474561

https://twitter.com/getongab/status/930628308735111168

Yep, that's why I was declaring the open utopia of ssb "officially" cancelled...

now for a personal attack: https://twitter.com/getongab/status/930628505959723008

shaken up.

it'll be sometime before i process what happened / is happening.

THANKFULLY THAT POST HAS NOW BEEN DELETED! That shook me up a bit too.

cc @marina this might be relevent to what you're working on - it feels like the free speech thing is a weird emphasis which is emerging. Funny because it's technically true, but not the vibe of the culture I see/ experience at all.

mikey I'm still catching up o nthis thread. here for support if something horrible has happened

I missed the attack thread, but the rest seemed like pretty unpleasent enough.

I think the main takeaways for me are:

• disengage early from trolls
• ask friends / people we know not to route horrible humans to us
  • we might need to communicate what sort of contacts we would like
• let's get on roleplaying some shitty attacks on the network
  • this would help us prepare, while being able to stop it
  • grant anyone?

The worst thing would be for this network to get flooded with pepes

I use cjdns, but I've mostly backed off from the Hyperboria community since it got flooded with pepes.

Yep, that's why I was declaring the open utopia of ssb "officially" cancelled...

I still operate public peers for the Hyperboria network, but I don't participate in the open social forums. I used to run one of the irc servers. Now I'm in only one irc channel with three other people I've known for at least 4 years. I was also responsible for forking the irc network, and taking the majority of the non-pepes to the new network. From what I've heard the old network is a pretty terrible place to hang out.

There are differences between ssb and cjdns, primarily in terms of visibility (ssb is social, cjdns is at the inter-networking layer). As long as there are open pubs, these people are going to be on the network, so the focus should probably be on keeping them as many hops away as possible. I have an ssb pub that I maintain, but I've never posted a large number of invites for exactly this reason. Unfortunately this slows down adoption, but I'd rather move slowly than end up with a toxic community.

I think the main takeaways for me are:

disengage early from trolls

I'm quick to block people. I have my client set to 1 hop, but I believe most clients have that dialed higher. If bad behaviour is close enough that I can see it, that makes me a vector for it to spread to my friends, and probably their friends, and maybe their friends.

ask friends / people we know not to route horrible humans to us

I mentioned this in another thread, I unfollow first, and ask questions later. Unfollowing doesn't mean I don't like the person being unfollowed, rather, it's a means of curating what I see in my feed. Usually I follow up with a private message explaining what came up. If they resolve the situation (talking to the person in question or unfollowing them themself), I'll probably start following them again. The last time I used this strategy, though, I think the block feature wasn't working perfectly, so this might be out of date.

This relates to the point above, though, that if I expect this of other people, I should think about how my feed impacts those around me, and be proactive about maintaining a comfortable space for those I'd like to associate with.

Usually at this point, people object to this approach as thought policing, so I'll just point out that I don't care what people are thinking so much as how it affects me. I also care about how it affects those around me, but to simplify things, I consider that if this network stops being enjoyable, people stop participating as much, or just leave. for the xkcd comic!

let's get on roleplaying some shitty attacks on the network

I'm not interested in wearing a frog costume, but the main attack vector is the pubs.

1. identify as someone who you think will be welcomed into the community
   • ssbc is lgbt*-friendly, so a troll might pose as such to get some follows somewhere in the middle of the network
2. wait until you have a few followers
   • bonus if any of the people only check in every few days, as they will be slow to react to your bad behaviour
3. start flooding the network with blobs
   • long threads of pepe memes, or similar (take up as much space in the interface as possible)
   • it also takes up disk space and bandwidth, this might be frustrating enough for people that they stop participating in the network
4. invite your friends
5. repeat with a new feed on a different pub

The best way to disrupt a community is to introduce churn. People who last a long time act as a collective memory of the network. Onboarding new people takes effort, and can lead to burnout. A network with little collective memory ends up not having coping strategies to deal with relatively simple attacks.

PS: sorry you had to deal with this, Mikey.

PPS: as the twitter thread indicates, talking about the censorship resistant qualities of ssb is a bit risky, as that's a dog whistle for people with some really gnarly opinions. If this is listed in the documentation, maybe we could consider removing it.

reflections

in retrospect it felt like a really silly battle where the isms fight against each other, in a great big miscommunication.

a lot of people were concerned that i didn't know how communists hurt so many people.

it's another reminder not to use simplistic but legible identifiers like communism or fascism to describe complex systems, it attracts the trolls.

the personal attack was strange, the replies were like a witch hunt. it's not my kink to be attacked by random strangers, so let's hope nobody does anything stupid.

i maybe should have said the original message privately and maybe only the subsequent message publicly.

i'm taking this as a warning sign that we are not ready to counter the September that never ended, we need to get our butt in gear.

if Scuttlebutt is to survive, i think we should split this big ship (singleton network) into a floatilla of smaller ships (small world network).

@ansuz
you're right about the dog whistle. I said something how ssb doesn't have central moderation tools, and how there is free speech here, and that went down like a sack of shit with someone from a marginalised group. This interactions of Mikey's help me understand why - I've not met this sort of trash and trash talk before, it's sickening.

I should think about how my feed impacts those around me, and be proactive about maintaining a comfortable space for those I'd like to associate with.

I love this phrasing. I think there's a thread in there I want to draw into the light.

I'm sad you had to go through shit-talking from that account, Mikey. Reading the other tweets from similar accounts, those are people worth ignoring. They just want your attention directed towards them, don't allow them to have it. Nevertheless, I think your counter-comments were noble.

if Scuttlebutt is to survive, i think we should split this big ship (singleton network) into a floatilla of smaller ships (small world network).

This is key. I think they picked up on one key message of yours:

we will not be good hosts to fascists either, they should build their own infrastructure.

We can be understood as "The Scuttleverse Singleton", which is the most common interpretation of social networks, because all of them are singletons, or quasi-singleton federations. In reality, SSB is radically different, making it impossible to prevent fascists from using SSB if they so wish to.

It would help if next time we say simple something along the lines of "this particular sub-network of the scuttleverse won't welcome fascists".

Yes! Let's do that. No one refers to "the world wide web" as a community, because it's just neutral protocols. Let's make up a name for this particular network of pubs and accounts, and optimize to make it a nice and welcoming place. I'm actually super grateful and surprised I haven't seen offensive and/or nsfw content here despite open-invitation pubs and many months of openness.

Ideally, we display this code of conduct when requesting an invitation on a pub. In the ideal case, you can also tick a checkbox whether you consent to your data being displayed on ssb-viewer, and the pub remembers that somehow.

So many things to build!

Sorry you had such a hostile experience @dinosaur I hope you are feeling okay

Let's make up a name for this particular network of pubs and accounts, and optimize to make it a nice and welcoming place.

Yes. This is very important.

Ideally, we display this code of conduct when requesting an invitation on a pub.

We already have a Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct on github. Although it describes expected behaviour for those contributing code to the project is there anything to stop us from using it immediately as a temporary communitiy code of conduct for this particular "ewok village" and advertising that on the invite page? (To be honest, I had assumed that it did apply when I first joined.)

The fact is that yes SSB would be a convenient technology for {insert here ideology you hate} advocates to use when talking to each other. So if people associate the word SSB with any of these groups, there will be one group conflating SSB with something they hate.

We need to find a way around that. For some reason, people don't conflate "smartphone" with {ideology you hate}. It's a very neutral technology. SSB should be in the same category as smartphone. It doesn't make sense to say "the smartphone community", it shouldn't make sense to say "the SSB community" either.

sounds like a great opportunity to implement the best moderation features ever!

Oh btw, pepe uses twitter because he craves attention. He loves "censorship", because it gives him a legitimate sounding thing to complain about. Twitter gives him the opportunity to harass people (via global notifications on replies and mentions) but everything on ssb is pull-based, so I think we can avoid that kind of harassment, we'll need to implement some stuff... but it's a challenge I am confidant we will rise to!

so I think we can avoid that kind of harassment, we'll need to implement some stuff... but it's a challenge I am confidant we will rise to!

Is there a roadmap?

What can less technical people and/or those not familiar with server side javascript / electron / etc do to help?

@tim see free listening roadmap

note that mastodon has The Fediverse as their plural. Lets fall back the The Scuttleverse (or The Buttverse)

@dominic i love this "freedom of listening" turning freedom of speech on its head

ahh, I wrote that while I was still drinking my first coffee of the day, and now I want to correct it to say

for those with whom I'd like to associate

blah blah blah ending sentences with prepositions blah blah

I thought @viInay 's response about being a communist was brilliant reverse-trolling. Got all the pepes to foam at the mouth about murders.

yeah, Vinay is definitely trolling.

Let's make up a name for this particular network of pubs and accounts, and optimize to make it a nice and welcoming place.

buttcomm

@substack: unfortunately I encountered basically all of that behaviour years ago before the term alt-right had come about.

I don't think I've ever seen it analyzed so accurately, though. Thanks for the link!

Those are beautiful goals David. Thank you for sharing them with us.

Does it help to view the discussion above as a group of people trying to build the minimum set of technical tools that are needed to make social solutions possible?

Human bodies are finite. Our capacity to communicate is bounded by our ability to handle volumes of information. Fledgling online communities are very vulnerable to malicious actors and individual social bonds can be broken in the flood.

Perhaps you might explain based on your work with these groups what their particular safety needs are so that we can think about how we might help? It sounds like you have some ideas about what is needed. Can you give some specific examples?

@mikey I am still retrospectively greatful to you for taking one for the team on that ocassion. I've been in the middle of shitstorms on social media and know the cost of them.