I wanted to like Tidal, but its music discovery isn't great. It builds great lists of music you might like, but then they never change, and you end up hearing the same music over and over, with little change.
As someone who doesn't listen to playlists much, it was frustrating. But spotify isn't much better there either...
is it not enough that you remain oblivious to the attempted harassment? If a bigot harasses in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did they really harass?
The problem is, there are plenty of other people around to hear it. Everyone else except the harassed person can see it, and on top of that, the fact that harassment is trivial to do, and not policed, ensures that more harassers will come along. Each one having to be blocked one by one by the people they're harassing, after the harassment has already taken place.
As I said earlier, this is how twitter does things, and there is a reason that vulnerable folk don't use twitter anymore.
But isn’t this already the case?
No, it isn't, because right now, local only posting, follower only posting, authorised fetch, admin level instance blocks etc, all combine to make it non trivial for harassers. If you're familiar with the "swiss cheese defence model", that's basically what we have here. Every single one of those things can be worked around, especially by someone dedicated to harassing folk, but the casual trolls and bigots, they won't get through all of them. The more imperfect security, anti harassment and privacy options we have, the harder it is for casual bigots.
They commodify and profit from Nazis on their platform. When called out for it, their response was "We don't like Nazis either, but we won't do anything about them and we'll continue to take our cut from their presence on our platform"
This headline is weird.
How can it be both "already upending" and "after years of promise". They seem like mutually exclusive concepts
Not going to give substack any views, so I'll pass on this one
What might an anti-harassment tool look like on a social network without any pretenses of privacy?
There's no such thing. They are mutually exclusive. Take queer folk for example. We need privacy to be able to talk about our experiences without outing ourselves to the world. It's especially important for queer kids, and folk that are still in the closet. If they don't have privacy, they can't be part of the community, because they open themselves to recognition and harassment in offline spaces.
With privacy, they can exist in those spaces. It won't stop a dedicated harasser, but it provides a barrier and stops casual outing.
An "open network" where everyone can see everything, puts the onus on the minority person. Drive by harassers exist in greater numbers than a vulnerable person can cope with, and when their content is a simple search and a throw away account away from abuse, it means the vulnerable person won't be there. Blocking them after the fact means nothing.
I'm not saying existing features are good enough.
I'm saying that they're better than the alternative that started this conversation.
"Just loudly proclaim that everything is public but clients can filter out shit you don't wanna see"
That's what Twitter does right now. It's also a hate filled cesspit.
The Fediverse though, even though it has hate filled cesspits, gives us tools that put barriers between vulnerable groups and those spaces. The barriers are imperfect, they have booked holes and be climbed over by people who put the effort in, but they still block the worst if it.
Now that is a fascinating idea. I really like it
You're thinking about this in an all or nothing way. A community in which everyone and everything they post is open to everyone isn't safe.
A community in which no one can find members or content unless they're already connected to that community stagnates and dies.
A community where some content and some people are public and where some content and some people are locked down is what we need, and though it's imperfect, things like authorised fetch brings us closer to that, and that's the niche that future security improvements on the Fediverse need to address.
No one is looking for perfect, at least not in this space.
Privacy and being free of (in-context) harassment aren't the same thing.
They're related. Often, the ability to limit your audience is about making it non trivial for harassers to access your content rather than impossible.
If the goal is privacy so that people who aren't in the community don't know that you're in the community
That's not the goal. The goal is to make a community that lets vulnerable folk communicate whilst keeping the harassment to a manageable level and making the sensitive content non trivial to access for random trolls and harassers.
It's not about stopping dedicated individuals, because they can't be stopped in this sort of environment for all the reasons you point out. It's about minimising harassment from the random drive by bigots
Vulnerable folk are looking for community, not a soap box. The goal is to connect with other folk whilst being as free as possible from harassment.
It's absolutely possible to achieve that without perfect privacy controls.
Yes.
What you're describing is basically the way Twitter works, and there's a reason vulnerable folk have migrated away from it in large numbers