Even though millions of people left Twitter in 2023 – and millions more are ready to move as soon as there's a viable alternative – the fediverse isn't growing.1 One reason why: today's fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default – especially for Black and Indigenous people, women of color, LGBTAIQ2S+ people2, Muslims, disabled people and other marginalized communities. ‌

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[–] TheBeege@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Maybe I'm part of the problem, and if so, please educate me, but I'm not understanding why blocking is ineffective...?

And block lists seem like an effective method to me.

The security improvements described seem reasonable, so it would be nice to get those merged.

I understand that curation and block lists require effort, but that's the nature of an open platform. If you don't want an open platform, that's cool, too. Just create an instance that's defederated by default and whitelist, then create a sectioned-off Fediverse of instances that align with your moderation principles.

I feel like I've gotta be missing something here. These solutions seem painfully obvious, but that usually means I'm missing some key caveat. Can someone fill me in?

[–] thenexusofprivacy 3 points 1 year ago

At some level you're not missing anything: there are obvious solutions, and they're largely ignored. Blocking is effective, and it's a key part of why some instances actually do provide good experiences; and an allow-list approach works well. But, those aren't the default; so new instances don't start out blocking anybody. And, most instances only block the worst-of-the-worst; there's a lot of stuff that comes from large open-registration instances like .social and .world that relatively few instances block or even limit.

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