Depends on the instance. Some have the BlueSky response. Some have the Xitter response.
Don’t believe me, ask a black Mastodon user.
Yes, but those instances are normally the ones that get blocked by half of the web.
No I mean instances like mastodon.world who do ok moderating their own users, but are very poor at moderating the instances that federate with them. So any minority users who joins mastodon.world can still be (and is, I’ve seen it) subject to the worst bigotry on the fediverse.
I’m just so tired of watching green mods make the same mistakes. “It’s not my job to weigh in on debates or tell people what to think.” No, but it’s your job to reduce disruption in a community. If someone comes in going “being gay is a choice if you ask me,” they have about 30 seconds to clarify their position or they’re gone from my discord server and generally that won’t do it. We have a lot of LGBT folks who have NO desire to deal with those people in a the little corner of friends we’ve created. That person is not entitled to their time and attention. It is our job to look out for the best interests of all our users, yet we categorically see mods get bogged down by a handful of incredibly disruptive attention seekers/combative personalities that make it shitty for everyone else. It’s so predictable at this point.
We banned someone a few months ago from our discord who had some of the best insights about gaming I’ve ever seen. The dude was remarkable. But my god he was such a jerk! He kept being such an ass to people who disagreed with him. “That’s just a brain dead take.” “People who like that have no taste so frankly I don’t care what you or they think.” Just constant antagonism that halted all conversation and made people feel like crap. So we booted him! We asked him to stop, he didn’t, and his disruptions just became unwelcome. We didn’t play rules lawyer with him or debate things. We said stop, he didn’t, that was the end of it, and while I miss his insights the community is noticeably better without him.
Most mods aren’t clueless. They know bigotry is occurring in their communities. Yet they too often just won’t be proactive about it because the behavior doesn’t overtly violate the rules. Don’t let bad actors weaponize your own rules against you!
That’s one of the current weaknesses of the fediverse right now. Devs are working on more comprehensive moderation tools, but it’s all under development.
I’ve recently been added to the mastodon.world mod team. The amount of spam that gets posted makes it much harder than Lemmy to weed out the bigots. But it’s improving. And like on Lemmy.World we request Mastodon.World users to keep reporting…
I’m surprised I haven’t seen blue sky at least hire one Trust & Safety professional to coordinate baseline standards for content.
They do have a mod team, but they haven’t said much publicly around the hiring of dedicated T&S staff other than that they have positions open