I hope version 4.2.0 implements well and finds itself to be chill, relaxed, and not stressed. Otherwise, yeahhhh let’s hope some of the forks come to maturity soon.

I hope it’s a nice addition to the neighborhood! The menu looks quite good! We really need some more restaurants in the area.

I believe the admin has sufficient skills to determine if any instances listed in tier-0 are consumed by users of theatl.social. I trust they’re making sounds calls what to include from the list and what to not include. That said, an auto-update could be deployed with some automated list scrubbing (i.e.: scan the list for changes, check if newly added instances are consumed, post a message to theatl.social clearly calling out changes or calls for review). But until then, a manual periodic review is appreciated.

I feel the general Mastodon community well established has a consistent baseline of acceptable use/content with guardrails requiring content warnings (CW) and proper flagging of material not suitable for general audiences. That said, there’s a time, place, and instance that can provide people with outlets to consume and share non-“G-Rated” (NSFW) content and other content not generally accepted in polite company. TheATL.social is managed in such a way to avoid publishing NSFW content- and that’s fine. My litmus test before posting on theatl.social: “would I feel okay if my mom saw this post?” If not, rethink the content or post to a more appropriate instance.

However…I want to call out one sentence that made me bristle a bit:

I’d support blocking brighton.social purely to protect theATL users from wandering into a conversation prompted by their nonsense…

Assuming the content/instance in question doesn’t violate established community standards or violate terms of use, I would not appreciate the admin (or anyone) doing something to “protect” me from accidental conversation wandering. I’m fully functional adult who can choose what to read, what to “believe”, and what to reject. Same goes for the concept of blocking mainstream news orgs and other entities with knee jerk reactions, such as preemptively blocking threads.net. Why actively close yourself off from the world around you? Echo chambers can be quite toxic and lead to uninformed world views. Why block something without a clear observation of impact? If I don’t want to see it, I can simply block from my account.

To round out the public park analogy- I’ve wandered through many public parks while people hand out flyers, yell from megaphones, and try to recruit for their cults. I just walk by and ignore them. Just as I do when I see something in social media I don’t want to engage with. I don’t need a nanny to “protect” me. As a gay man, I’ve heard plenty of mainstream news orgs propagate ideas I find personally offensive; I take the content for what it is and move on or engage in healthy public debates. By blocking the org, I’d loose context around the discussion, the people engaging in the discussion, and in impact of the topics. I’d rather be informed of the unsavory things than to be blindsided because someone put my head in the sand.

Likewise, I am not a free speech absolutist- limits should be in place to censor the most repugnant content. Using the Tier-0 list for instance-level blocking is a good approach: light touch, using globally accepted standards.

For the rest, if a user doesn’t want to see content from a user or domain, they can block either/both at their level. As a user, I should be permitted to follow who I choose, consume text/media I wish to see, and block content that which offends me. I don’t need an admin making those decisions for me. An overzealous admin (or instance leadership) blocking domains at the instance level that /they/ find distasteful is far too arbitrary.

However, the admin must balance risk- they own the underlying infrastructure and could be accountable for the content transacted and stored- from both a legal standpoint and with respect to the broader community. Consider a situation where a user is acting against de facto global content standards and the admin does nothing- all users of the instance are at risk of global defederation.

I feel the guidelines established to moderate theatl.social are broad enough to foster open dialog, but also protect the instance from broad defederation. Adding a Tier-0 block is a sensible addition.

So sad, intel. But yay ARM.

More meat-based foods 🙄 Don’t we have enough Chick-Fil-A’s? Also, their track record supporting anti-LGBT orgs and support of religious orgs is a big “no, thank you” for me. One more Chick-fil-a is two too many.

Hello! I’m also a technologist with a background in coding (C, asm, Pascal, Perl, Python, Go, JS/Node, etc…) but my expertise is in Linux/systems engineering and data center ops. I’m always happy to have a beer (or whatever) and talk nerd.