Social media platforms should have a "fuck you, and your friends too" block button to block someone's moots at the same time as them. This would make it a lot easier to deal with trolls that move as a group. Maybe pair it with a "your friend fucked you over by being an asshole" notification.
This is kind of how fedi blocking works already (which I like), but that breaks down more with large instances that lose social context between users. IMO >1000 active users is when the context collapse muddies enough that individuals can't expect to trust everyone else.
@mauve this is kind of eternal-september-ish, but more about the scale of a community than the influx of newcomers
@yhancik Oh? tell me more.
@mauve do you know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ?
It's a Usenet thing, but I think we all encountered that in other online communities. A community starts small, we all (probably implicitly) agree on the general etiquette. Newcomers might crash a bit into that, but with time they learn the customs of the place and fit in. When that influx becomes too important, space for "adapting" shrinks, and eventually there's a disconnect with the original community.
Which is a reasonable observation, although I also always have the concern there's a bit of ... maybe vague elitism or something in that narrative. It's complicated :p
@yhancik yeah, I get that. It's complicated. IMO this is one of the issues with centralized spaces. IMO it'd be nice if the onboarding was more organic based on attaching onto social connections that are established off platform rather than getting exposed to large volumes of low context info.
@mauve as someone who started online in the early 2000s: we had (semi)centralised spaces and connections born on-platform. But thinking of something like Livejournal, you didn't have a global timeline exposing you to everything anyone was posting.
In other places (thinking of Deviantart) where you had that exposure, the context was still present because the community was small (to today's standards) and very focused. I guess the same would apply to forums of the time.
First social networks I saw (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace) were weird to me because they didn't seem to have a point. No focus like "this is a community about a topic" or "this is place to blog", but just "this is a place to have a profile and friend other profiles".
A nice thing about the Fediverse is that it brings back, in some places, this "topical community" thing with servers, and a nice middle ground between small (server) and wide (fediverse)