Addendum to Fedi fucking sucks (as a minor)

So uh. I published a text mostly in anger about a topic that I thought only affected me which I barely proofread and suddenly my article gets a round-trip around the Fediverse with minors thanking me for speaking about an issue that affects them as well.

This caused a lot of discussion that I honestly was not prepared for so while I still have your attention, I'd clarify my thoughts on the things proposed.

I'll try to make this less ranty, so if you were expecting the same article again, sorry.
Before we start,

Non-Solutions #

Profiles marked as sensitive / NSFW toggle #

I want to get this early because that's something I've seen suggested the most, to the point where my post has managed to get on the Mastodon issue tracker for the proposal.
It's not something I can support in good faith sadly, despite being the easiest option.

CEO of Mastodon Gargron puts it best in that issue:

So the various problems, summarized, are:

• Avatar and header images of sensitive character (possibly also display name/bio itself)
• People who always post NSFW stuff and don't want to always mark it as such
• Even when posts are CW'd, some people don't like lots of NSFW posts in public timelines

Unfortunately, we must also look at how Twitter handles things: Twitter hides detected NSFW accounts from search results and hashtag timelines (they don't have other public timelines), and hides the entire profile behind a "sensitive content" spoiler when you open it. People call this shadowbanning and are not happy to be on the receiving end of it.

I don't know how to resolve this situation. I thought that granular NSFW toggles per-post would satisfy everyone, but I was wrong, as people whose primary work output must be put behind a NSFW spoiler (like sex workers and adult artists) are not happy that their posts are disadvantaged like that, and many want to have avatars and headers reflecting their work.

The problem with a software NSFW toggle for profiles is that your activity would be (by design) disadvantaged on the network. Just because you set your profile as NSFW doesn't mean you post NSFW all the time, but because of your designation, you are intentionally hampering your chances of being discovered.

This is ignoring the problem that what is and isn't NSFW (like I mentioned in the previous article) isn't cut and clear, which means there will likely be disagreements if profiles or posts are safe or not.

All of that together would probably cause the next non-solution,

Split-brain profiles #

Here's my argument against people splitting their profiles between SFW and NSFW.

I think this is a hassle. Me talking about this is abstract because it's not an issue that I actually have (I don't have multiple Fedi accounts) but a concern.

Effectively we want to reduce the friction between switching accounts as much as possible, because if it's a hassle to switch between accounts, most people probably aren't going to bother.
They'll probably post it on the account that they're most comfortable with which dilutes the point of splitting the accounts in the first place.

The entire selling point with the Fediverse is that it's not a hassle to talk with others, you can talk with others no matter who and where you are.*
* Your mileage may vary.

Using multiple accounts isn't a foreign idea in the tech world and we can draw examples from platforms like *shivers* Google.

For multiple accounts in the Fediverse, I use Fedilab which ships out of the box with multi account features.


Notice how Fedilab allows switching between accounts without needing to switch context, I think this is what makes multi-accounting useful.

For Mastodon, this doesn't exist. The issue for it was opened in 2017 and probably won't be resolved anytime soon.

I can log out, but that'll require me to constantly type in my credentials and that's a major hassle.

Sure, there's workarounds for this like:

• using Firefox Multi-Account containers which maintains isolated contexts ("containers")
• registering on a separate instance, which does not share context with your main one and therefore allows you to run both accounts
• using a completely different client which supports that

But this all adds mental and technical complexity that is not inherently required.

Segregation #

I'm going to wear my biases on my sleeve even if this topic feels like walking on eggshells, this strikes me as a weird adult-centric idea.

The idea is that underage people should have a separated space where they get to do underage things while the adults do their thing.

Aside from grooming which is an entirely separate discussion which I'm not qualified to talk about (if you write an article about it, hmu and I'll link you here), I don't see the problem with minors interacting with adults. A lot of my friends and people I interact daily with are adults and nothing nefarious happens.

I also think that this idea that minors and adults must inherently be separated is… strange?
I feel like that sets the subtext that adults cannot be trusted to interact with minors and therefore minors must be protected from adults and themselves.
That gives me a very bad gut feeling.

Assuming this idea gets implemented somehow by the Violetist Goddess anyway, ignoring all the concerns and implementation details with that, we've now split the network away into the Fediverse and the gimped Ikea Småland Fediverse.

With some support from Gargron, we might be able to get ballpit support across the Fediverse!

Calling back to the poll,

You'd create a network that is significantly smaller than the rest of the network.

At what point should be people be allowed to graduate to the proper Fediverse?
Seriously, you have to decide another magic number at what point someone is allowed on the real Fediverse to discuss topics with adults. Will they even be able to deal with the real network?

I personally think that minors should be given the tools and knowledge to safely engage with the network, this requires teaching them how to avoid and deal with bad actors and troubling topics, teaching tech literacy, as well as awareness from everyone else about red flags. But this also means giving them the agency to do so in the first place.

I wish I could say more concrete things, but that is probably a topic for another article by smarter people with better knowledge about this.

If that all has been unconvincing to you, I'm only afforded the soapbox to talk to you because the network doesn't discriminate based on age. A crux of my argument is that I want to be included, I want to join discussions, I want to have a voice here even if I haven't hit the magic age number yet (but I cannot because a lot of people restrict their entire account instead of posts)

Standardized CW tags #

This one would technically be a workaround if I was super optimistic but I'm not.

In theory, we could propose a "default" or "recommended" set of content warnings that can be used to filter out content. Except that we (are supposed to) already do that with CWs like lewd and nsfw. In general, having a CW on something is better than having none, even if the phrase added isn't easily filterable.

But that requires actually using CWs in the first place too,

While I don't agree with a full standard for CWs, I do think there is value in creating a index of popularly used CWs (or lingo) as a resource for newcomers.
As solonovamax smartly brings up, a lot of CWs use shorthands that might be unclear if you don't know what they mean.
(I only recently learned what OH meant and I've only been here for a few months lol)

Workarounds #

These don't actually "fix" the problem but make things more bearable.

(Mastodon) Profile preview on hover #

This has a Mastodon issue, see here.

I saw Noble's take on the situation and I think I actually agree with this, having a profile preview sounds like a thing that would speed up the process of checking profiles.

In fact, apparently the idea was so good that Gargron used to work on the idea:

I had a branch with tooltips and was planning to eventually add this. I need to check the state of that branch...

Anyway, we write the year 2023 and it's still not a thing, seemingly work having been abandoned.

If it's any comfort, fellow ball fetching connoisseur and friend Vipra & the contributors of ProToots might actually race the Mastodon team for doing this first .

Web Extension / Profile Markers #

Continuing our journey with Vipra and doing webbed extensions,

I think having a web extension to provide markers like that could be useful but I'm incredibly worried about false positives from just parsing profiles, so I personally think it'd be a patchwork workaround.
However, it might be worth doing R&D on and seeing if it works or not. I personally wanted to work on it but my backburner keeps getting longer and longer.

I feel like in the worst case, you could probably do something like PronounDB for it (although obviously we should try to minimize central solutions like that).

This also obviously will require duplicate work for clients and other web interfaces to support this as well, so I think this would be closer to a long-term workaround.

Cold Truth #

I've outlined a few solutions to you as best as I understand them and I hope we both can shake hands on that there is no easy solution for this.

The real solution is a culture shift by opening up the owners of MDNI accounts to question if they truly require the restriction therefore empowering more underage people to participate in the network, as well as showing mutual respect for each other by adding CWs your posts in good faith with words that can easily be understood and filtered by those who don't want to see it.

This way we can maintain profiles that contain mixed content and allow people (not limited to minors, I think this is something that affects ace people as well but I don't want to speak for them (you guys are still cool though, keep rocking)) to opt out of NSFW content if they want to.

But that's not as easy as writing a pull request unfortunately.

Personal stuff (feel free to skip) #

Anyways, hello. I never intended to reach this sort of publicity with my post and when it did, I honestly was feeling like shit, I was feeling really nauseous, the night after that post was the worst non-nap sleep I've ever tracked. I was shitting bricks even, it's terrifying to think about that potentially thousands of people might have read my writing, the writing that I don't have a lot of self-esteem about.

But now that I have a soapbox with the option to either let this fizzle out in silence or give my last words before it actually does fizzle out, I'd rather take this and steer my words into the right direction.

I don't think I'm fit for this type of publicity, I don't think I can ever talk for the entirety of all underage Fedi people. If you're reading this and you have more to say on this, please, talk as much as you can!

As a community, we require more discussion and visibility about things like this, I can only write so much until I drop dead.

Anyway, I think I should play some video games and try to calm down from all of this.