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With respect @jdp23, when your piece says;
"clacke agrees..."
https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/
... I think that misrepresents what @clacke was saying about
> the timing of the channer-culture and freezepeach instances
As I read it - and experienced it - he was not agreeing that they *were* the pre-Mastodon fediverse. But rather clarifying that the OStatus/GNU social fediverse had been in regular use long before GamerGate channers arrived, after Titter started banning them in 2016.
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The 2016 influx of GamerGate channers was a big problem for us, just as much as for those who arrived in the first great Mastodon influx, later in 2016. Because of...
@jdp23
> the lack of tools and roles
... which was a consequence of 3 things;
1) Up until 2016, the network was small, and mostly used by well-behaved software freedom and decentralisation activists. Most of whom ran their own server or knew the people who did.
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2) Many genuinely believed that the toxic behaviour on DataFarms was caused by algorithmic manipulation (see The Social Dilemma), and wouldn't be a problem here, because we didn't have that
3) All the software was bleeding edge software and devs had a lot of fires to fight, just getting it to work reliably at all. The 2 Titter influxes of 2016 revealed many limitations in OStatus, and a lot of dev time was soaked up in standardising and implementing ActivityPub, so they could be solved.
(4/4)
So volunteers doing fediverse dev in 2016 were dealing with;
a) unruly mobs gatecrashing their formerly pleasant house parties
b) complicated protocol work that was essential to building new tools for improving the general human experience of the verse - and moderation in particular - but mostly invisible to the tourists
c) being dogpiled by mobs of tourists, shrieking either about how they didn't care enough about moderation, or how moderation of any kind violated their freeze peach