This was an interesting read for me; a guy sets up on mastodon, starts posting, then gets what is, from his account of events, a false positive moderation hit that gets his account deleted.

And it’s interesting to me because he presents this as a Mastodon problem.

I feel like a lot of women and minorities, especially LGBT people, kind of regard this as a normal social media experience. It’s entirely common for us to randomly find ourselves restricted on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook for simply talking about our own lives. Sometimes we get outright banned, and appeals tend to not work.

The only social media I pay for is Mastodon (I have a cloud server) and Reddit, and I nearly got banned from Reddit for talking about reclamation of terms user against LGBT people. Lesson learned: no “shop talk” on Reddit.

Even private Facebook posts are not safe. They’re safe from malicious reporting, as long as you haven’t gone too broad with your friends group, but Facebook has a lot of automated moderation that scans everything, and if it doesn’t like what you say, into Facebook jail you go.

In this light, it comes as no surprise that queer, and especially trans people, are congregating on majority LGBT instances or, in increasingly large numbers, rolling our own. I have a cloud Mastodon server which I’m paying for, but @Zoë O'Connell and I have also been experimenting with a #Friendica server running on our own home network. We are safe in our own servers: from malicious reporting, and from automated keyword auto-bans.

The worst that can happen to us is defederation, and we aren’t particularly at risk of being defederated by our own community.

And the micro-instance fediverse is a fun place, with a lot of camaraderie and, I think, quite a different and more intimate experience than even being somewhere like mastodon.social, let alone commercial social media.

To all the malicious reporters out there, all you did is encourage us to get stronger and build a fortress. Joke’s on you.