@Jürgen Hubert One thing that might help is if people who are involved with contributing to the design of the user interactions/experience did two things:

1. deprioritized growth as a design goal. Many of the features that focus on this result tend to bring growth for the service at the expensive of the end users. Problems like participants being in a constant states of hyper emotional arousal which increases conflicts, addiction which drives unhealthy interactions trying to satisfy the cravings, and lack of consent based engagement which hyper charges bullying, stalking, and platforming unprotected speech (also it’d be great if in design discussions ppl stopped throwing around the term “free speech”, because “free speech” is REGULATED; the US law you’re quoting specifically defines that some speech is manifestly known to cause problems and is therefor not protected expression, speech like fighting words, death threats, genocide incitement, injurious denial of established fact, etc. Expect that I am going to dismiss any free speech related discussion in design principles that ignores this fact).

2. Increase semi-public and semi-private engagement as core features. Because they’re the more natural way that humans communicate. Not sure what semi-public means? You’ll understand if I find you walking on the street and point at you screaming very loudly to the surrounding passers by “HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK AT THAT GUY’S SHIRT! LOOK HOW WEIRD IT IS OMG HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMETHING SO WEIRD???” Now you’re no longer semi-public, you’re public. Everyone is looking at you. Semi-public was when you were quietly walking down the public street minding your own business, but no one was paying particular attention to you. You were there, you could be beheld by members of the public freely, but there was not an collective conscious moment of broad public intent to notice you. Being in public is not the same as being public. Being public is a state of vulnerability, risk, and lower personal control. Those three things are seldom desired by the individual as daily experiences.

What is semi-private? You’ll know if we’re sitting at a dinner table in a restaurant with a group of our mutual friends, and I lean over and very loudly say to you “YOUR ZIPPER IS DOWN!!” Our table is private, no one at the restaurant could realistically hear us. But everyone at the table heard me tell you about your zipper. A private way of telling you would be getting fully up from the table and bringing you with me and going somewhere secluded and saying that. But a more semi-private way of handling it would be just leaning over and giving you an aside. The art of the aside has been kinda significantly lost in online spaces.

Like essentially ditch the binary notion of everything is public or everything is private. There exist more fluid in-between types of interactions in human communication. So in design, lean into them instead of totally ignoring them, because there’s lot’s of good consent-based healthy engagement features to be mined there.

A thing that often happen is the visibility of abusive posts us not set to "everyone".

So it's important to be aware that when there's an abusive reply, it might not be visible to you.

There are also some instances that take a very lax attitude towards moderation.

Now, if your instance's mods are doing a good job of moderation, posts from those instances will be blocked. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're blocked by the poster's instance.

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The net result is often something like this:

1) A new user from a marginalised community writes a post.

2) One or more trolls from an instance with lax moderation posts an abusive reply, with visibility set to something like "mentioned users only".

3) Most users don't see the abusive reply, because their instance mods block the lax moderation instance, or because of the visibility settings.

4) The new user from the marginalised community posts about the abusive posts he/she/they has just seen.

If s/he/they is a new user, possibly not aware that post is not visible to everyone, as it might be on other social networks.

5) Here comes the replies from the well-intentioned users, for whom the abusive posts in question are not visible.

"I don't see any posts like that!"

(Your instance mods block posts from the bad instance. But even if that wasn't the case, the trolls set the post visibility so you can't see it and they can.)

"Maybe you should use moderation tools..."

(Targeted harassment of this sort is not something you encounter because the racists, transphobes, homophobes, and misogynists aren't interested in harassing you.)

And, perhaps worst of all, assuming the posts that are visible to you are all the ones visible to them, and chiding them for being too sensitive.

6) The new user from a marginalised community has seen multiple nasty, violent replies on Mastodon, from other Mastodon users.

And when they mention this publicly on Mastodon, they get dismissed or chided for not using the right moderation settings or instance.

(Again, if they're new to the platform, it's likely they not unreasonably assume the harassment they received is visible to all users.)

7) They not only leave Mastodon, but they share their experience with others.

And after hearing two or three or more people share horror stories about "that Mastodon app" where the racists say the most vicious things, and then people chide or lecture you for complaining about it?

Well, they don't want to join.

And I don't blame them. If I were in their shoes, and I heard that, I wouldn't either.

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By the way, there are a number of prominent Black academics who were bullied off Mastodon in a manner similar to what I described above.

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Some of this is up to the Mastodon and other Fediverse developers to fix.

But we all have a role to play.

And if you get nothing else from this post, please be aware and mindful that:

Because of the nature of the Fedi, not all of the bullying and harassment that goes on is visible to everyone.

unfortunately many people have no idea the demands on Moderators. So members who have been around long enough to know about the tools and reporting may help a lot on getting action. I’ve been on 3 instances over the years and I know where I’m at now is best and just one person who is Admin is doing a tremendous job with moderation.

Another thing I learned was to lock down my stream to “Request Follow”. That helped me a lot. I still vet every person when I get a notification. About 1 of 3 I still have to deny. Because my gosh, didn’t they read my bio?
How do newbies learn about this?

The one thing I would change is the way Mastodon has the landing page. Choosing your instance to apply to is too much for many people. Then the rest of us are stuck with a gigantic open enrollment Instance that is poorly moderated. And the Fediverse/Federated View is iffy and sometimes bizarre.

People just starting don’t know that their “Home View” and “Local View” will largely be just right for them as they follow people and also interact with comments or faves or boosts. No one wants to have followers who are only lurkers or only boost but never post their own thoughts or content like sharing a photo. How would newbies know this?

Once I locked down I went from 300 people who follow me to 1,000 in a years’ time. I follow about 3,000. People knew I was legit, posted often and commented often. i have contacts around the world because I was so many interests. I now look at my Home View and see fresh posts day and night. Sometimes there may be 200-300 posts in a day. And guess what-no trolls, harassment, or bots; yay!

But newbies don’t know these things. Definitely “we” the people here need a plan of change from the newbie POV. Then Moderators also need their own plan of change for their own instance. Oh dear, then somewhere beyond that a plan of change from the Admin of gigantic federated collections of instances. Whew that’s a lot. But doable.