AJ Sadauskas

2025-10-07 11:30:13

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.