Decentered S1E4: Shawn Grigson and the Oliphant in the Room
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Thanks for joining us for another episode of Decentered! This week, we’re talking to Shawn Grigson, who runs the widely-known Oliphant project. Shawn’s efforts are widely known for the shared blocklists, where problematic servers are rated through a wide range of criteria and split into tiers.
Show Notes
- Like all important efforts, Oliphant started out because Shawn saw a need, and didn’t really see many available resources when he first came to Mastodon.
- There are more than a few concurrent Trust & Safety efforts going on in the space! Getting them to work together is like herding cats sometimes.
- What’s his position on Threads joining the Fediverse? “I’m blocking them, simply because I’m not interested. Other people are free to make that choice for themselves.”
- A lot of Trust & Safety efforts in the Fediverse are grossly underfunded, with lots of people donating their work for free. That may be changing soon.
- There’s a lot that can be done with a content labeling system similar to Bluesky, which could help flag problematic content for admins and moderators to review before making any decisions. Ideally, such a tool should supplement human moderation, not replace it.
- How are the blocklists put together? They’re aggregated from vetted sources in the community, that are proven to be good actors.
- The We Distribute team isn’t on Mozilla.social anymore! We finished recording way before our recent move, but you can find us on social.wedistribute.org now!
@news
@oliphant You mention CARIAD works with contributors like MastodonApp (25 mins in).
Without trying to be more of a pain to them than I already was –
is CARIAD asking contributors about their processes for manual review?
MA have definitely had some resource challenges. When I was using MA, I got the impression they stopped acting on my relayed reports, in favour of using Oliphant. At irregular intervals.
(Hopefully the “irregular” is evidence they *are* continuing with manual review.)
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@news @oliphant
I'm thinking about hrefna's concern of "amplification".https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/111988063440844436
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@oliphant @news
It seems straightforward to me. It's not a direct concern of mine, but I am interested.
I take your point, I haven't listened to the whole podcast and had just gotten past "I can tell you one thing that I've built" :-). As you say, it's a question for IFTAS as a whole.
@news Something I heard in the podcast that didn’t make sense to me was that IFTAS can’t release open source software because of the type of nonprofit it is. It seems to be a sub-project of the New Venture Fund, a US 501(c)3 charity. The Mozilla Foundation and the Free Software Foundation are also 501(c)3 charities, which leads me to question that explanation.
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