Decentered

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!