Huh. Just chatted in person with someone who's been on #mastodon for a while, now, who honestly thought that all the Mastodon domains were run by Mastodon. And having a different domain was, like, just a vanity thing to look cool. It only came up because they were complaining about an issue they were having, and they were on a smaller server (not naming it for anonymity), so I suggested contacting their server admin about the problem. I was surprised when they answered "Dude nobody at big companies reads those reports. It just all goes to AI or whatever." It took some actual convincing to get them to believe that the server they're on does, in fact, have a living breathing human admin who can be talked to.
Anyway, folks, support your #fediverse server admins and moderators. With money, where you can. They're almost certainly getting messages from users who think that reporting things to an admin here is exactly like reporting stuff to Facebook or Google. IE: screaming at a giant faceless entity who's never going to care or do anything about whatever your problem is.
@fastfinge That's crazy to me. Though maybe it was because my instance has signs ups that must be manually approved, so right away you know you're talking to an actual person.
@silver_huskey I think even that's going to become less clear as more and more big corporate websites start requiring age verification. Just because your account needs some sort of manual approval is already not really triggering people to think "There's a human in charge somewhere". They're just thinking "Probably some exploited and underpaid contractor in another country has to verify my identity somehow."
@fastfinge And people still think the whole federation thing is so badly abstracted and hidden that choosing a server is a major barrier of entry to new users.
@fastfinge Kinda makes me wonder if this person actually reads anything or talks to anyone, because federation is a major thing people talk about here. Also, the owner's name should be on the page when you sign up, but I can understand how a person could forget that.
@Fragglemuppet They talk more about politics than technical stuff. And yeah, it sort of is, but it's much less visible on mobile. Also: remember Myspace Tom? Just because some username and profile photo is shown to you, that doesn't mean they're someone you can interact with. At least not on the big corporate social media.
@treehugger They were brought over by political activism and a fandom space. This is the sort of person who doesn't even own a computer and just uses their phone; they would've just glazed over one, if an explanation was even offered, so they could get on with the things they actually came for.
@fastfinge A story is told that a man gets harassed on Mastodon social media and complains to friend. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep,” says the man. “I feel constantly miserable.”
“Report post to Admin is best medicine, my friend,” says the friend.
The man looks at the friend for a moment. “Ah,” he says. “That won’t help.”
@fastfinge this is the way bluesky works—custom domains are only vanity names for individuals, everything still goes through the same bluesky servers (unless you are on blacksky). Perhaps that's where the misconception came from.
@Joshsharp@fastfinge It’s not vanity. It is a kind of identity verification - since in order to use a domain name as an ID you have to have access for the domains DNS records. Which means you have an ICANN registration.
@vartak@Joshsharp Or you're using a subdomain. Or one of the free tlds. Spammers and phishers have no problem getting domains, so it's pretty meaningless.
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