Call me crazy, but I a) think the fediverse probably doesn’t have more ‘toxic content’, harmful and violent content, and child sexual abuse material then other platforms like X, Facebook, Meta, YouTube etc, and b) actively like the fediverse because of that.
But after a few hours carefully drafting and sourcing an edit to make it clear that no, the fediverse isn’t unusual in social media circles for having a lot of toxic content, I realised that the entire ‘fediverse bad’ section was added by 1 editor in 2 days. And the editor has made an awful lot of edits on pages all themed around porn (hundreds of edits on the pages of porn stars), suicide, mass killings, mass shootings, Jews, torture techniques, conspiracy theories, child abuse, various forms of sexual and other exploitation, ‘zoosadism’, and then pages with titles like ‘bad monkey’ that seemed reasonably innocent until I actually clicked on them to see what they were and, well.
I decided to stop using the internet for a while.
I’ve learned my lesson trying to change Wikipedia edits written by people like that - they tend to have a tight social circle of people who can make the internet a very unpleasant place for anyone suggesting maybe claims like ‘an opinion poll indicated that most people in Britain would prefer to live next to a sewage plant than a Muslim’ should maybe not on Wikipedia on the thin evidence of paywalled link from a Geocities page written by, apparently, a putrid cesspit personified.
I thought I’d learned my lesson about trusting Wikipedia.
It just makes me so angry that most people’s main source of information on the fediverse contains a massive chunk written solely by a guy who spends most of his time making minor grammar edits to pages about school shootings, collections of pages about black people who were sexually assaulted and murdered, etc, and that these people control the narrative on Wikipedia by means of ensuring any polite critics’ are overcome with the urge to spend the rest of the day showering and disinfecting everything.
@moubliezpas The reference for “With toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse” is a single study (https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/31293/33453) that looked specifically at Pleroma only, not the Fediverse.
Pleroma itself has its own baggage, and the study’s own data is skewed in large part by one overwhelmingly toxic domain that is no longer active.
This is in no way a reasonable source for “toxic or abusive content being common in the Fediverse”
Also possibly useful: https://about.iftas.org/2025/03/27/content-classification-system-post-mortem/
This is why Wikipedia has policies against relying on non–meta-analysis and non-book scholarship
@moubliezpas
This study: https://arxiv.org/html/2502.17926v2
compares Threads to Mastodon, and finds the toxicity levels to be roughly the same.
(I’ll point out that “Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing” study is similarly Pleroma only, 729 Pleroma instances from 2020, most of which are no longer online)
@jaz @moubliezpas for several years, around 2018-2022, there were waves of folks who came to any instance with a reasonable LGBTQ/other leftist population and began shouting about how every mastodon instance was, quote, “worse than twitter and bluesky in every way, overflowing with racism and bigotry”, and whenever I asked for evidence of any kind about this, I was of course accused, myself, of being toxic without any evidence of this anywhere in my histories.
Overall, its much, much lower.
Yep, that was the sentence that took me from ‘I don’t really agree with the tone of this but that’s my problem’ to ‘this is bad faith bullshit’.
Published papers are written by people with biases, blind spots, agendas, and sometimes, special forms of idiocy. That’s why we don’t take a single sentence from any random published paper and present it as the whole undisputed truth.
And while Wikipedia had similar levels of trustworthiness - in theory it’s peer reviewed by the entire reader base and presents information that shouldn’t be taken as absolute fact - I’m kinda annoyed that the system is so easy to game.
Part of me thinks that anybody editing quite so many pages about porn, gore, death, suicide, racism, violence, sadism etc should maaaaybe have an internal ‘this user is working through something psychological’ flag that prevents them from adding or subtracting more than 100 words or so to ‘normal’ pages.
But that would also be pretty easy to game, and would involve a slippery slope of deciding who is normal enough to edit which pages. And, thinking about it, gross and weird people with gross weird hobbies can still have normal opinions and I do want them as part of my society.
I just don’t want to have to look at all those gross and weird pages to decide whether I’m being reasonable and am safe to edit a Wikipedia page about social bloody media. There must be a middle ground between ‘any old nut job can write whatever they want and good luck arguing with them’ and ‘only this selected group of people may control the information that the rest of the world must has to accept’.