Lmao now my PR to remove trending hashtags is getting negative reactions 👌 👌
@Gargron People have told you this isnt a popularity contest. Its about safety. But go off.
@MeimuHakurei @Gargron Also known as lots of people are vocally against vaccines but they are still wrong
@Laurelai Safety? Huh?
@Sir_Boops Trending tags is a dangerous and easily weaponized tool for harassment
@Laurelai 
How? x.x
@Sir_Boops Its all fun and games until 4chan creates a trending tag filled with your dox :)
@Sir_Boops Also everywhere else the feature has been added its been used as a tool of abuse while adding virtually nothing of value
@Laurelai I'll argue it has a little value in showing people some new things! :>
@Sir_Boops Like showing nazis and terfs what hashtags trans women use (this actually happens on twitter)
@Laurelai Ya there are some real shit people out there.
@Laurelai But they could just dox anyone anyway? Don't get me wrong doxxing is a bad thing. I just don't understand how trending hashtags makes this worse?
@Sir_Boops Because it puts more eyes and attention on it. Trending tags create attention feedback loops.
@Sir_Boops Lets say instance.evil creates a bunch of accounts one day and starts the hashtag #kittensaregreat until its trending by posting someone they hates full dox along with the tag over and over and over until it trends, and along with those dox defamatory information thats somewhat believable. Now the targets life is ruined and every instance thinks he eats babies
@Sir_Boops These are things that have actually happened, details changed of course.
@Laurelai How does this differ from someone just spamming the FTL?
@Sir_Boops Because trending tags attract attention that the ftl doesnt
@Laurelai Yes but if the hashtag was trending there would be a ton of posts in it like the FTL, Not quite as many ofc. But if someone has a spamming bot army in a single instance I'm guessing they'd be blocked by 90% of instances within a day...Or even across instances look at the recent bot wave and how fast they all got the ban hammer(s) :>
@Sir_Boops Right thats fast to ban, trending hastags not so much. Please believe me when i tell you ive been a victim of cyber harassment and ive seen how they exploit these tools to additional harm
@Laurelai I don't understand the first part?
Sorry you had to be a victim of that, And I'm not Questioning that?
I'm just trying to understand this in the context of mastodon as larger social media networks moderation is worse then literal garbage when compared to mastodon so that's why i see spamming as less of an issue here as all the times I've seen it happen it's been stomped out within an hour by most never mind harassment as I'd guess that get stomped out even faster!
@Sir_Boops Harassment doesnt always get stomped out, mastodon.social for example doesnt have the best moderation and they federate with some pretty bad people. Then there was the time a serial harasser made an account and then the team would not ban him.
Theres too many "free speech" instances out there and they could manipulate trends to put evil content into peoples laps
@Laurelai But a user in question don't have to live on m.s They can pick any number of other instances!
Like if a user dislikes the moderation practices of one instance they can move to an instance where they do like it! :>
There are alot of instances out there that have alot more robust moderation practices then m.s!
@Sir_Boops Yes but the trending tags wer for *the whole federation* it wouldnt matter where you are, the evil content could be delivered to you
@Laurelai That's the point to finding an instance with moderation practices you like? So you'll only see trending good things :>
@Sir_Boops @Laurelai yeah if your federated timeline is full of bad things then your trending topics may have been as well but that’s on the admin I think
@debugninja @Sir_Boops Thats not how it would work though. its trending topics from all across the fedverse. We asked for the ability to opt out of it entirely but people threw a fit
@Laurelai @Sir_Boops I don’t think that’s how it works. For instance if I have blocked a domain on my instance there is NO possible way for me to get trending data. It would be generated only from toots my instance can see which basically means my instances federated timeline.
Looking at the code; the hook to aggregate trending hashtags is in activitypub.create which I believe confirms this.
@debugninja @Sir_Boops then why can instances ive suspended see my toots and reply to me 🤷♀️
@Laurelai @Gargron Yep - What made this place special compared to twitter is that we built the fediverse to be safe and friendly and not to cause the least amount of vocal minorities.