Twitter rival Mastodon isn’t safe from online mobs either

This really shouldn't be surprising.

Commentators seem to still be missing a core tenet of Mastodon: decentralization. The different instances are not some homogenous community. Each instance forms its own community with its own style of moderation and its own rules. It's absurd to comment on "Mastodon's" moderation policies or style because Mastodon itself doesn't have any. Kinda like there's no single defining set of rules for every "club" in real world.

So if you join an instance where moderators are willing to kick you out to entertain frivolous reports of misconduct, the failing is a deeper social one, and those are notoriously hard to fix technically.

So sure, if Gargron comes up with a feature that mitigates trolls' ability to bully someone they don't like off the platform, that's wonderful, but I don't think that would necessarily be in the scope of the program. You can go start your no-wheatons.club -instance with blackjack and hookers and moderate it however you like, but to me that makes you a petty person and a bad mod who can't bear the responsibility of running a social media platform.

Did anyone think Mastodon was safe from mobs? What Twitter has already made clear is the scope of the problem of social media moderation in an open-follow model. It's actually a core problem to be solved, VC economics do not incentivize solving it, and solving it in a distributed system is potentially orders of magnitude harder. The bottom line is that it's not easy when 1 out of a 1000 people can make life miserable, and many of these people having nothing better to do in their lives then to just stir the shit all day every day.

Personally I think broad social media will inevitably devolve into a Bladerunner-like cesspool, and all meaningful social activity will move to smaller, closed, or at least heavily-moderated groups.

This seems sort of like a "Duh" moment to me, but Wheaton's deference to moderators here is amusing, since no-one ever cuts Twitter any slack.

Wil Wheaton made his bed (idealized world of tattle-tales, reporting users, threatening to leave social media unless someone else gets banned), and now he has to lie in it.