Vibe-checking in the Fediverse as a user

Woohoo! You’re in your Fediverse instance, and…

OH NO! You just saw something that makes you want to bleach your eyes, and rip them eyeballs out of their sockets, and bleach them again! Or perhaps a post so horrible, you’re willing to write a rather colourful 10-paragraph explanation as to why their opinions are wrong.

Our scenario

You’re in an instance called weLoveCats.hehe. Yes, I know that .hehe is not a valid TLD, but that’s because our instance here is a fake one for the sake of example.

You love your instance! Most of its users are amazing. The admins are friendly. The moderators make sure the instance stays squeaky-clean of the bad stuff you don’t want in there.

Unfortunately, you can’t have perfection all the time. Some bad stuff still gets through occasionally.

NOTE: not sure how these apply to different Fediverse software, but they definitely work in Mastodon and Misskey.

Case 1: the rando you just don’t like for no particular reason

You’re doomscrolling on cat pics again. And then… you see someone who said that they didn’t like cats.

Hot take, huh? But they didn’t mean any harm and didn’t break any rules. Nonetheless, you want them out of your timeline.

Luckily, you can mute them!

You might even be able to set the duration of that mute, but at any rate, you can rest easy as you won’t be seeing any of their posts unless they @mention you.

Case 2: the meanie

So you were browsing your feed and commenting on cat vids and someone slides into your profile and DMs you: “what a miserable %$#@!”.

And it ruins your entire day. How dare they use such a slur!

You can mute them, but you might decide that you want something more forceful. Wipe them right out of your life!

Behold: the block.

You can block this user and thus you won’t be able to see any of their posts or interactions with you. You won’t be able to see anyone’s replies to them. They will be removed from your followers. They won’t be notified of you blocking them.

Case 3: the rule-breaker

But wait! A user like that… saying a slur like that… you don’t think they should be anywhere near your server!

You can report this user to your server moderators. They can decide what to do from there, whatever it is. If the user isn’t from your instance, you can also choose to report them to their instance so their moderators can take action.

Case 4: the bad army

Turns out, there are tons of randos you don’t like for no particular reason. Or tons of meanies, or tons of rule-breakers.

And they all happen to reside in the same instance called noCatsArmy.hehe. There seems to be a consistent pattern of that instance having users you just don’t like.

You can do these actions for instances too! You can mute, block and report instances as needed.

Case 5: the bad words

So your timelines are now free of horrible people. Yipee!

But one more thing still bugs you: you see lots of dog posts.

It’s not a huge issue and it’s not against the rules. But you wish you wouldn’t see so many of them, and it’s too spread out across so many users of so many instances. What can you do?

You can make filters. These filters allow you to make sure you don’t see posts that might meet certain criteria.

How advanced these critera can be depends on your instance’s software. Some might include AND/OR logic, and some can apply to instance names and user names. Some might only apply to the text in a post.

If all these dog posts annoy you, you might want to filter out the word “dog”, or perhaps go further and filter similar words like “dogs”, “pup”, “puppy”, “puppies” and such.

Some final words

And that’s some things you can do as a user to make sure your timelines pass the vibe checks and you feel nice and chill in there!

However, you’re just a user… you might be able to keep the unscrupulous characters out of your front door, but it takes a good police force to keep them out of your neighbourhood (okay, not the best analogy but whatever). That’s where your instance admins and moderators come in.