Technology

In addition there is a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls: in a diverse community there will be people who so vehemently disagree with others that they interpret their good-faith comments as trolling and so will use whatever tools are available to suppress it

There is only a fundamental tension between preventing groupthink and preventing trolls when communities and moderation are defined by large monolithic entities that have to square the circle of trying to cater to everyone. That isn’t the case on the fediverse. A summation of communities with differing moderation policies, demographics, sizes, governing styles and cultural norms is fundamentally different than a monolithic single community administered by one group of people in power with one vision that makes decisions to exclude people from 99% of the online sphere of that social medium/platform. Even if the average of all the moderation policies of many small communities averages out to roughly the same moderation policy of one massive social network, the fundamental mechanics of how that play out are way different.

With a single community the edge cases become flashpoints of exploitation and trolling but with many communities the different definitions of what is unacceptable behavior and how edge cases are dealt with tends to filter out the trolls more naturally because trying to find a controversial line to tiptoe justtttt behind is useless when every community draws their red lines slightly differently (even if in spirit they are similar) and every community has different stakeholders actually enforcing and enacting the moderation. Instead of finding a line to tip toe safe just on the other side while dog whistling, trolls experience a progressive, smooth ramp up of rejection from more and more communities the more toxically they behave.