When my cat passed away I wept like a baby. He was my friend and companion when we travelled across the country for 10 years. It’s been 5 years since and I still tear up whenever I think about him.
I don't understand how banning it does anything to address the underlying problem of people wilfully ignoring PPE/safe working practices.
One of the "Suggested safer alternatives" is Granite which can have silica content up to 45% (Engineered stone being 95%+)
So instead of 2 years to develop silicosis it will instead take 4 years of working with the "safe alternatives"?
All the people who were cutting engineered stone with unsafe methods, are now just going to be cutting granite and other natural stone with the same safety practices that led to this being banned.
I really don't get it.
This whole "But we tried to enforce the safety standards on the industry" is a load of nonsense - How many businesses got fined or shut down for unsafe practices that caused silicosis for their staff? None.
The cycle will continue, and we'll be back here in 10 years when the "safe alternatives" are getting banned.
It’s incredible how bad tradies are at PPE. When my solar panels were being installed on my house, the electrician was happily about to drill through asbestos cement eave lining before I stopped him, and at least made him put on a disposable P2 respirator mask I had lying around. But he still released asbestos fibres into the air and the ceiling cavity where his colleagues were working, and will have got it on his clothes and hair. How many times had he done it completely unprotected at other people’s houses without even thinking? (Australian houses often contain AC sheeting in houses built between the 50s to the 80s)
With silica it’s a similar story, we were moving in to an older office block that again had asbestos in the ceiling tiles, and I was wearing a respirator because again electricians had drilled it in a bunch of places (inside this time, ended up going through very expensive decontamination a couple of days later including ripping out and replacing half of the brand new carpet). Anyway, I was in the server room where an air-conditioner guy was installing a split system unit, and he asked me about it and I told him what was happened. He then said something like “Oh yeah, I definitely should have been more careful with that kind of stuff when I was a young fella”, and then proceeds to start drilling through the double brick wall (to install the piping to the outdoor unit) with no mask or hearing protection… Cutting brick and concrete releases silica into the air too, most tradies just give no thought to using proper PPE…
Sadly that's just the culture. I've seen apprentices laughed at by old timers and called pussies because they were taking basic precautions and wearing PPE. And then to fit in they themselves took on that same attitude.
It hurts me when I see my tradie trainee husband (at school to be an auto mechanic) skip PPE in places he really shouldn't (e.g. latex gloves when handling carcinogenic fluids). I don't really know as I can do much other than state my objections to deaf ears though.
Both my grandfather and father received identical forms of bladder cancer due to improperly handling solvents without PPE. It's preventable and stupid.
A similar situation exists with mostly men who work outside and refuse to wear hats or sunscreen but develop malignant melanoma at far greater rates than other groups.
The definition of stupid is someone who believes they can smoke 5 packs a day and not get cancer. But it's the inconsiderateness of someone who doesn't love their family enough to watch out for their own health to not leave them prematurely rather than hurry death along.
My dad worked construction from 15 to 65. I’m frankly amazed that he’s not developed skin cancer - he’s had a couple of suspicious moles removed.
He is also the only person I know who went cold turkey off a pack-a-day smoking habit, and years before indoor smoking bans and higher tobacco taxes. He gained a lot of weight that he’s never managed to shift, but he’s not touched a cigarette in over 30 years.
I’m sure he inhaled and handled plenty of other awful things on job sites without any pretense at PPE. He diligently wore a hard hat and steel-toed boots, and wouldn’t let any of his crews work without them. All I can guess is that he saw some gruesome, very preventable injuries, but vague figures on higher risk in old age just didn’t quite outweigh the inconvenience of PPE.
For several years now I cannot wear a wristwatch on my left hand because of a sustained skin reaction to a mixture of automatic transmission fluid and gearbox "oil leak fixer". Don't be an idiot like me, wear the gloves.
I think I permanently trained myself out of that by looking at some arc welding when I was about 8 years old. Looked pretty, and brighter than anything I had seen before. (sun, lightning, lasers, etc) Didn't seem to hurt or cause any immediate issues.
Realized how wrong I was when I woke up the next morning, felt like I had gritty sand in my eyes for two or three days.
I walked past a guy using a pneumatic drill the other day. It was so loud I crossed the road to get away from it and my ears were ringing for a while after I'd passed him. He wasn't wearing any form of ear protection at all.
The talk in the trade is that asbestos is way overblown and it mostly affected people installing it in ships for the Navy. They worked in tight spaces with lots of asbestos in the air, lining the ship and its pipes with it, all day every day.
I don't know how true that is but I've heard the same exact story from several different contractors. I do know that getting those linoleum/asbestos floor tiles ripped up will cost you a lot to get somebody to do it for you, but there aren't any real safety precautions you need to take since it isn't getting airborne, it's basically just pure profit for the contractor.
Asbestos has affected all sorts or people, not just in the Navy. A close relative of mine who was a plumber has been diagnosed with it and it is an awful disease.
It’s also that relatively few people are affected. That’s approximately one in 100,000 people, twice as many people in the United States were murdered in 2015. It is really easy to know nobody who died from asbestos.
I'm skeptical of the story. Husband wears asbestos ridden clothes all day, maybe wears PPE and what not, but we've tied it the cancer the wife has because of her exposure to the clothes while handling them in the wash?
Even if the husband took off his clothes, separately bagged them and then handed them to his wife to clean, it's hard to see how his exposure is less to the point where only she was diagnosed.
Given the article is from the law firm representing the client in the article, I 'm dumbfounded to see people jumping onboard in agreement and not drawing fair conclusions on causation.
Smoke usually means fire yes, but not always - could be someone heating oil on a pan.
I'm certainly on board with the belief asbestos increases likelihood of cancer. But so does driving through a dirty tunnel in peak hour traffic every day of your life. Quantifying which one were more likely to 'cause' your cancer is a not a straighforward thing.
Asbestos can cause lung cancer, but also asbestosis and mesothelioma, for both of which the only known cause is asbestos exposure.
I’ve heard of a number of these cases of wives of construction workers contracting these asbestos related diseases, it’s a population that had a higher chance of contracting them (just like construction workers themselves exposed to asbestos, of which there were many in this country). As I understand it, none of this is disputed by any of the medical science, epidemiology or experts in those fields…
Since asbestos is still around in various (mostly old) materials, it is possible to have additional exposure unknowingly, but it’s quite rare to contract something like asbestosis or mesothelioma without known exposure.
Basically asbestos presents an opportunity for things to go wrong and for you to get cancer. There isn't a discrete threshold where you have been over-exposed and now have cancer - think really shit lottery tickets.
So over a population you'd generally expect to see the incidence correlate to the level of exposure, but not in a way that precludes unusual shit like this.
My understanding is that there is not a very obvious dose response curve for mesothelioma. There are some people who had occupational exposure for their entire working life and don’t get it, while there are some people that had a small number of individual exposures and do get it. I think this is what drives a lot of people to dismiss the risks of asbestos. They work around the stuff and they work with people who work around the stuff and they don’t see people getting mesothelioma, so they assume it’s not a big deal.
Official statistics (in Spain, which is where I'm from and have read them) don't agree with that. Plenty of construction workers and various related workers, like plumbers, etc. have died from asbestos.
As an anecdote, you could even die from asbestos from working at a TV station... The Spanish public TV station used asbestos as insulation in stages and apparently, when there were vibrations from loud sound, applauses, etc., dust particles fell on the workers and public. A famous TV anchor, José María Íñigo, died from that, as well as other workers from the station.
There are different varieties of asbestos. None are good for you, but some are far more deadly than others.
Western European countries (including Spain, I am guessing) and Australia tended to use the most dangerous varieties of asbestos - crocidolite and amosite. By contrast, North America and ex-USSR countries used the less carcinogenic chrysotile.
While blue asbestos was used in some applications, the vast majority of asbestos in Australian homes is chrysolite.
There were (and are) still many mesothelioma and asbestos deaths in tradesmen building with chrysolite containing products here, as well as people whose only known exposure was renovation of houses containing it.
I had some conversations with some folks who worked in asbestos removal. In the US, everyone who touches the stuff owns it forever. The bags used to pack it have the name, license #s and contact info for the company removing it. If the landfill decides 20 years from now that they no longer want it in their landfill, your company gets to pay to remove it and then dispose of it in a new landfill.
The general feeling was that every asbestos removal company goes out of business (dissolve, chapter 7) in order to escape the permanent liability of the stuff. At which point it now becomes a SuperFund issue.
Sadly no better here in Germany, which surprised me. In the UK health and safety is much more extreme. Here in Germany it’s rare to see workers taking any kind of safety precautions
My dad, who is permanently sunburnt from his half century in construction (and wasn’t terribly into most other safety measures against abstract risks), tsk-tsks the laxity of German road crews allowing workers to wear shorts in the summer. Sturdy jeans go a long way as basic leg protection, and he couldn’t imagine any construction worker in much hotter Texas forgoing them, no matter how much they have to be yelled at about hardhats.
The main thing I noticed in Germany was open construction sites with little to protect pedestrians walking through, lack of any kind of masks when working with fumes or dust, no ear protection, and no hardhats.
But still the "real men" on UK building sites and trades shun PPE. It's just a dumb man thing. I often wonder if they think every day there's a chance of a woman seeing and thinking how manly and hot they are for not even needing wimpy protection. Here the construction vehicles have a green flashing light on to indicate that the user has a seat belt on. They get round that by just buckling up then sitting on the belt. Tbh that one seems a bit silly but there's probably a good reason for it.
Perhaps, though still my experience seeing building sites in the UK still seems to have way more health and safety and risk assessments. As I said in the other comment, in Germany it's not rare at all to see road workers with heavy machinery, fumes, and dust, who are wearing no ear protection, no goggles, no mask, and no hard hat. That would be an extremely rare sight in the UK.
I was recently in Malta and saw a bloke in shorts and t-shirt start angle grinding into the pavement in the middle of a busy road. Definitely would never see that in the UK.
Sadly that is not an uncommon sight around where I am in London, where there is a high number of Eastern European tradespeople who either know no better or simply don't care.
Doubt it has anything to do with women. More like poor long term risk assessment leading to immediate tasks and short term goals being prioritized over more abstract longer term goals.
You've probably crossed a road at a non-ideal location right? Because you had somewhere to be and you figured you were paying attention - the risk was managed. Same dynamic basically.
I've seen some behavior on German job sites that blows my mind as an Australian (and from this discussion it's pretty clear Aussie tradies aren't saints).
Zero compliance with hard hats, straddling a 4th story window without fall protection, incredibly sketchy scaffolding, dust everywhere etc. I was half expecting a worker fatality at some point.
Though I'm not sure I'd blame the Germans (other than for very lax oversight) it was an entirely Eastern European work crew. Which seems to be the case for many job sites around here. Bunch of young folks hustling for money to take home with zero regard for health and safety.
There's a lot of people living in really old substandard houses with Asbestos here in Canada too. The decline of the middle class, and economy where a new house costs 1 million, while the average salary is 59k made it nearly impossible for people to afford to build a new house. So the vas† majority of people in old homes will be stuck in them.
Asbestos is fine if you dont drill/breathe it. If its fire insulant between drywall it was never proven to be health issue. Its not like its radioactive or something
I mean, you probably should disclose your property has asbestos to trades working on your house - and they probably would wear the right PPE. Lots of people are fine with small risks with regular materials like sheetrock on small jobs (cutting a hole or something).
But really, that should've been disclosed to workers as they enter your property.
I honestly don’t think it would have made a difference - he was going to drill it anyway after I stopped him, I had to ask him to please use the respirator.
In the commercial case we had also very clearly told them that it was asbestos containing but there was some miscommunication to the workers, so they just drilled all these holes…
Anyway, at the end of the day, while there are rules for commercial buildings to have asbestos registers, I wouldn’t expect every homeowner to know what every part of their house is made of, but at the same time, basically every building built for a period of more than 60 years in Australia contains (or contained) asbestos containing materials - so it’s a pretty scary lack of training or ignoring of the risks for somebody working in the building industry to not take even basic precautions when at least 1/3 or so of the houses these people are working in contains asbestos. For the solar guys, the eaves are the most likely place for it to exist, because even when houses have been pretty extensively renovated inside and had a lot of the AC sheeting removed indoors (as mine has), or might not have had asbestos sheeting inside originally (plaster was more expensive, so a more premium finish), it’s one part that was very likely to have still been AC sheeting (since it was mould resistant) and much less likely to have been replaced with non-asbestos fibreboard in the meantime.
Okay well you clearly have a great life with a lot to live for, but that's not really the case for everyone. How about you don't judge people you're calling "tradies" for how they decide to live their lives.
Did you even read the article? These people are very young, and deeply regret the way they decided to live their lives. And tradies is not some kind of slur, it's how they refer to their colleagues across the trades. And wtf is up with just assuming these people who don't wear PPE don't think they have a great life with a lot to live for, there's literally a 35yr old dude with 3 loving kids in one of the pictures of affected persons.
Sorry you're feeling bad, hope you get out of it soon. I'm a bit tired working two jobs and a baby at home so I probably went in a bit too hard as well.
> All the people who were cutting engineered stone with unsafe methods, are now just going to be cutting granite and other natural stone with the same safety practices that led to this being banned.
> I really don't get it.
Before engineered stone took off like crazy people were already cutting natural stone, working as stone masons, working at BGC quarries (stone mining, crushing, grading, delivery).
After engineered stone became fashionable the rates of silicosis in under 35 year old tradespeople spiked in a sharply noticable way.
After the engineered stone ban things will likely return to previous levels of "it happens but it's acceptably rare".
For whatever reason ( . . . insert theory . . . ) engineered stone manufacture and cutting is much much much worse wrt health issues.
For whatever reason your desk bound rational rule of thumb doesn't track against the data.
Not saying those figures aren't valid, but isn't it also possible that the increased affordability of man-made stone meant that these workers were doing more "stone" installations as opposed to tile or other options?
"The qualitative comparison of in vitro responses between the categories of particles we examined revealed some interesting patterns. Firstly, the ES dusts were the most potent stimulus in inducing cytotoxicity and pro-inflammatory responses in epithelial cells while the standard silica sample was particularly toxic to macrophages. All particles (ES, BM,NS and standard silica) showed some potential to promote IL-8 (CXCL8) and TNF-α production in macrophages, as well as IL-1β, with the exception of natural stone. These observations are consistent with our overarching hypothesis that particle characteristics are key drivers of the lung cell response and, therefore, the risk of disease. In more in-depth analyses with a focus on ES dusts, we found that the quartz concentration was significantly associated with the inflammatory response in macrophages. This is an important observation as there has been consistent rhetoric regarding the crystalline silica content of ES being the key driver of the high disease prevalence. 7,39Indeed, crystalline silica has been shown to be related to the dose-dependent macrophage accumulation response,40aggravated inflammatory cell infiltration, thickened alveolar walls and enhanced expression of collagens. 41However, the relationship between quartz and the macrophage inflammatory response was not the sole driver of the cellular responses we observed."
IIRC in the nineties and earlier, porcelain tile countertops were very common. Granite and marble were exotic.
Porcelain is high in silicates, but not so high in silica. Glaze is (I think) amorphous, like glass. And your average tile installer cuts with a wet saw.
Marble is mostly calcium carbonate. Granite contains lots of quartz.
Porcelain is also easy to cut with a tile saw, and tile saws make very little dust. Porcelain tile doesn’t look fun to cut with a dremel or angle grinder.
> For whatever reason ( . . . insert theory . . . ) engineered stone manufacture and cutting is much much much worse wrt health issues.
My theory: engineered stone allowed us plebs to get stone benches. Previously we had stainless, Formica and other bench tops that were less toxic to work with.
Or the size of the particles. Cutting engineered stone has been shown to generate large quantities of extremely fine particles (< 1 µm). Cutting natural stone or driving on a dirt road, the typical particle sizes are much larger.
Yes, it is. There's an ABC article about this, they interviewed one particular business owner who has gone to great lengths to get good equipment which cuts engineered stone with wet saws which don't generate dust, and has worked hard to instill a culture of safety with his workers. Nobody working there has silicosis.
As per the rest of the comments here, it just seems that most tradies would rather literally die than implement any reasonable safety precaution.
> In February 2021, a WorkSafe Inspector attended the workplace and observed
an employee using a powered abrasive polishing tool to abrasively polish a slab
of white coloured stone which was from the brand Stone Ambassador. The tool
was being used without the required control measures in place. Instead, the
employee was applying water to the stone from a bottle with a small hole in the
lid when the tool was in use.
It's the bozos working with the stuff without proper PPE.
I watched a grave marker carver absolutely bathing in dust with just a thin bandanna, I was in there for 5 minutes and was left choking in their hazardous work environment.
WitH sufficient PPE and dust control, it's not a problem. This is just barking up the wrong tree because they can't get workers to not be idiots, so they pick a scapegoat to ban at random. It's not fucking asbestos. It's apparent but ineffective motion by expediency.
Is it that or is it that someone doesn't want to pay for those industrial-scale air cleaners?
I got a little interested in particulate air quality during covid so I ran across the entrepreneurs selling them. You can probably make the air in a quarry as clean as in a surgery room, if you're willing to pay.
There is an easy, cheap and well-tested air cleaner: wet cutting, i.e. cutting under running water. All dust will be bound in the runoff, almost no airborne particles. But it is messy (often not doable indoors, because you splatter everything with rock slurry) and just a little more expensive gear than for dry cutting. So nobody does it...
I don't think seeing one person do something can really compare to having a dedicated taskforce do 2 years of research into an industry, in terms of understanding risk and what practical options there are to manage said risk.
> A total of 12 successful prosecutions have been reported since 2021,
with many related to the uncontrolled processing (dry cutting) of engineered stone materials
OK, fair, and tragic, but is the only solution banning it entirely? What about requiring PPE?
There are a whole lot of jobs that are safe when done properly and unsafe, when not done properly. It seems as if they are punishing an entire industry for not knowing what they didn’t know.
Cutting stone and keeping 100% of it out of your lungs is nearly impossible, especially when you are working in uncontrolled environments like someone's kitchen that is being renovated.
The PPE available for this sort of work is just not up to the job.
Making driving 100% safe is nearly impossible, but we drive cars built to good crash standards with seatbelts, ABS, AEB, etc. People still die on the roads, but these safety features reduce risk to an acceptable level. Likewise, using decent PPE won't 100% eliminate risk, but it will greatly improve it. Just because PPE isn't 100% effective doesn't mean you shouldn't use it.
The other kind of obvious solution with engineered stone is to avoid cutting it at the installation site. If it's cut to spec at the factory in a controlled environment (surely not that difficult in this age of CAD design etc), you wouldn't be blasting dust around during installation.
You inadvertently make a good point that driving should probably be taxed a lot heavier in most places.
It's reasonably safe for other people in cars, but it's hell for pedestrians, wheel-chair users and cyclists. So much so, that we have re-organised our whole society around avoiding this danger. Eg kids don't play on the streets anymore.
I agree with this. But perhaps a lot of it is just perception? In my country pedestrian deaths have fallen dramatically since the mid-1980s, by about 80%, despite the size of the vehicle fleet getting much larger. Were there more pedestrian deaths in the 1980s because more kids played on the streets? Or because cars and drivers were less safe and less aware of the risks? It certainly wasn't because there were more cars!
Cars and streets have also been getting safer here: advanced pedestrian and cyclist-aware AEB is already in many cars - and becomes mandatory in all new cars in Europe from July 2024. Streets are getting safer with better designs (more choke points, raised pedestrian crossings, etc), and speed limits being reduced in urban/residential areas.
Although good materials, acrylics and laminates are not quite as durable as engineered stone countertops. They tend to show more wear over time, and are more prone to damage from extreme heat etc. Some may consider the look and feel of stone to be more "premium".
But of course they're cheaper and lighter and probably still cheaper than stone even if you end up replacing them a couple of times over the lifetime of the kitchen...
Polished concrete is another decent alternative to engineered stone, although again perhaps not as durable.
> Cutting stone and keeping 100% of it out of your lungs is nearly impossible, especially when you are working in uncontrolled environments like someone's kitchen that is being renovated.
I'm building a house, and I have a stone countertop installed. None of the cutting was done on-site. All the work was done in a specialized workshop.
I think that’s simply untrue. You’re not cutting the stone in kitchens, it’s cut at the warehouse and transported to the kitchen. In the US we’ve regulated this and while our record isn’t 100% safety due to non-compliance (which is always the case) we’ve got a much lower rate than Australia despite presumably selling a lot more of it.
Tooling and PPE are part of the problem but not all of it. People who clean up job sites are also getting sick:
> "We actually not only saw people who were directly cutting and grinding the stone, but we saw people who were just sweeping up the work site after the stone had been cut," says Rose. "They were exposed to the silica particles that were suspended in the air just with housekeeping duties."
So, basically everyone needs to wear a P100 all the time when on site until the site has totally been cleaned up. In a manufacturing environment, if you're on the floor you wear a mask and there must be a dust collection system and tools that perform dust collection or mitigation. In this case that'd be water saws.
Read the threads here, a lot people don't like wearing respirators. The outcome isn't surprising.
Contractors with brooms are a huge pet peeve of mine at a construction site. Seriously, WTF? You take all the dust and re-suspend as much of it as possible into the air?
Every construction site should have a HEPA-filtered vacuum with a filter bag. (The bagless kind is to be reserved for special cases that need it, and people should wear respirators when emptying it, TYVM.). Brooms are for non-vacuumable debris only, and subcontractors should be reminded of this regularly.
Keeping dust down with water sprayers should be a thing. Also, there should be particulate counters and VOC sensors all around sites to indicate what level of PPE is non-obvious but needed.
For indoor construction, a water sprayer seems like a mistake. It would turn all that only-mildly-nasty dust into hard-to-remove goo, not to mention making wood soggy and damaging gypsum and other materials.
I've noticed that a lot in public outdoor construction where I live the last ~10 years. Whenever there's the slightest chance of dust, they have giant water mist spraying machines in addition to the PPE.
may i ask where you live? I’ve worked outdoor construction as a teen for a while, even up till now, I’ve never seen mist sprayers in use round here in Germany.
yeah, i think they are pretty standard for demo work around the world afaik. Very interesting, Germany tends to be hellishly strict on building codes and such, but PPE is seriously lacking over here. It bred the mother of all toxic cavalier attitudes.
The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.
The industry is set up so you only get paid for doing the job. If doing it unsafely means doing it faster or being more comfortable then a lot of small time contractors will take that short term gain despite the long term risks.
I don’t know how we incentivize doing the right thing more here.
> The problem with “always wear a p100” is that they’re not comfortable in an unventilated uncooled house which is where a lot of construction happens. If everyone is wearing one you also need to take more breaks which eats into time to do the job.
Also, solutions that require people to consistently do uncomfortable things are not realistic; we know they will fail to comply - just like we would - and they will get sick.
For comfort you'd probably want to get a positive air pressure mask. Those things are wildly underrated. Can even stick on a volatiles filter when relevant.
Yeah, those helmets that are basically face shields with optional hard hat and neck hood are generally speaking fairly comfortable: wide FOV, zero difficulty breathing, and an entire face shield (not just eye "shield") almost casually integrated.
As long as you're working where you dare to go without full-on SCBA, a high-enough-tier variant of the e.g. 3M face shield helmets will suffice.
Bonus points for being able to easily just run an external air hose feed into the helmet when working in environments that don't kill you if you dare to take the helmet off in an emergency.
This is what I wear for carpentry/wood working. It's almost identical to the mask I wore in the military for CBRN just different filters and far lighter. Suggestion to look for masks that have larger outter and inner seals if you have glasses or low cut facial hair/stubble respectively as they'll continue to seal.
I believe 3M makes a mask that pretty much doesn't have a seal at all, instead relying on the positive air pressure to keep crap out. That has always seemed like the best solution comfort-wise to me. Anything that seals to the face will end up sweaty at the seals. Should work with basically any variety of lush woodworking beard too.
You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises where building works appear to be progressing. You strictly limit what they are permitted to observe and record and require recording of reasonable suspicion. Refusal to grant entry is itself an offence.
Approaches like this would work but are also a huge can of worms.
>You pass a law giving a class of inspector the right to enter premises
In most countries (and I'd expect to include Australia), there cannot be a blanket invasion of privacy - and it'd require a court order. The amount of paper would would be ridiculous, then what if I do that on my own, or I used a cousin to do it for me, for free?
The customer would be made to sign a contract allowing random state inspection.
> what if I do that on my own, or I used a cousin to do it for me, for free?
You and your cousin could decide to go and mud wrestle crocodiles, but we'd still ban opening an amusement park where that was offered to members of the public.
I mean, if we can't incentivize doing the right thing by teaching people that they'll die of a respiratory disease in their 30s if they don't wear their PPE, then honestly, that's life. If people choose to do their job in a way that gives them high risk of bad health outcomes, that's on them.
Certainly if workers are being coerced into not doing the right thing, that's a problem, and employers need to be fined into oblivion if they pull that crap.
If it's uncomfortable or takes longer to do it safely, that cost should be passed on to the person paying for the work.
It would be ridiculous to have any responsibility on the customer.
The only feasible order is government, employer, then worker. The government is tasked with the making the rules and surprise inspections, and the rest follows from there.
Well, the customer also has a lot of power. They can decide to hire a company (if available of course) that encourages/forces their workers to use PPE, even if it's a little more expensive (and maybe also takes longer) instead of just going for the lowest bidder...
How would a customer verify that? They are supposed to also monitor the worksite? And be knowledgeable about consistent work and the type of PPE it requires?
It's not really that hard to understand PPE requirements.
Is it dusty? Wear a mask.
Is it loud? Hearing protection.
And everyone should wear shoes with steel caps.
If you see someone with a bandana over their mouth in sandals you know they are unsafe. They know it too. This is not something that is difficult to understand.
And then what? The customer takes pictures and reports them to the government? Fires them? What if there is a dispute, the laborer takes the customer to court for false claims?
Who polices the customer? The logistics of making everyone a cop make no sense to me.
If you see your contractor not using PPE, you just tell them to put it on. Just like you'd tell him to do it properly if you saw him cutting corners somewhere else.
Contractors want to get paid, so they generally tend to do what the person paying the bill asks them to do.
I wonder instead of these diesel or whatever bans. Why not mandate that everyone wears sufficient PPE 24/7. I mean protecting your health instead of removing source seems entirely reasonable in that mindset.
There’s got to be ways to cut stone that don’t involve people sweeping up the dust with a broom. Water jets, wet saws, or even just a water mister and a wet/dry vac with a filter is going to be much better than just going about the same process with a different stone that they hope won’t be as bad on their lungs.
The sad state of australian industry is that there's very little investment in tooling, plant and equipment.
Businesses don't want to invest, and even if they do, they find it hard to find any financing as banks don't want to lend. It makes such tooling expensive, and thus a lot of small businesses don't (or can't) upgrade their tooling.
Uh... tough shit? If you'll most likely get an often-fatal respiratory disease from not wearing your respirator, and you still don't wear your respirator, maybe that's just Darwin in action there.
Banning the entire thing is just dumb, assuming there are actually PPE and mitigations that will keep people healthy. If people don't follow the safety rules, they should be fired. If companies don't implement the safety rules, they should be fined a significant portion of their revenue.
If following the safety practices means it costs more to do a particular thing, then the people paying for that thing should pay more.
The trade off in this regulation is young people dying vs middle class people being able to afford a countertop that looks a bit more expensive than it actually is.
I'm amazed at the person cited in the article who worked in administration at a quarry, developed silicosis and didn't know what it was. That suggests it's not just people willfully ignoring PPE practices, it's that they genuinely have no clue how dangerous rock dust is.
Exposure to RCS from engineered stone causes silicosis typified by a faster onset and more rapid progression than that caused by RCS [Respirable crystalline silica] from other sources, including natural stone.
When engineered stone is processed, the dust generated contains higher levels of RCS, and that RCS has different physical and chemical properties that likely contribute to the more rapid and severe disease. There is also evidence to suggest that other components of engineered stone may contribute to the toxic effects of engineered stone dust, either alone or by exacerbating the effects of RCS.
...
The increased risks posed by RCS from engineered stone, increased rate of silicosis diagnosis amongst
engineered stone workers, and the faster and more severe disease progression amongst this group,
combined with a multi-faceted failure of this industry to comply with the model WHS laws means that
continued work with engineered stone poses an unacceptable risk to workers. The use of all engineered
stone should be prohibited.
Agreed - I'm surprised the Aussie version of OSHA isn't the one taking care of this problem. I feel really bad for the early workers who didn't know getting affected. That's downright terrible.
But I imagine there's a method of safely working with this material. And, there's ALWAYS going to be hazardous materials - you can't ban them all. You raise the standard of the people working with materials. This feels like - oh melting steel is too hot and can be dangerous - we'll ban melting steel.
NOW, if it's like asbestos and the end consumer can get affected then I 100% agree with this ruling.
thanks I appreciate the link. Looks like the one we're interested in this thread is Option 4 (also 5b to cover other things like granite). They did a pretty good laying out the details.
I've worked previously as a firefighter, a lot of the stuff that we do can be considered high risk. PPE is incredibly important however there are several issues I have noticed while working with PPE.
1. PPE can get in the way of being efficient.
From personal experience this is one of the most painful things. Engineers design equipment to meet requirements. The people setting these requirements are often bureaucrats who have no knowledge of what it feels like to be doing the manual labor. Some of them may never have even handled any heavy machinery in their life - the end result is you end up with unergonomic tools. Since, the workers are not the ones paying for the tools, the upper management will select things that hit their own KPIs. Some how you are expected to hit unrealistic throughputs with tools that dont work well with your PPE. End result is most people will neglect PPE and find ways around it.
2. PPE upkeep
One has to keep equipment in good condition. Using boots with holes is not going to be a good idea. Corporate culture however is such that they make replacing PPE very painful, in part because PPE is ridiculously expensive in certain contexts. Good managers and supervisors will make sure their crew has safe equipment but often have to take the blame if they overspend. Lazy managers/supervisors will make it a nightmare if anything gets damaged. Unfortunately the number of lazy supervisors far outstrips good supervisors. This can result in things like black markets for PPEs.
3. Workplace culture
It can be "manly" to do things in an unsafe manner. This takes a lot of work to solve but the best way to solve it is by trying to inculcate a culture where people don't cause suffering for others just because they suffered. There is no need to "pay forward" a malpractice. If someone abused you earlier for conforming to something, that doesn't give you the right to abuse your junior. The problem is people who do this kind of change often go unnoticed.
I have no insight into Australia's workings here, in California this kind of WTF can happen in the sort of situation where there is an industry that is being disrupted/destroyed by the 'thing' in question and as a result a way is found to make the 'thing' bad (but not in a way that just says "It makes other options noncompetitive but in a way you can't argue with." Health issues are the go to straw man in that case.
You absolutely could create big fines for the contracting and construction companies that sold an engineered stone solution which would protect the workers as it would be noncompetitive to not follow the rules and risk a huge fine. But that wouldn't help the granite and stainless steel countertop folks would it? Or the contractors that install granite or stainless steel.
Specially when stuff you are comparing something rather novel basically existed before animals moved on land. Stone formations wearing down can causing dust has happened for hundreds of millions of years, if not billions. Biological systems are quite adapted to this type of exposure.
Just like heavy metals, some poisons, and some radioactivity.
I believe people work in mines develops silicosis all the time. Isn't this exactly where we found silicosis exists? Cutting natural stone didn't seems to be a 100% safe-proof option in my opinion.
Medical data shows that people who work in mines develop silicosis some of the time.
Cutting natural stone is not a 100% safe occupation (like almost every occupation).
The specific difference here in the case in Australia is that since Engineered Stone first entered the Australian market in the early 2000’s medical data shows a significant rise in silicosis cases.
It's not that Before Engineered Stone was 100% safe,
it's that Post Engineered Stone appears to be considerably less safe.
Maybe it's the resin, maybe it's the particle size that's so uniform, maybe it's a coincidence . . .
The Australian government has 2 levers. Tax or Ban.
Their reasons are usually bullshit, such as their Vape ban, which implies that border farce cant keep nicotine out of the country in this one specific product category.
Year ago I was cleaning my flat after renovation, there was lots of dust settled everywhere and my first thought was - how do I protect my lungs? There were many one-time-use face masks in hardware store, but those masks did not look like good enough- mainly because of lack of filter. So I bought slightly more expensive aparatus with proper filters. Yet, trademen who were doing the work did not care, they were not wearing anything to prevent dust from being inhaled. I felt so bad for them that I was vacuuming whole place each evening when they were gone (including walls), so at least they would start with no dust... Still, I was wondering how much of their future suffer will be because I was not asking them to protect themselves...
They know the risks, if they choose to be idiots that's on them.
Invest in some good PPE that doesn't get in the way. I have an air-fed mask I use when spraying lacquer, I do woodworking as a hobby. My small shop is set up with two different filtration systems to keep dust and VOC out of the air. I refuse to use isocyanate catalyzed compounds because of the health implications.
Completely anecdotal but my father in law is a stone mason at 75 years old, working since 16 and wears zero PPE. Not even ear muffs on a large cutting machine the size of an SUV. Wears open toe sandals. Incredibly, he is insanely fit, not an ounce of hearing loss, and works full time to this day. I helped him lay a stone wall this year and I dare say he’s possibly stronger than me at almost half his age.
I mean if people break the law there's no need for the law? Speeding is illegal and kills many. The alternative, driving slower, is not perfectly safe. I guess the Germans don't criminalise speeding?
It’s a lot easier to get a one to three month driving ban in Germany for speeding than in the US, and a driving ban in Germany means “you may not drive at all.”
20 mph over gets a one month driving ban plus about a 200 EUR fine.
Only the longer, rural stretches of Autobahns still have unlimited speed, and your insurance probably has the condition that they won’t pay out if you were going over the national recommended limit (130 km/h, or about 80 mph)
It’s a looser driving environment than most of its neighbors (Switzerland is covered in speed cameras), but it’s nowhere near the nationwide speed track a lot of Americans imagine it is.
Get caught speeding enough, and you can lose your license for longer, or even for life. Driving is a privilege in Germany - there’s always the bus and train, or somewhere to move that has them.
just saying, Germany enforces speeding laws DAMN strict. We have radar cameras ("Blitzer") and random police patrols with handheld or mobile equipment.
The only thing different here is that we don’t have a general speed limit, if sections of the autobahn meet the safety requirements, they can be marked unrestricted. You can drive as fast as you want there, but the majority of sections are limited to 130km/h due to steep(ish) curves, visibility, traffic and noise pollution guidelines.
That said, we do love our Autobahn and there ARE quite a few unrestricted sections left, my favorite is the A30. All open, starting at the NL border up until Osnabrück.
It's really frustrating to be bathing in these holier-than-thou attitudes on the Internet these days. I've noticed the language on social media is also getting worse. I really enjoy the people you can meet on the internet, but the flippant disrespect is really hard for me to accept as normal. OP your comment is not the worst of them, but it seems to be indicative of a trend. I wish you well.
Just went to the 'Programming' lemmy/beehaw and the first thing I see is a post about how they have had to defederate from some instances because of a lack of proper mod tools, trolls and bad actors.
> these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
> unfortunate reality we’ve also found is we just don’t have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don’t scale well. we have a list of improvements we’d like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible–but we’re unanimous in the belief that we can’t wait on what we want to be developed here.
One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other.
At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how you count metrics) site was poa.st, and this was on a mastodon.social blacklist, which was one of the other major sites, and every site had their own list. I know people would sometimes have 4 or 5 accounts so that they could talk to everyone they wanted or as insurance in case the current admin got bored and closed the site.
I of course support the idea of a federated reddit, but there are a lot of problems that exist in the community
> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it.
This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace.
It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are almost indistinguishable from the ones found on commercial networks. In one case, it's business interests that drive culture, in the other, it's the egos and personal ideologies of the most powerful community members.
Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?
The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.
Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.
However, the worst that can happen to you is that you stop interacting. This is as opposed to Reddit, where you can get removed from the platform as a whole, so it's still an improvement.
Lemmy and general Fediverse centers the workflow of spinning up your own community even against the will of the entire rest of the ecosystem. This is in complete opposition to Twitter, Reddit etc.
Usually ego is worse. Money is inclusive - anybody can have money. If the decisions are made purely on money (this never happens in reality, but speaking theoretically) then any community of considerable size can find a home - it's money, so somebody would want to take it. When egos and ideologies come in, then splintering and exclusion runs rampant.
That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.
> That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation
People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.
But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.
Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.
Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!"
At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.
Big e-mail providers are primarily concerned with spam–which is defined by the volume and unsolicited nature of the messages, rather than the opinions they express. Sometimes their attempts at stopping it impose collateral damage, and their response to that collateral damage can be arbitrary and capricious–but that's a different issue from what we are talking about with Mastodon coordinated de-federation, which is much more intentional than collateral.
The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.
By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1
> But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.
That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
On this Lemmy thing I guess the solution is to just maintain multiple accounts - each on a server connected to a particular cluster of servers.
> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
Almost no one runs a personal instance. Most people have accounts on multi user instances. This is unlike reddit, where accounts are global and independent of subreddits. On reddit, mods from subreddit B can preemptively ban you after they learn that subreddit A doesn't like you. But they can't ban entire subreddit, say C, so that every user that's subscribing to C can no longer interact with anyone subscribed to B. This is the scenario that plagues Mastodon - not individual blocks, but defederating whole instances.
> That's how it is on Reddit too no? You visit and post a comment on subreddit A, somehow mods in subreddit B will find out and pre-emptively ban you.
I've been avoiding Reddit recently, but when I used to use it – I never agreed with that kind of behaviour, and any subreddit which does it is one I don't want to be part of.
However, that said, that's community-level not instance-level, and so I'm not sure what that has to do with federation.
IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.
There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot ever work. This is not the 90s where most people online were academics and you could get away with everyone building their own Killfile over time.
> The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.
Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.
Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation.
If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.
Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.
It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.
> If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole.
The most popular instances are the platform. Yes, you can run your own instance, with only yourself as a user. Unless others choose to federate with you, that's the equivalent of calling your blog a social network. And if the biggest instances impose their own rules on others under threat of severing federation, the freedom to run your instance as you wish exists only in theory.
Whenever you get a bunch of people together you have to have rules or you get the inevitable mentally ill person who starts to troll or try to spread racism. Think 8chan or 4chan on steroids. It just has to be done. Hopefully the rules are permissive enough to allow reasoned debate on topics between diverse opinions. However I don't need to know your political leanings in all caps while discussing the latest news so pitch that guy off. If I'm being rude or ranting pitch me off.
But then federated services operate on the level of a single subreddit, not that of reddit. That's fine, but they will never replace social networks (which unfortunately means we'll have to live with big corps running those).
How do people feel about having some of the open-source LLMs offloading some of the moderation burdens? I understand it sounds rather dystopian, but I also feel if the model is developed transparently, it may offer a solution to the moderation problem.
Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large.
Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large.
The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers.
It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).
Beehaw was around a long time before Lemmy took the spotlight, and they explicitly have tried to have a high-moderation community with a distinct character. It wouldn't surprise me if they continue to defederate any instance with open registration.
There are other programming communities on other servers that will likely become the actual replacement for r/programming.
EDIT: The "What is Beehaw?" post in their sidebar[0] is a really enlightening introduction to the community, and also quite interesting for developing an understanding of the fediverse as a whole. This isn't going to be a drop-in replacement for Reddit because the admins will all have very different visions of the kinds of communities they want to create. I didn't end up deciding to join Beehaw, but reading their post made me very hopeful for the future of the fediverse as a whole.
I like this miniature manifesto (Beehaw). Sadly I don’t think the mod policies outlined in it are something scalable for the masses, but if you’re trying to build a cool, tight knit community it feels like it will work really well.
> Initially, most IRC servers formed a single IRC network, to which new servers could join without restriction, but this was soon abused by people who set up servers to sabotage other users, channels, or servers. Restriction grew and, in August 1990, eris.Berkeley.EDU was the last server indiscriminately allowing other servers to join it, Eris being the Greek goddess of strife and discord.
> A group of operators, with the support of Jarkko Oikarinen, introduced a new "Q-line" into their server configurations, to "quarantine" themselves away from eris by disconnecting from any subset of the IRC network as soon as they saw eris there.
Moderation in the fediverse (inc. Mastodon & Lemmy) means defederating from "problematic" instances, where problematic is defined in the rules of the server doing the federating server (which appears to be documented at https://beehaw.org/instances)
This means moderation happens at a community & instance level rather than global moderation.
Please correct me if I'm missing something - I'm quite new to Mastodon & the fediverse like I'm sure many are!
That's correct. Defereration is a moderation tool. There are instances which explicitly cater to bad behaviour and they will be dropped by many others. It's fine. (Yes yes, it's not perfect and random problems do happen)
It's actually problematic when instances get too large to fail (like the two biggest mastodon ones), because when their mods cannot cope anymore, you can't realistically ban the whole insurance - too many users would be affected.
But that's still better than a single global namespace where you have to deal with single accounts every time.
>It's actually problematic when instances get too large to fail (like the two biggest mastodon ones), because when their mods cannot cope anymore
Or like Twitter, and every other large social media network. So much straight up criminal stuff flies under the radar simply because it's impossible for a handful of people to police that many people.
But we were told "You can access all content in the lemmyverse from any server/instance" (1). If lemmyworld is a "problematic" instance, why is it one of the recommended sites to join? Seems like the messaging is confusing for new users.
Yeah, I created an account in lemmyworld simply because it was the first one in the list, and this move from beehaw pisses me infinitely. So now I do have to trash all the work I did subscribing because they threw a tantrum?
Well, they can have their server to themselves, I'm not going to subscribe to another server only to see it also blocked. They have proven to be the unreliable ones.
I hope the rest of the network retaliates and defederate beehaw. That's the right thing to do. If they want to be alone, grant their wishes and make them alone.
This has been my primary concern about federated reddit. With mastodon etc, the defederation stuff is tolerable because you aren't as likely to have any reason to care about the instance defederating from you anyway.
For instance, the free-speech instances weren't going to be interested in dealing with the typical Twitter refugee anyway, and both would be content in their own corner.
But with federated forums this changes, as now you're expecting users from other instances to form a community with your users, so you're heavily incentivised to only work with instances who place the same emphasis on the rules, and unless each "clique" is fine with duplicating all the common forum topics for their own users, the result is that a very small group of people gets to take everyone's content hostage to impose their own will on the community.
So we're back to the same Reddit issue of a few people controlling the majority of the content.
I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.
The point is that "federating" with a remote instance means accepting posts from users on that instance that you have no control over. If "host" is a rogue instance that's sending spam all over the place, it makes sense that other parts of the network will defederate from it. It's still a global namespace, users are just limited in where they can post if they are on an untrusted instance.
The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable.
I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc.
Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?
On a service like Reddit a user can simply visit or join subreddits they are interested in, and ignore subreddits they are not interested, or which they find offensive.
The way the Fediverse works, as it is explained to newcomers, is that you can follow any topic on any server regardless of which server you are one. The expectation is that the graph is complete. When the graph is not complete, suddenly you can't follow your favorite topic because some users talking about a different topic did something that the admin on the other server isn't happy with. The whole server gets disconnected. Whichever server you choose to join, you always have the risk of getting defederated for things you have nothing to do with. Yes, you can change to a different server, but changing servers is not nearly as frictionless as it's sometimes made out to be.
In Usenet, to name another decentralized service, this is completely different. Servers can decide to carry or not carry a newsgroup, but they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups. (That's not to say that Usenet doesn't have problems of its own.)
> they don't cut off a complete server for what happens in one of the newsgroups
Back in the dark ages when I was running a Usenet site, we would definitely drop servers if they were more hassle (spamming, providing blocked material, etc.) than we wanted to deal with.
Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?
Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
I don't, but I don't want to see it either or allow them to see my stuff since I'm extremely anti-nazi and anti-fascist and don't them to come trolling me. Nor do I want them using my resources to try and bring young impressionable people into their fold.
> Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts
Email providers very explicitly do care. You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example. If an email account was serving me nazi propaganda I would inform the platform, and if it was coming from a specific email provider they would likely be blacklisted. Keep in mind this already happens when it comes to spam; the difference is that nazis are not blasting random emails with nazi stuff so it becomes much harder to track.
> Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?
Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare and sites that were full of people harassing and harming other users. Responsibility eventually falls on someone and that someone was the host provider.
> Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?
Because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated instances and content works, which is why I recommend you actually interact with those services before trying to make arguments. A user isn't subscribing to sub XYZ, they're a user of an instance which has subs XYZ and which federates to instance ABC. This is important because the instance is serving you that info, so if I like XY but hate AB, the instance can serve me content, users etc which are a part of AB. In fact, this is why Reddit does exactly what you seem to think they don't do. Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits due to the content of their posts or how likely they are to troll. Defederation is a more explicit form of that.
That wasn't what I was asking though – I was asking whether a user should care. Why should I care who else uses my email provider, if I never interact with them?
> You can be banned from gmail for especially egregious things for example.
Gmail will only ban you for "especially egregious things". The Mastodon Server Covenant clause 1 calls for banning people for things which Gmail would not consider "especially egregious". A big difference.
> Generally speaking, yes. We went over this before with Cloudflare
I don't consider who a CDN's other customers might be when deciding which CDN to use. I'm sure many CDNs provide services to websites advocating viewpoints which I view as foolish, even reprehensible–but I don't see what relevance that has to my own decision as to which CDN I should use for my own site.
> Many subreddits have bots, automod etc that will ban people that are from certain subreddits
I think that kind of behaviour is toxic, and I would never knowingly participate in any subreddit that did that. But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.
> But, in any event, that's a community-level issue, not an instance-level one, and as such I'm not sure what it has to do with the topic of federation.
Instance == Community. The rest of your post I've already addressed and I'm not going to go over again. You calling out the Mastodon Server Covenant does not particularly make sense because it's not an authority, it's a listing of servers. Again you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works given that you keep using incorrect comparisons.
A whole instance is not necessarily a single community.
People keep on defending Mastodon by comparing it to email – an email provider is not necessarily a community.
If we are talking about a federated Reddit-clone (Mastodon is more a federated Twitter-clone) – the communities are the subreddits (or whatever the clone chooses to call them) not the instances.
An instance is a community, period. This is like trying to argue that subforums on a forum is not a single community. They may be smaller blocks within a larger community, but they still form a larger community as a whole and adhere to a generalized ruleset.
You're the one that keeps comparing it to email, so I recommend you stop. Simple as that. Ctrl-F this thread and every response that has to do with email starts with you. I've explicitly compared it to IRC and forums.
Your last point is incorrect. Beehaw is a reddit alternative. They defederated from other instances because other instances had free registeration, which was resulting in users from that instance trolling and doing low quality posts in their community (according to them). They can do this because the instance is the community.
This is not the previous discussion, nor am I one of the previous users from a previous discussion made over two months ago. I do not care what other people have argued about and am not making their argument.
>Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, why would I want to be in the online equivalent?
A closer analogy here is that your city councilman doesn't want to go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in real life, and so he orders all the roads to the churches and the bars demolished, and also the roads to all the houses of the people who go to the churches or Nazi bars.
"After all," he says, "they can still build their own network of roads if they want. We're just not going to allow anyone in our community to use our network of roads to get there."
> have the power to decide who's a part of their network.
Former Reddit mods are going to love this feature.
Now when they are power-tripping or they don't agree with another instances users views on a topic, instead of just banning the users, they can ban entire instances/communities from participating in one fell swoop.
As opposed to Reddit, where admins have to forcibly intervene when subreddits frequently brigade each other. For all its foibles, the fediverse approach is solving actual problems with Reddit.
Reddit mods already have bots that do this for them. Subscribing to/commenting in the wrong subreddit will get you banned from a whole host of subreddits.
That's the reason I got banned. I posted in one anti-covid sub a study that refuted one of their pseudo science ones and got banned from 8 or 10 popular subs, most which I didn't even join, and warned if I ever dared post there I would get banned from reddit. And yet there is no reddit feature where you can see where you are "banned" from. It's ridiculous. I didn't even care but a lot of stuff hits r/all and you can easily go into those groups and comment on something. Banning should mean you can't enter or post in a sub, but it doesn't. That's how glaring "reddit features" are and how awful some mods are as human beings.
The irony is that one of the main drivers for the Reddit blackouts is/was the lack of moderator tools in the official client.
However, if there's demand open source contributors will sort out the tooling soon enough, while the closed-source official Reddit app is unlikely to improve anything soon.
And there you have it. Reddit has solved both performance / scalability and moderation, and thinking it can be solved by going distributed / federated is naive. Every Reddit alternative has failed / is not as successful is because of this.
How do you measure success? Number of users? Number of posts and comments?
It is possible to have a small community with few people and less activity, that maintains a higher quality of content than a bigger community with more people.
The main danger of being small might be the threat of becoming an echo chamber because you are not exposed to as much variety in ideas. But even big communities sometimes do a “pretty good job at” (i.e. succumb to) becoming an echo chamber.
That's what has turned me off on the whole fediverse thing. Too much time spent on figuring out who's not going to talk to whom and who is going to be banned from where. I am old enough to remember the old time internet forums. It wasn't always pretty. It wasn't always clean. There were trolls. There were flamewars. But people spent most of the effort to connect and build, not on banning each other and walling off. For me personally, a collection of 100 safe spaces, cross-banning each other, is not something I want to deal with, and defeats the whole purpose.
Maybe it's my own problem, but I believe a lot of people have the same problem:
My biggest issue about this is that I'm too lazy to learn how it works. I don't understand what "federation" and "defederating" mean in this context. For Reddit I have terms like:
subreddit - a board, like in a forum
mod - a mod, just like in a forum again
karma - useless internet point
and that's about all I need to know. I just don't have the incentive to learn what federation, defederating, instances, etc are, but they seem to somehow can affect what content I can see or whether I'll get banned. This demotivates me even further.
Of course if it becomes a mainstream platform or all my friends are using it then I'll learn these concepts. But not before that.
That's because beehaw is essentially a giant safe zone and they don't suffer trolls. They got too many trolls from outside so they decided to cut bait.
Paying a monthly subscription to only have access to half of Reddit (NSFW will not be available through third-party apps) sounds like a bad deal to me.
I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely.
This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.
The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"
I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.
The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)
I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.
Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care.
Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
Is this more rigged election without evidence talk? I browse Reddit maybe 20 minutes a week, on the weeks that I think to use it. I'm subscribed to maybe a dozen subs. I voted in favor of the strike in the one sub that was kind of late to asking about the protest and I noticed in time.
I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.
>Is this more rigged election without evidence talk?
I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.
In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.
But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??
If you're just someone who browses 20min/week, I'm not sure you represent the average user in any of your subreddits either much less one that should be weighing in on whether other people get to use the subreddit. ;)
"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.
So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not.
Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.
I read (and very occasionally contribute to) a large number of subreddits that I'm not subscribed to. Recently I use redreader, but I'm the past I did it via the main Reddit website, simply by visiting /r/a+b+c+d..... to show all the posts on the same page.
> they are not representative of the overall community.
I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.
I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)
r/nba and r/hockey are particularly interesting examples because the threads before the shutdown were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the subs open and all the upvoted posts were openly trashing the mods over their decision. The poll was also posted in the ModCoord discord servers so was almost certainly not representative of the average r/nba or r/hockey user.
Selection bias, most casual users are not going to fill out a poll. The only ones who would are those who are likely to support the protest. This is clearly visible when you look at how many total votes there are compared to how many subscribers the subreddit has.
9 out of 10 days most Reddit mods are considered the scum of the earth, it's a literal meme at this point how bad a lot of them are. They are the heroes this week because it fits their narrative.
Censorship, power-tripping, running subs with a iron fist, etc
Nobody knows or cares who they are.
As much as they'd like to think they are, the mods are not the community. The community is the people. The people are not there for the mods.
Sounds like you may need to find some different subs to participate in. Majority of experiences with mods in mine have been between very okay and positive.
I’ve literally never had a bad feeling towards any mods. The only ones that seem to have negative sentiment are those running massive subreddits (which come with insane challenges).
I don't know if you know this, but mods are not a monolithic group. Each sub is going to have a different set of mods, some worse than others.
That said, if you thing mods are not the community you are more than welcome to try and run a community without mods. In fact you should do so right now. Go create a subreddit without mods and link it here.
Mods are the stewards of the community. Not the community itself.
They help foster a good community, but once again - they are not the community and can usually easily be replaced by someone else in the community who is passionate about the topic.
> Each sub is going to have a different set of mods, some worse than others.
The problem is that the main group of people driving this 'protest' are the Reddit power mods.
Smaller communities with great mods have been strong-armed into this protest and have no idea why they are actually participating, because as per usual, Reddit power mods need to control the narrative and want people to believe that "Reddit is nothing without them".
They took the ball and went home. Some went through the motions of having a poll to try to legitimize it, as if the community would rather just shut down their subreddit for good because the mods feel disrespected.
> No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.
I had the same experience 2 weeks ago when being put under with propofol.
They asked me to hold a mask against my face and to start counting and then that's it, I woke up in recovery.
It was like I blinked and the whole thing was over.
Did not feel anything 'coming on' or like I was loosing consciousness, I was fully conscious and aware of all my surroundings, and then, bang, was in recovery.
> Why on earth are you criticizing the moderators?
Because 99 days out of 100 the majority of people including Redditors hate Reddit mods for being power tripping egomaniacs who actively censor any discussion that they don't agree with. It's a literal meme at this point how bad Reddit mods are - but today they are the 'heroes' because it suits the narrative.
It's amazing how many people have bought into the mods agenda regarding this whole 'strike'
> If Reddit leadership reached out and worked things out privately and in a productive manner with 3rd party app developers to create a plan and agree on reasonable timelines,
Well to be fair, that appears to be exactly what was happening until the dev of Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama before actually consulting with the users of his App on how much they'd be willing to pay.
This was Reddit's statement (proven to be false btw by audio recordings) before "the dev Apollo spat the dummy and turned it into a public mega drama":
> Steve: "Apollo threatened us, said they’ll “make it easy” if Reddit gave them $10 million." Steve: "This guy behind the scenes is coercing us. He's threatening us."
Currently going through a extremely difficult time at the moment with my amazing cat that is dying of CKD/CHF.
First video this site showed me is "A scene from the movie A Dog's Purpose (2017). A family's dog reaches the end of his life."
Now I cant stop crying.