The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest.
And cancel culture.
Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read?
That should be solely in the user's hand.
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is
Also, fragmentation and visibility.
It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
I’m pretty close to being a free speech absolutist (side-eye to the guy who ruined the term), but IMO one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
one of the worst things to happen to free speech is this conflation of “right to speak” with “right to be heard”
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
In North Korea, you can’t start your own instance to say what you want. They will still jail you for what you say. That’s the actual point.
The fact that other people want to be on a system that blocks you is their business, not yours. The point of the fediverse is you get to choose your own censorship.
If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on. Sometimes, even knocking off servers you had connectivity with that were indirect.
The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.
>If you got to choose your own censorship it'd be nice. As it stands, other instances can decide to defederate with what you're on.
That is not censorship!
This conversation is frustrating exactly because people think a group “excluding” someone is “censoring” them. Except that's not what censorship is.
Censorship is about you not being allowed to say what you want on a sign outside your own bar.
You complaining about a different bar, not letting you in because they don’t like you. That’s not censorship, that’s just people being jerks to you… and that is allowed. Nobody has to listen to you if they don't like you. Nobody has to even let you in the door to where they hang out if they don't like you, especially if the reason they kicked you out was something you said.
It's 1 person, the instance admin, deciding what's good or bad for all their users.
And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives instance admins too much power to moderate content the way they like vs giving the individual user the choice to decide on their own.
Call it whatever you like.
"It's 1 person, the bartender, deciding what's good or bad for all their patrons. And this is, I'm not sure what, but gives bartenders at bars too much power to moderate bar conversation the way they like vs giving the individual patron the choice to decide on their own. Call it whatever you like."
It's called moderating the space you operate. This is literally why you can’t walk into a bar like you own the place. If you don't like it, start your own damn instance. You don't have any right to make people tolerate you if they don't want to.
If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.
That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.
I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.
Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource.
When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die.
Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it, and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.
> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.
> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.
No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.
it seems to me that the networking design is flawed. just to give a simple example: whitelisting (only seeing content of friends and followees) versus blacklisting (seeing everything ranked by an algorithm). wouldn't whitelisting already solve most of those issues? that would actually be my preferred modus anyway.
No, because that puts the effort of fighting bad actors on everyone. It means that every day you have new trolls spewing hate in your comments, and that your users have to constantly keep blocking trolls who follow them (and who recruit other trolls to join them) until they get tired and leave the platform.
This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer - I wasn't around for Usenet's heyday but it wasn't immune either.
Only allowing posts between mutual friends is instant messaging, not a social network. Discovery, engagement, and platform growth comes from people wanting to hear from and interact with followers who they don't necessarily follow themselves.
i think you are trying to solve a problem that in my opinion should just be skipped. i don't want to be part of a social network where some algo decides what i see. all i care about is what my friends do and maybe the friends of my friends. and that's it. that was the golden era of social networks, when precisely this was just the norm until they discovered that they can make more money by messing with the feed. no incentive to mess with the feed is what i'd expect from a non-commercial solution like the fediverse. or - at least allow for configuring my feed. if somebody wants to be exposed to all sorts of people - do it. i don't.
That may work for you, but it does not work for anyone running a platform and dealing with the needs of all users. That requires real moderation for both legal and practical purposes, as previously described.
Because it overwhelmingly attracts a certain demographic of people who have a higher-than-average rate of various paraphilias as well as interest in software but such arguments are a bit taboo to discuss even if they are quite self-evident.
I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.
I’ve seen the Internet from the 1980’s until today. It has always had people exploring gender identities and public sharing of neuroses. Mostly nerds, though.
> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.
There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.
There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.
The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.
I listed some of the real world consequences already. Allowing disinformation to spread and assuming that people will figure out what's wrong on their own does not scale and does not work.
If a social network has an ACTUAL straight chronological feed of only accts you follow, or lists you curate, that works great.
Somebody posts abhorrent Nazi racist crap, or lies about what is happening, you shut them off, and they'll never be heard by you again. Yes, you need to see/hear the crap or propaganda once for each Nazi or liar, but that's it.
The problem is nearly every social platform needs to increase your engagement get you to click or scroll just another time so they get to show you more adverts and make more money and claim more 'engagement' to juice their stock price. So along with having to listen to the advertisements, you ALSO are REQUIRED to see/listen to the crap and lies.
The good solution — "you don't have to listen" — is not an actual option in the real world.
(NB: This is why Section 230 should only protect web providers if they have no algorithm. Once they have an algo, they exercise more editorial control than any newspaper or broadcast editor — they ARE responsible for the content, not because they posted it, their users did, but because they routed it to you.)
I don’t think that anyone has an issue with the block feature. The problem is when the platforms themselves decide to arbitrate which viewpoints are allowed. This was clearly visible during Covid, when divergent viewpoints were penalized aggressively.
Imagine, if you would, that the strict libertarians had much more influence in shaping the country. So much so that the roads are toll roads, the parks require a fee, and almost no libraries exist because the ROI just isn’t there.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
Physical public spaces are regulated. Laws still apply there.
There are countless online spaces which operated like physical public spaces, where anything legal goes. Move off of the mainstream web and even the illegal stuff is allowed. You can literally run your own instance of whatever application on the Fediverse and follow whomever you want. No matter how radical or extremist your ideology is, someone will happily host it.
It's only a problem if one insists that all online spaces must be run under the same anarchic principles and must be forced to give anyone a platform, but that's far more dystopian than what we have now.
What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
I think it should be ever so slightly more nuanced than that.
It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.
After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
Yeah, I also don't understand their take. HN also dictates what their users can and can't read. There's tons of stuff that can't be posted here without being removed. That's a good thing.
Nope. Air is static and no one has to pay to keep it there. A mastodon server is private property, and needs maintenance and money to stay on. You cannot force a private entity to host your speech. They always have a choice.
Mastodon is a federated service, like e-mail. Would you use an e-mail server where the admin reads messages delivered to your inbox and deletes the ones they don’t like?
I run a very small instance and have zero problems finding content. I have a constant stream of posts to the point where its hard to keep up with. It's pretty much a myth that there's no content unless you're on a large instance.
If you don’t like how your server is run, go to a different one! That’s the whole point of the thing. You can even set up your own without too much trouble. If you believe servers shouldn’t be doing this stuff then you can make it happen. Nobody owes it to you.
Instances often block users or other instances because their users have asked them to do that. They often have posted guidelines about what they will or won't allow. Users will hold them to it. Users can and do block other users on an individual basis. If a lot of people are blocking you, the problem might not be them.
They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.
Most prominent example is the Ukraine.
Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.
So there is political censorship.
And the fediverse is super political.
The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.
Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.
It's not practical for every user to choose each individual message to read. We allow others to help us filter. If you want the unfiltered version you go get it (and then try to find something under the torrent of spam).
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
Fediverse on mastodon increase social bubbles. Especially when admin of instance has apathy to any kind of different opinions and censor anything like that.
I'm on infosec.exchange and there's plenty of content, especially since it federates so I get content from all over the fediverse. I don't mind that there are only several very large instances, since federating to them from a tiny or even personal instance is no problem.
I am talking about when instance X defederates with instance Y, so the users on X cannot see content from Y, even if they took no part in the decision.
Well, obviously you’re not going to be on a platform you dislike. I have signed up for Mastodon several times, but always ended up finding the instance dependency off-putting. I wish for a protocol where the instance mostly doesn’t matter and you can trivially switch to a different one, like with e-mail.
E-mail providers allow you to use a custom domain, so if the one you’re using suddenly goes away, you can just point your DNS records at the new one and that’s it. If the ActivityPub instance you’re using suddenly goes away, you can say goodbye to your account.
Unless I'm missing something, that's exactly the same.
If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.
Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).
The difference is that you cannot use someone else’s instance with your own domain. You have to get your own instance, which is much more expensive and creates a lot of duplication.
> And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture.
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.
Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!
The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.