Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It? | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?

motherboard.vice.com

52 pointsjboynyc47 comments

"We" are not using it for the same reason nazis are not using it: because hardly anyone's there. It needs critical mass first. Once that happens, nazis/trolls/etc will find their way there too, I'm afraid.

Nazis are banned by policy.

I doubt that Twitter's policy is very nazi-friendly either.

Depends. You can take free speech very seriously and hence not want to ban Nazis. For example the ACLU went to the US Supreme Court to support the National Socialist Party of America to march in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

Not every country is the United States of America, and freedom of speech is not exclusively defined by amendments to an American constitution.

You can ban the nazi symbols & language and still have freedom of speech.

I'm pretty sure that "banning Nazi's" is a catch all phrase meaning banning anyone whose opinions we do not agree with above a certain level / token candidates.

Twitter has a pretty well rounded TOS and they tend to go out of their way to block/ban people even when they haven't violated the TOS/CoC when there is sufficient pressure.

That said I don't understand why people want to turn their social networks to echo chambers, if you only having discussions that do not make you feel uncomfortable or challenge your views you often do not hold discussions worth having.

not every discussion about topic X needs interjections about topic Y.

> I'm pretty sure that "banning Nazi's" is a catch all phrase meaning banning anyone whose opinions we do not agree with above a certain level / token candidates.

The mastodon.social terms ban this stuff:

> - Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism > - Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism

So, er, literally "Nazis", not just "things I don't like"

That worked well for the Rhineland.

Only on one of the servers. You can set up a federated nazi node using the mastodon software.

Yes, but according to the article, Mastodon only has 35K users at the moment. The question is how they're going to enforce this policy when/if it reaches Twitter size (hundreds of millions of users). When armies of trolls show up making hit-and-run accounts, that's going to be hard to combat.

Then again, Twitter has been notoriously uninterested in fighting this kind of problem. In fact, they don't seem to care much at all what their users think (editing tweets, anyone?), probably because users are not a direct source of income for them (but advertisers are). This is different in the case of Mastodon. It would be interesting to see what kind of solution they might come up with.

'Intentionally splinter' is a likely and interesting answer. Mastodon.social (the main site, with about 40K users) has now actually closed for registrations, so users are going to Mastodon.xyz, Mastodon.club, or one of the many other instances: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Using.... Users on all of these can still communicate between one another freely though. Users can join any one they like and keep talking to all the others, or start their own, and can import and export their data to move between them fairly easily too (although you can't forcibly redirect the people who were originally following you).

Each of those instances are (potentially) run by different people, who can each have their own rules and limit entrance however they like, to ensure they can maintain their own rules. If an instance wants to allow nazis, or doesn't want to enforce any rules at all, then fine, but most others will block them. The nazis can have their own little corner of the internet, but nobody else will talk to them.

In practice, if Mastodon reached hundreds of millions of users, I'd expect that to be spread over a great many instances, run by many independent groups which makes the enforcement problem _mostly_ simpler. It's not perfect, but it's an interesting approach.

Twitter addicted journalists have started to perceive their tweeting as one of the most important aspects of their job. This is not good for journalism or society.

You know what a better solution to Twitter problems would be than "clean" Twitter? No Twitter. Just drop it. This is a problem not a solution.

Twitter seems to have become an alternative to Reuters or AP for most journalists the days. Even major newspapers and news organisations seem to 'back up' their articles with numerous quoted tweets —as if the half-baked shite spewing out of Twitter in response to World events was some kind of confirmation of a story's authenticity.

it's pretty disturbing. I wish I had better insight into the causes of this but from where I sit (an outsider in a different industry) it looks like a noxious combination of race-to-the-bottom, intellectual and professional laziness, lowered standards, groupthink, and institutional corruption.

First time I've heard of Mastodon, but I really hope it takes off. Social networks are now too integrated into modern life to be completely owned by private corporations.

Why is this flagged?

If we use it, the nazis will come.

PS: this reads just like a big old advertisement.

PPS: the scrolljacking is real on this page.

VICE lost me as a reader when they overhauled their sites and made them shitty to unusable. I would have stuck around using reader view, but their writing quality has gone down again too.

> If we use it, the nazis will come.

Mastodon.social explicitly bans nazis:

> The following types of content are explicitly disallowed and will result in revocation of access to the service: > Sexual depictions of children > Content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism > Conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism

There's a popular adage that technology only becomes useful when it starts being used for porn. The reason is that, when the technology was thought up, the idea was not to use it for porn, but for something else. However the fact that the porn industry has independently found the technology useful, despite it not being targeted at them at all, shows the true potential of the technology.

The same can be said about social networks, except swap porn for nazis.

Since it's decentralized that means there wouldn't be an effective way to ban someone from the network without consensus. Anyone, "Nazi" or not, would be free to post offensive content without a central authority policing users as is the case with Twitter. I don't think this is actually a solution that certain users and most advertisers want.

Mastodon.social would ban them, and if other instances don't police content sufficiently then Mastodon.social doesn't have to federate with them.

That doesn't sound very decentralized to me.

Other instances of Mastodon can make their own decisions in terms of banned content, and other instances can choose to not federate with them.

That's kind of my point. You end up with the option of 1) it's centralized. Everyone only cares about who Mastodon.social federates with. How it's built to work doesn't actually matter. 2) It's centralized. Users wrestle control from Mastodon.social and everyone cares about who some other server federates with. 3) It's a balkanized mess. You spend all your time worrying about who you're federated with so that your content and the content you want to see become accessible. 4) It's decentralized, but nobody really bothers with banning anyone anyway, because it leads to the other scenarios and they are worse.

It would defeat the purpose of federation if there's a different server for each political persuasion. Why bother with federation if you don't want to see anything you disagree with? Each server would be its own hugbox.

There is a big difference between "I would prefer not to be routinely confronted with literal threats to kill me" and "I demand my own hugbox."

The problem with that is there is no practical difference between the two points of view. Both lead to balkanization and isolation.

What do you think the purpose of federation is? I like federation because I can choose a server I like or run my own and still talk to people on other servers.

Why on earth was this flagged?

What I would like to see from any of these FOSS alternatives to Twitter is a way to import your existing Twitter archive.

I don't know if it's colossal arrogance, or colossal stupidity that makes so many developers launch their "Alternative to Hugely Successful Product X" without giving people any way of bringing across their existing "Product X" content, that they may have spent years creating.

So it's twitter with less content.

Less Nazi content, in particular

But is this by integral design, or just by current circumstance?

I wasn't aware that Twitter, or really anyone in 2017, had a Nazi problem.

Did... did you sleep through 2016?

If so, you might want to sit down. I've got a lot of bad news.

Calling them Nazis is misguided and self-defeating. Whoever the they you think are Nazis are not Nazis. The NSDAP and its related organizations have been dead since 1945.

You may want to take another look at Godwin's law.

I mean neo-nazis are largely interested only in the racial policies of the NSDAP anyway, so it's not that far off base.

Less users would be more appropriate, given the title.

The more users, the more diverse people you'll run into.

But I thought the article described it in the wrong way. Mastodon was down. Well one instance was down for the author because some big names had signed up on it.

The emphasis should be on it being decentralized. A modern day IRC where any community can run their own nodes and communicate with other nodes.

Running big communities is a challenge regardless of technology, just see Freenode for example.

I remember running IRC Networks back in the day, it required time, money and organisation. Sometimes even donations.

Who is worried about nazis? Really? Any why take any default political stance as a medium. About as smart as voat's strategy of going the opposite direction.

So, you complain about Twitter's inherent lack of freedom, then offer an alternative which "bans nazis"? Given the frequency with which internet debates end up invoking Godwin's Law, that sounds even worse than what it's trying to replace. Who decides who's a nazi?

I'm also confused by the distinction (or relationship) between this and GNUsocial. The article seems to suggest that Mastodon is an instance of (or at least compatible with) GNUsocial. The Mastodon FAQ seems to suggest it's a completely separate and incompatible thing.

FWIW, there are already several longer established GNUsocial-based almost-clones of Twitter out there, offering more than Mastodon seems to. Personally, I use Quitter, to scratch my FOSS 'twittering' itch:

https://quitter.no

Mastodon uses OStatus to communicate between instances, so it's totally compatible with GNU Social. I checked it myself.

Nazi, noun -- A person with a opinion "we" do not like/agree with.

See also: libertarian, classical liberal, conservative.

Update: -3 points for mocking the world view of, apparently, a shit ton of people these days? Damn...

Mustn't disagree with the hivemind, it bites

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