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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the idea of walled gardens and echo chambers, which is the major benefit Mastodon is providing over Twitter. Already this isn't morphing into a community where people have more control, its encouraging people to insulate themselves into communities where everyone thinks the same way and dissenting opinions can be squashed by the site moderators. I would like to think this kind of freedom would lead to greater exchange of ideas and open lines of communication, but everything I have seen online points in this going the opposite direction.

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I have two responses to this:

1) Anyone is free to make a Mastodon host with no moderation (except for what's necessary to avoid running foul of the law), but I doubt you'd get a lot of takers, at least not among the sort of people who would build a functional discussion space. Probably you'd just end up with 4chan again.

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink": lots of people have decided they want moderation, usually for good reasons involving harassment and abuse. People often want echo chambers too; that's not great for us in the long run, but it's difficult to make a moral argument that people's preferences should be overruled and they should be forced to listen to content they'd rather avoid.

and 2) Mastodon is no worse than the situation now with Twitter: Twitter also has a set of baked-in standards for moderation, and also allows you to live in an echo chamber if you want, with blocking. At least with Mastodon you can choose the type/degree of moderation you prefer.

The whole premise of federation is that you're not limited to talking with those on your home instance. What about Mastodon will yield more insular experiences than Twitter?

As it is, the fact that I can see and interact with people on the local and federated timeline (much like one used to in the oldold days of the twitter firehose) means I am in _less_ of an echo chamber than I am on twitter, in every sense.

Your definition of "dissenting opinions" is essential to this. If it's "genuine points of conflicting dialogue", I don't see any squelching of that in the slightest. If it's "hate speech, advocation of violence, etc", then yeah, that stuff has been shut down pretty hard, and I'm happy for it.

Mastodon will yield a more insular experience because it allows moderation to happen by a few people and, since they are effectively own your online identity once you have established presence on their server you are bound by their decisions. Once given that power it is extremely unlikely that any server admin, unless they are explicitly committed to free and open speech, will continue to allow dissent when it is so easy to control it.

This is effectively a repeat of the sub-reddit moderation scheme, but applied to a twitter like messaging platform. Go look around reddit for a general discussion forum where there is healthy tolerant community, outside of very specific limited topics where moderation is focused solely on keeping people on topic you will find moderators who have used their ability to create insulated echo chambers.

"We'll see how it goes" and "it can't be worse than what we have now" are my basic postures to this kind of critique. It's very, very clear that Twitter (for example) is hardly an exemplar. If you are concerned about moderation being in the hands of just a few people, I presume you're super-concerned about Twitter, facebook, etc etc.

Again, I think it's important to be explicit about what you mean by "free and open speech", "dissent", etc.

I don't really see the analogy to sub-reddits, or shared forums in general. On my instance, the only stuff that's eligible for ejection is illegal porn, hate speech, abuse/harassment, etc. If that's an "echo chamber", then we don't have a shared vocabulary here.

I don't think it will start out as an echo chamber, but as time goes by the desire to limit the speech of not just those limited categories will lead to at least some, and if history is an indicator most, of the instances limiting their connectivity to the network to keep out speech they don't agree with, but that decision will be made by the few who run the instances and control the peering, and even those who have good intentions will be faced with going along with the swarm ( limit speech ), or face their node being cut off as well. These kinds of protests and ultimatums are common on twitter ( https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petition+to+remove+an+account+on+t... ) ,but thankfully no one has enough clout on twitter to make them actually do anything. That will not be the case on a Mastadon instance when 25% of your server threatens to jump ship if you don't de-peer a node over some comment they don't like.

To paraphrase what you're getting at with the ~slippery slope argument:

""" 'Free speech' means absolutely nothing can be off limits, ever, because in some theoretical future timeline, that means we won't be able to voice controversial opinions. Bluntly, if oven memes are at risk, then that means we won't be able to have dialogue on race relations or tax policy. """

You're right that, in general, this has been the state of affairs on Twitter, and it's a top-3 reason why a lot of people are interested in exiting that platform. Few want to spend time in a 4chan dystopia.

I think of it less as a slippery slope and more of a base state. All systems will regress to the base state and this one is designed with a base state of segregated walled off partitions, not because people are evil or want it to be that way, but because that will be the easiest thing to do.

edit: Also this isn't some theoretical, unproven thing that will happen to far future generations. At this point its almost a surety that it will happen in less then ten years.

I'm a Mastodon admin and I've "silenced" (not "blocked") one other instance. I wrote about why here: https://blog.freeradical.zone/our-first-silenced-instance/

My goal is to allow as much free conversation as possible on my instance. In general, that means I'm taking a laissez-faire approach to enforcing the rules I've set out (see: https://freeradical.zone/about/more) and not caring unless I have to. But if a user is causing problems, I reserve the right to drop them. If another instance is causing problems for one of my users, I reserve the right to silence or block them that server if that's what's necessary to protect my user.

I have about a million things I'd rather be doing than powertripping on who can post what on my instance. Barring illegal, extremely distasteful, or abusive content, I really don't care what my users send or receive. But I will do what it takes to protect me, my users, and my instance.

and I hope you continue to be able to do that. Remember there was a time when Reddit claimed they wanted to be liasse-faire, then they got popular then that stopped. It takes a superlative amount of resolve to keep that attitude as you scale.

One key difference is that I'm not responsible for all of Mastodon: I'm responsible for my little corner of it. There aren't the same moral conundrums. Twitter and Reddit have to ask what stance they should take for every user in the world. Loli stuff is legal in Japan but iffy in USA. Holocaust denialism is legal in USA but verboten in Germany. What one policy can they write that would handle all of those situations?

On the other hand, I only have to deal with what's legal an acceptable where I live. If an instance in Japan wants to host loli, fine. I can (and have) chosen not to carry their content. If an instance in Idaho wants to host Nazi content, that's up to them; the rest of us can choose not to carry their content.

I won't have to (and can't) come up with global policies.

Please do no conflate hate speech and abuse with dissenting opinions. There may, very well, be people who want to hide in an echo chamber. But that is all over twitter and Facebook today. Being able to isolate yourself from abusive speech should not be considered the same thing.

Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers.

The first is a consequence of people, the other is a function of Twitter and the fact that you probably read it from a person with lots of followers, who have at least somewhat similar ideas and therefore many are going to disagree with you. Because there are many of them, it can feel overwhelming when they all answer you.

And having not kept my mouth shut during the rocket-guy-shirt fiasco I can tell you that you get the same result when you are on the other side too.

The complaint covers genuine abuse like what happened to Kathy Sierra.

>> Most of the people who complain hate speech and abuse are conflating it with dissenting opinions, sometimes stated aggressively or insultingly and in large numbers.

I can only speak to my own observations, which do not support this assertion.

That is my biggest concern with the health of the GNU Social network at the moment. Some operators of popular nodes are configuring their nodes to reject messages from all users of some other nodes, which they deem to be housing undesirables.

I think people have forgotten the origin of John Gilmore's famous quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He wasn't talking about the people of the internet (though I believe he later said it wouldn't be wrong to interpret it that way), but the way the Usenet network would find a way to pass messages across the network, even when some Usenet node operators decided there were messages they didn't want to pass.

Those who do not learn their history...

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