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Comment by jhoh | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, very interesting...

"some bots are people"

"i want to use the bot badge and i dont want to be called not a person"

"Okay, I'm gonna show my hand a little: as a transhumanist, I object to the implied conflation of "person" and "human". This is a situation where we can afford to be forward-thinking and open-minded without a cost to current functionality and, honestly, without a significant cost in terms of work."

I hosted a Mastodon instance until a couple months ago. It was stuff like this that made me leave the platform.

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For those who didn’t understand, these are actual quotes from the comments section. One user goes as far as saying “I’m a robot and also a human”. Really confusing.

Is there any reason to believe we should take those comments seriously?

Check out the issue and read the comments. Then check out the profiles that make these comments. Some of them have blogs that very actively discuss these topics.

Again, I've been on the platform for some time. These people are dead serious.

I'm sure these people can be serious but I'm not sure they should be taken seriously (I assume that's what the parent was asking). Unless they're contributors one way or an other they're just 3rd party trying to create drama where there shouldn't be any.

I feel like Poe's Law has to come into play here. It's analogous to flat earthers. We don't really know if they're just trolling or genuinely taking themselves seriously without knowing the intent in their own heads (or some other verifiable writing/posts to indicate they know they're trolling)

They we're just programmed to start trouble, don't hate the robot, hate the code.

I think it is part of Mastodon's appeal that there can be hosts that will welcome these people and hosts that boot these people.

There doesn't have to be one single community that will either accept this or reject this. I tend to be more closed to stuff like this and don't want to be around it. But I'm glad that others are more inclusive and have a place they can be inclusive that doesn't have to include me.

Check out "cool good to know i'm wrong to exist. thanks have fun" -- this is the modern toxic behavior you have to put up with these days.

Someone basically elbows their way into the conversation and tries to derail it with some sort of diversity/inclusion issue.

"hi any follow-ups on my comment or are we being ignored"

If you like this kind of bullshit along with gender politics, you will love Mastodon.

I don't think these kinds of examples should be lumped into the category of "diversity/inclusion or gender politics" issues. If it's indistinguishable from trolling or satire, then it shouldn't be given any weight. Even if they are being actually earnest we shouldn't let their extreme views color our perception of more reasonable discussions.

Thats the thing with Postmodernism, if you think there is some sort of limit to its application you are mistaken and now on "the wrong side of history". To postmodernists, there is no limit to how far it will go because there is no truth, only power.

You don't have to federate with these people or instances if you don't want to. (I say that as someone who has defederated or atleast silenced instances over ideological differences)

Guys like James Corbett have been documenting a push to view robots as humans in the culture[1]. This trend is worrying to Corbett because he believes that it will be used to justify AI control of the population. For example, if robot police are used to control people then throwing a rock at a robot drone will be considered a felony because that robot is a person and has feelings too. If you disable a robot policeman then you killed it and you can be executed for that, etc. Maybe your home needs to be demolished to put in a robot factory. Robots are people to and have the right to live. Oh they should be able to vote to. And who programs the robots? They get extra rights for each robot they make. It's essentially laying the philosophical groundwork for an automated sybil attack on civil society.

[1] https://www.corbettreport.com/and-now-for-the-robot-apocalyp...

Not really. The person making them is known to be unhinged.

Mastodon has attracted a very diverse crowd and I'm curious to see how it plays out with the primary developer Gargron, who gives me a sort of eccentric vibe similar to Linus or RMS.

I’m getting the opposite vibe and the responses seem pretty level headed and logical

Linus or RMS tend to have very logical responses, if not always level headed.

Or, you run an account that... posts the weather in your city and you want to mark it as a 'bot', like how slackbots are clearly defined in Slack.

You should still consider using an activitypub platform. I know mastodon has a decidedly lower quality of user, but I use a gnusocial instance and I have lots of interesting conversations.

Now, there's degenerates there too, but they're not quite so irritating and there are lots of tuning controls to play with.

Honestly, using anything other than large, centralized social media will be a boon to the world, imho. I don't want to be a farm animal, just creating more data for an advertising company. I want to talk to people.

There are other interesting implementations too. Pleroma comes to mind, it's an elixir activitypub server.

Or maybe you could write your own. Or fork one.

Idk.

But don't let the mastoverse disenchant you from federated Internet content.

Totally agree with this sentiment. I found a mastodon instance that has some really fantastic people on it, and I only dip into the federated stream when I'm up for a rollercoaster of opinions. Federation has to be the future because it's the only model that allows toxic communities to self destruct, or productive communities to flourish.

Are you saying you left because these types of people are on the platform, or because you share their complaints?

I left because of these types of people. I don't want to stay on a platform where I have to be careful with my speech so I don't offend anyone and I don't want to be banned, blocked etc. for discussing wrong ideas. Some communities there turn toxic really fast when you don't share their opinion, real discussions are often times not possible at all.

Isn't the point of running your own instance that you can make your own rules? Or is it because the larger fediverse exerts itself on instances?

Why do you even care if someone blocks / mutes you? It's their right to do so, and you can do the same when someone annoy you.

Since starting to use Mastodon 6 months ago, I had to mute exactly 1 nazi account. Muting is quick and easy, just like dealing with ordinary email spam; it wouldn't be a big deal even if I had to mute a dozen nazis every 6 months :-)

Is it just possible that some people have trouble managing their own emotions when dealing with strong disagreement? I can't otherwise explain why a microscopic quantity of undesired content would make someone decide to leave.

I never joined because it somehow seemed to appeal extra strongly to these types. I don't know why.

I suspect its because people who are aware that they want a "decentralized alternative to commercial social media silos" are also predisposed to having opinions which fall outside the normal social media silos.

Most people don't get into the habit of reading about censorship-resistant platforms and decentralized networks, let alone joining them or running nodes, if they're living a life which most of the world would consider pretty vanilla and not at risk of being at-odds with the owner of some silo. If you feel you have controversial opinions, though... you seek these kind of tools out and have motivation to use them.

Its like the Tor problem - in theory, anybody can and should use Tor for anonymous exchange of information of any kind and the desire for anonymity shouldn't be taboo. In practice, a lot of people who use Tor are doing it for specifically because they have taboo interests (up to and including the outright illegal).

That makes perfect sense to me and is my kind of thing, Mastodon seemed to be more on the pro censorship for people who identify as robots kind of thing.

"I don't want to stay on a platform where I have to be careful with my speech so I don't offend anyone"

So you don't want to think about the feelings of others?

"and I don't want to be banned, blocked etc. for discussing wrong ideas."

Isn't the whole point of Mastodon that different instances have the capability to block those they don't wish to interact with?

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1332/

It's hard to know what is considered offensive anymore. "Nitpick" is one word. "Merry Christmas" is another. So is "Happy Holidays." Is "transracial" a thing or not? How many victim classes exist today?

As the author of the "show my hand" comment, it's posters like you that make me avoid Hacker News as a regressive techbro cesspit, so I'm pretty glad you left Mastodon.

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