Comment by krinchan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krinchan | Hacker News Reader

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As someone whose primary social media is in the Fediverse, the discussion in this thread is ... confusing? It's so disconnected from my experienced reality of the Fediverse I don't even know where to begin.

Functionally, my experience within the Fediverse is it's literally just Twitter but with moderation fully broken up between instances and not agreed on. An instance's administrator(s) can decide what instances users are allowed to interact with. This is done either via whitelisting or blacklisting, though almost all instances work via blacklisting. Furthermore, administrators have total control over moderation.

Users pick the instances that closely align with their own ideals. If they don't like the moderation, they can move instances.

The software that backs the Fediverse and the software that consumes it is quite varied. Users are unusually adept at navigating all this.

We had the same sort of frontend diversity in Twitter for many years. This isn't much more than that, honestly. Now you just can match any client with any set of moderation rules you like best. It's very much a free market approach to the question of moderation of user generated content by Big Tech.

When it's so easy to move between instances and you have a large selection of moderation rules to select from for your account's "residence", you no longer really have a legal leg to stand on for "censorship" because you can just move next door where explicit adult gifs are totes cool and your followers will be updated with your new home. There's literally a network of instances that can be as moderated as your most loathsome ban happy video game board to as unmoderated as your favorite anonymous image board. And you get to pick. Not Musk. Not wall street. And certainly not Congress.

This is a nice idea in theory, but the issue then becomes inconsistent moderation that affects what is visible to everyone. If you get banned or have posts deleted on one platform, presumably those posts disappear from that instance, and thus the Fediverse as a whole.

This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

Not to mention, people don't typically want to pay for these services, or pay to host them, they want to access them for free. On top of that, with something like Twitter, the desire is to be visible to all, rather than just a few. Most people use Twitter to interact with 'the world', not just a local part of it.

> This also leads to some pretty insidious siloing since (at least with Mastadon) you can have instances block themselves off from other instances or instances at large, which seems pretty unhealthy.

I really keep coming back to this sentence and still continue to not see the downside. Why is it a problem if an instance walls itself off from the Fediverse? What right do you have to force an instance to do literally anything? This idea that people think you should be forced to engage or interact with content they don't want to see is ... disturbing. Free speech gives you the right to say what you want but it doesn't give you the right to force people to listen to you.

I really want to give the benefit of the doubt but your protests seem entirely based around this idea that you have the right to force people to interact with you. That aspect of Twitter is entirely what enabled Twitter Mobs to mete out life destroying "justice" over the smallest of infractions.

I think people should just drop the expectation that they can just be "visible to all". Not everybody wants to see your content. If they want to block you, then they should be able to. If a group of people wants to block you (think: getting banned from a mastadon instance), they should be able to as well. At least in the case of the Fediverse, you can look for a community where you'll be accepted. That's not possible on Twitter, you're either allowed or banned.

I don’t pay for my account on my home instance. I don’t want to interact with the world and I think most people are tired of living under threat of being one misstep away from a Twitter Mob.

Your complaints are features. People are fleeing to group chats for a reason.

As for the problem of your data being deleted if you’re concerned with that export your data regularly or run your own instance. Anyways, while it’d be nice to take a stab at that problem, it’s no worse than Twitter banning you.

> most people are tired of living under threat of being one misstep away from a Twitter Mob

I think you severely overestimate most people's capacity to give a damn about Twitter.

I'm also confused about all these comments about whether it could work. There are already people using it in practice.

I may have joined mastodon because I wanted a non-corporate social media, but I've been using it for years because I like it. Not I'm hoping I will like it, but I like it how it works now.

In fact I have mixed feelings about a potential twitter exodus, because you never know how it will change things. (I also don't understand why you would quit twitter because it may suck when musk takes over. Why not wait until it sucks an then quit? And in the meantime you can also try the fediverse).

If anyone decides to give it a try, I recommended following many people, and later freely unfollowing people if it turns out you don't like their posts. Mastodon won't give you any content you didn't subscribe to, so you need to find some stuff yourself. You can find lists of people sorted by subject to start you out.

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