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Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.

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This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not.

That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.

Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.

Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess.

I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.

More mastodon and mastodon-like hosts should allow for custom domain names. Then it would allow you to own your AP identity similarly to email.

That's just hosting your own, basically. You can pay someone to do that for you.

Banning a server because it won't shut down a spammer is effective.

A server that doesn't take responsibility for its users will soon find itself shouting into the void... as long as enough admins react.

Gmail is the largest source of spam because other mail systems won't ban it because it's too big.

Sooo the server is banned, problematic users move off it coz they can't get anything from outside on it and... move on

How that helps ? It just makes impossible for small server admin to take vacation...

Small server admin should not have open enrollment. Start friends-only. Quite possibly stay friends-only.

When comfortable, change to friends-of-friends.

And if you're going to grow past being comfortable with everyone on your server, have a backup admin you trust.

This is why I think a big player needs to get involved. As soon as Google hosts a Mastodon instance, that will ease the entry for a lot of people.

I don't think that would be a good thing.

Google used to host the biggest xmpp server (google talk), and then they defederated from the rest of the network.

An instance set up by Google would be likely de-federated on the next day, and it would be a good thing.

People always complain that MS does the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model but they never remember or refuse to acknowledge that a lot of these other big tech companies have and continue to do that the same thing

XMPP is but one of many protocols that were adopted by Big Tech, then once market share was achieved they took their users and walked away from the open internet

Or Twitter joins the Fediverse.....

How exactly is it hard to enter the fediverse ? Yes, you need to spend time to understand what you're going into, to understand the lingo, the rules, the etiquette. But it's normal, because Mastodon is not Twitter2, the fediverse is not the usual social networks. It's a new world, you have to understand why it's different.

If Google ever speaks AP I won't be surprised to see it defederated from many instances. It will create a schism, and that's perfectly ok because the expectations are different.

Well, I found it straightforward, so you'd have to ask the many people who are saying they found it difficult. The most common issue I've noticed is "how do I pick a server". For that reason, I think 'big name' servers may be necessary for widespread adoption.

But do we want widespread adoption ? It'd be nice if people used federated/decentralized means of communication, but the objective is not to reproduce the schema of domination and control by a few people in the majority; taking control back is the basis of building the Fediverse. As long as people don't go through the process of understanding the structures of power, we won't have made any progress.

Well, just as I want as many people as possible to have email addresses that I can use to send messages to them, it would be useful for me for as many people as possible to have the equivalent for more public communication. I think that's a separate issue from power structures.

A big deal was that a good Gmail client was available early on Android, and that you would basically get a gmail address set up for you ? (I wonder if Google didn't allow, feature-wise, for other email clients to work as well on Android ? I know that instant messengers have issues like that...)

Name changes are a fact of life.

You need a secondary link to your friends (email, phone, other server) so you can notify them when one of your vertices is taken down or another is added.

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.

There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers.

There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.

Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then.

It's actually a nice solution.

That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.

Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores.

Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.

It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to".

That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers.

Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

There is no mechanism currently to subscribe to a blocklist. Some forks allow exporting/importing block lists as CSVs, but that is manual.

Am new admin for a friend-only instance; currently blocking seems to be done via user reports + checking in on the #Fediblock hashtag. It's all manual, and repeated admin work needs to be done per-instance, which is why the article says it's inefficient but a good trade-off (so you can choose the server you align with best).

> Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

Nah. De-federating is manual. Such an adversarial group would need to join up, start spamming, and keep on spamming long enough for their instance to be added to a blacklist, and for other admins to pull that blacklist in, without the admin ever acting in the meantime.

It's not like the fediverse is that big, either - people talk to each other.

> Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow.

Mastodon servers do often have a "federated timeline" that shows you all the posts from servers your instance knows about. People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.

> Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse?

I don't think there's really a single person with the authority to ban someone from the whole fediverse; your instance admins always have the final say about whether their instance talks to another instance. But things like shared blocklists mean that, in the vast majority of unambiguous spam or illegal content cases, only one person actually has to respond to them directly.

> People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.

You can deal with that by blocking them personally. No need for a guardian angel.

You can't block everyone bad because you don't know who they are until after they spam you. Last month I got 100 spam texts from the same sender ([Redacted] Political Party) using a different phone number for each.

Also very new to this still, but from what I got so far, #fediblock is first and foremost just a hashtag. It's "well known" and there is a convention behind it, but it doesn't have any specific technical effects - i.e., you can't just remote control another server's blocklist by tooting #fediblock.

If your server's admin(?) makes a fediblock toot, that's more an statement that your own server has blocked someone and asks other servers to do the same. Admins of the other servers can always decide how to deal with that signal - ignore, issue the same block, boost the signal, etc. (Though there is probably some "peer-pressure"/reputation management at work, which makes their decisions not completely free)

So the "network-wide ban" really isn't. It's more a ban from the vast majority of the network - but there is no technical way to issue a genuine ban from all Mastodon instances, the way you can e.g. get banned from the entirety of Reddit.

That at least seems more democratic to me. Of course the usual pitfalls of democratic systems still apply: How to deal with bad-faith #fediblock signals? How to avoid hidden centralisation where certain instances gain more authority to issue blocks than others? etc...

If someone more experienced has some articles with more details about how the system works, that would be really cool.

I'd imagine the peer-pressure to be very large. In the world of private torrent trackers, you have a similar setup. Each tracker is independent in general, but there is the cabal, a group of elite trackers that dominate their vertical in pretty much all metrics, and are connected via staff knowing each other. You misbehave on one cabal-tracker bad enough, you're gone from all of them.

Lower tier trackers will often adapt the cabal's decisions for various reasons. You end up with a situation where one staff member making a decision can end your membership on a dozen sites.

In the torrent world, it's pretty open. I expect the same to be the case on the fediverse, even if it's not publicly communicated. I'm sure server admins do communicate with each other in non-public forms.

I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.

I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.

> it gets added to a blacklist

unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join.

With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.

>If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance.

That's the part that interests me the most.

Which is why I (when I get around to it) will self-host my own ActivityPub instance (Mastodon? Pleroma? WriteFreely?).

That way, I decide what gets blocked and what doesn't. And since it's federated (assuming other sites will federate with me), I can still access the benefits of using fediverse resources, without being beholden to someone else to make such decisions for me.

From a longer-term perspective, ISTM that an ActiviyPub (AP) "user agent server" (UAS) which allowed individual users to federate with the resources of their choosing without having to "join" an extant instance, makes a lot of sense.

Rather the UAS would utilize your local (i.e., generated and managed/federated from your AP UAS instance) fediverse credentials and act as a proxy for you, communicating with the instances containing the resources you're interacting with and acting as storage/cache/server for the user's client apps.

This would make the fediverse even more decentralized and under user control. However, it would also make discoverability even harder.

Perhaps that's ActivityPub's killer app? A discovery app. Perhaps a protocol change to require a cryptographically signed summary/intro for each instance, along with with a searchable index?

If you migrate to another server, don’t you lose all your followers, who will still be following @you@oldserver ?

Nope! That part is pretty neat.

It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically.

Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to use a well-run server with a good track record and a reasonable funding model, I guess.

In order for that migration to happen, the original server needs to cooperate and publish a "this person moved their account" message of some kind, right? I wonder if instance admins ever prevent that from happening if they don't like the server you're moving to.

You're talking about the ActivityPub "MOVE" message. Yes, that would be possible I believe.

Thats interesting thought - if an instance is blocked, does that also prevent migration?

I guess the problem is your username, right? Someone with a distinctive username that is, essentially, their identity has an incentive to squat on that username on multiple instances.

Oh thats cool. Is this part of the activitypub spec? does it utilise the alias in some way? Do exisiting messages, etc get updated to the new alias?

Sorry for so many questions - do you know where can I read about the mechanics behind it?

I don't think so. There's a way to move accounts.

there's no globally enforced blacklist. servers decide their own peering policy. cringe servers wall themselves off with much zeal, while based servers don't even care about cringe servers' existence. it's great

> freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

This is absurd. Mastodon is a network of severs run by volunteers. Admins have every right choose what servers to federate with.

Besides, if you don't like "the whims of democracy", try freedom of speech under a dictatorship.

except a Mastodon instance is a private property... so no freedom of speech protection there https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...

There is also no legal requirement for democracy. We re talking about the principle

Does this principle trump the freedom of association of the person who is actually hosting, and paying for, for each instance?

"Democratic" means "people rule" not "majority vote".

By giving you the choice of which server to use, you choose your moderation. If other people choose (or choose to delegate the choice) to block you, that's still democracy.

As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.

It’s almost as if it’s a people problem and not a technical problem.

Way back in the mists of ancient times, about 1970, a myth arose in minds of primitive men and women;

The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to anybody.

This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending to the death.

However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the limit - that is to say the idea that;

"occasionally anyone could talk to anyone"

silently transformed into the idea that

"everyone should talk to everyone all the time"

whereas in fact

"most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time".

That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for.

It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of resilience through diversity in the OP.

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