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Comment by irusensei | Hacker News Reader

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money.

It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

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So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places.

Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be possible for almost all services, at least in an ideal world), but you won't be able to do much in life without trusting at least someone along the way.

Let’s say you are a journalist or wathever today profession that depends on reaching people. After the twitter fallout you went to this new journalist centric instance and managed to recover a good following. Months later and you had a bad intercalating with the server admin which ended up not being a level headed person as you previously thought. He deletes your account… not even a chance to use the migration tools to redirect profile.

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

Tell that to Kathy Griffin and Jeph Jaques. And even before that, I doubt that people getting banned were considering it as "not personal".

Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts?

I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.

I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear that I’m glad people are enjoying Mastodon but I take issue when everyone seems to be omitting the tradeoffs. To make things worse im being seen as some kind of concern troll for pointing it out.

People moving to Mastodon fall into two groups, by and large - people who like it for normative reasons, and people moving there to see what the buzz is about. The first group sees practical concerns as an obstacle to be defeated; they would say you ought to move to Mastodon regardless of technical problems or lack of utility. The second isn't defending it in offsite discussion board.

In terms of utility for social networking, there's no defending Mastodon relative to a Facebook or Twitter. The small userbase is reason enough not to switch; what use is a social networking site if the people you want to interact with aren't on it?

That there are so few if any people who both recommend Mastodon and don't have moral/political objections to Twitter is damning. Where are the objectors who recommend it on purely descriptive grounds? It's a bit like GNU - it's cool, but don't try to tell people it's a viable replacement for Windows.

How would you find them? There's no website describing fediverse admins and their reputations. Most of the time you don't even know who the admin is. It could be anyone.

This isn't different than other websites. It's true of web forums too. It's fine, just don't post anything you can't afford to lose.

Experience: on my third Mastodon account. The first one disappeared without notice.

i think in many cases users are closer--node wise and influence wise--to their server admins than they were to twitter's moderation team. always? of course not. but, if this is a major concern for you, then its easy to either start your own server with a group of people or even spin up on your own. this was not possible under twitter.

I'm pretty sure they'll ban you if it's 'inconvenient' not to, like if a company raises potential legal hell, your posts get mass reported, you end up in the midst of a huge internet controversy/witchhunt, etc.

A large company is no more immune to that than a small one, or a community run site would be.

And at least with an individual or small company/group, you have someone to put your case to in that situation. Someone who can probably offer support and potentially lift the ban rather than the 'Get fucked' attitude of Facebook, Google, etc.

I assure you, individuals, especially ones with the tiniest bit of power, as just as capable of telling you to "get fucked". Some of them work at Twitter or Facebook. Others run your HOA or are university professors. Or Mastodon servers.

The server admin can kick you off just because they feel like it. At least with a large public platform there's the possibility of public exposure of bad behavior.

> If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place.

I don't direct people to my HN profile. I don't rely on that for identity. I don't try to build an audience on HN.

> If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter.

These are ad-funded businesses, they have a financial incentive not to ban everyone they dislike. They also have a track record.

> They also have a track record

Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782952

It's a common thing in the Fediverse that controversial moderation actions are discussed criticaly. People who don't like it then move onto another server. That's a feature.

If I host a personal instance, it's good that I can ban anyone I want. If you host a public instance, you probably will try to enforce your rules somewhat consistently, else it's gonna be hard to earn the trust of your users.

Because big data is valuable and little data is generally not, admins of small instances have little incentive to dig into the DB.

Because humans are moderating the small instances, they can do a better job than AI moderators, albeit with more work.

Moving from one Mastodon instance to another taking follows and followers is quite easy. Admins usually announce plans to close with enough time for people to make the move.

It seems a bit dubious to trust twitter with my data anyway?

Mastodon at least is not trying to shove politics and celebrities down my throat.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Enjoy Mastodon but be conscious of your federated benevolent dictator if you are not running your own instance.

No, but OP was arguing that lack of trust was reason not to use Mastodon. But if both Twitter and Mastodon both have the same trust issues then their argument is moot.

well, at least twitter is a well established, extremely visible corp. for a mastodon instance the list of questions is long and start with: who’s your hosting provider.

> well, at least twitter is a well established, extremely visible corp

Oh yeah, that worked out great with the planet-destroying overlords that are the oil companies. No, this is a terrible heuristic.

I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one.

It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station.

The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much.

Who moderates offshore content?

> Who moderates offshore content

Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular Mastodon servers.

I'd be surprised to learn that it's blacklisted from any feed readers. That illustrates the usefulness of separating reader app and hosting.

Pretty sure it happened to Gab nodes. In this case justified (and probably with a bit of push from Apple and Google) but the precedent exists.

Slightly related Google blocked Element a few years ago because something posted on a federated instance. I think they strong handed matrix.org to implement moderation on the default servers.

> Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps

I believe - although have not verified lately - that Tusky will not connect to some specific instances that host degenerate people.

I use Fedilab instead.

Gab comes to mind, before they forked the code to become their own thing. The Tusky case was notable because the app rickrolled users trying to log in to Gab.

Apparently there is some work being done to give the non-admins even more power/control over their own content, which currently needs GPG shenanigans.

I learned this from this talk:

A New HOPE (2022): ActivityPub Four Years Later: The Good, the Bad, and the Fedi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnciCz83t70

Which notably is a recent talk (July) but was given before the recent influx.

Great. I don’t want to sound lazy but can you give me a time stamp to the relevant part? Thanks in advance.

https://youtu.be/vnciCz83t70?t=878

That sounds great for verification. It would be great if users could automatically follow that pubkey across other nodes in case the pubkey owner decides or is forced to migrate.

Totally, but I have even less trust in Twitter now. Everyone who could say "no, that is unethical" has been fired or left the company. The company is deep in debt, desperate for revenue, and Musk's largest investor is a prince from a country that beheads its enemies. Assume all your Twitter data has already been sold with absolutely no limits.

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