Can Mastodon Survive Europe’s Digital Services Act?
techpolicy.press
techpolicy.press
I ask because federation is anything but new. IRC servers have been linked to one another for multiple decades with each server being managed by different groups of people or companies varying by the specific IRC network. Each server operator may implement their own rules provided they comply with the overall rules of the global federated network. Have IRC networks been left alone from scrutiny because their adoption by the mainstream consumers is low and thus making them a tiny target? If so I would expect that to change as more and more web front-ends to IRC become popular such as TheLounge and Convos that provide message persistence.
Will the DSA eventually cause platforms such as Mastodon to implement the same local and distributed roles that IRC has such as "ServerAdmin", "NetAdmin", "GlobalOperator", etc so that people can censor or manage each others user-base? [1] e.g. if Alice notices that Bob's Mastodon instance is hosting illegal material, rather than disconnecting from that node, Alice being a NetAdmin can ban that instance from the entire federated group or GZ-Line the user on Bob's instance from the entire federated group if it was just one abusive user and the Bob was in a long deep sleep. Bob gets cranky if he does not get a nap.
A subset of the same concepts also apply to Usenet groups. Each Usenet operator can choose to censor or simply not pull particular groups from the Usenet feeds and may decide to purge or censor some articles from their nodes, usually to comply with the laws of their country.
There's a lot of talk around #mastoadmin lately about people wanting some way to make one instance follow another instance's blocks, with varying amounts of human decision-making in the loop. There's multiple people already sharing their blocklists to help new admins catch up with five or six years of blocking undesirable instances one at a time. This will pretty much result in some people ending up as de-facto "net admins", there are already admins with a long-standing history of posting solid block suggestions.
I agree with this. Like I mentioned this is slowly changing with web front-ends to IRC like TheLounge. NGIRCD [1] + TheLounge [2] take all of about 10 minutes to set up and then maybe another 10 minutes to tie that into and configure IRC services such as Anope [3]. I would not be surprised if this has already been automated with Docker or Ansible.
It is possible that Discord and Slack may be popular until they reach critical mass and their corporate leaders might feel confident enough to start doing hostile things to their user base or until someone with a large ego purchases them or a whistle blower publishes proof of some malicious behavior that people might care about.
One nerd can host a platform for tens of thousands of non-nerds, or equivalent to one Discord server. The challenging part is finding non-toxic and non-power-tripping moderators.
[1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/
[2] - https://thelounge.chat/
[3] - https://anope.org/
Hosting a platform reliably isn't something that one can do with the BBS of old. Having the data center; or paying for AWS and the corresponding maintenance and security for the site; and that in today's polarized world, hosting such a paints a target on you and your services for threats and DDOS attacks whoever someone has a disagreement with you.
While yes, one nerd can host the platform, if it scales to thousands or tens of thousands it is not fun and tends to be much more than a hobby to do so.
This is very true. Running sites for people is a PITA. One has to be doing it out of a love for a particular community or as a passion. I used to be that guy. The internet has (d)evolved into a hot mess, at least by my standards. The world is so connected now that anything one makes will find {n} number of unstable people to deal with.
There is no way the fediverse at large will ever encounter any problem, then.
45 million users is a < 1% (i.e a few global companies) problem.
Not a big deal.
It's fundamentally the same problem with malicious actors that email admins have been trying to deal with for decades and the solutions will similar, The days of just allowing anything to link a server to a chat/discussion network ended when eris.berkeley.edu was kicked off the early irc network(forming EFnet) and for email the authorities have accepted best effort blacklists as "enough" for dealing with shady email servers trying to federate "bad" content.
1 - Betteridge's law says "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." which, in this case, is the same answer the author(s?) offer themselves in the article. So title alludes to something is hinted not very plausible in the content
2 - Networks have existed before, and will exist after EDSA, people asked the same question 50-40-30 years ago about the television (and the radio). I'm old enough to remember it since when I was a kid. Nothing really happened to broadcasters, they have in fact all been bought by even larger companies.
3 - questions like what will it mean if an instance ends up generating above EUR 10 million in annual turnover or hires more than 50 staff members are casting doubts when the answer is already well known: it will happen what has always happened, once they reach the tipping point, they'll split.
It's been observed in the past 10 decades in every sector of the economy.
One example is the proliferation of small companies in Italy where the limits for some of the more pressing obligations are set at "more than 15 employees" with the result that "over 93% of the Italian companies have less than 15 employees" [1]
[1] Google translate(d) https://www-ansa-it.translate.goog/pmi/notizie/lavoro/2016/1...