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Comment by johnthuss | Hacker News Reader

"Q: Have you seen more toxicity or other problems as more people have joined Mastodon?

A: There’s a kind of self-selection going on where the people who join Mastodon are maybe more civil. But it should not be discounted that all the different servers, with their rules about hate speech and against harassment, are doing moderation work and acting as gatekeepers against bad actors."

I haven't used Mastodon yet, but content moderation is one of the hardest most time consuming problems they will have. I am doubtful that volunteers can provide the level of moderation needed in a full scale social network.

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The approach so far seems to have been to spread the load over as many different servers as possible and disable sign ups if any individual server gets overloaded.

Also from what I've read, explosive growth has been an explicit non-goal of the Fediverse.

Of course, it remains to be seen how this all will cope with the current situation when Mastodon is pulled in the spotlight.

After all, Bitcoin was also a small community of enthusiasts for almost a decade. The real challenges only started when they went big.

> I am doubtful that volunteers can provide the level of moderation needed in a full scale social network.

You're right, they can't. Mastodon accepts that it will have Nazis and other extremists make their own instance to share and proliferate hateful ideas (much as they do on the normal web).

The solution? Block their site.

If you group up all the Nazis in one spot, it makes it very simple to shoot them into space and never see or interact with them again. That's the core moderation philosophy of Mastodon, and IMO it actually works great in practice. Most mainstream instances (1000+ users) will generally have uncharacteristically nice moderation because of this.

Additionally, it seems to be a stark contrast to Twitter, which seemed to favor pitting people of opposing ideas against each other to increase engagement. It felt designed to create a powder keg.

This seems to solve two problems -- #1, the problem of "how can I not be bothered by Nazis and violent extremists", and #2, the problem of "where do the people who are being repressed from sharing information that an authoritarian doesn't want shared go".

But I don't think it will solve problem #3 of non-extremist people of different viewpoints and diverse backgrounds being able to civilly discuss ideas or share perspectives and news stories. This seems like it will just create larger, more impenetrable silos breeding more contempt for "those other people" who we will no longer have any need or reason to even speak to.

Is it even possible to solve for problems #2 and #3 at the same time?

A reduction in 'pitting people against each other', could paradoxically allow for civil disagreement because of decreased polarisation. I.e. if I go on a platform and I expect strong/aggressive disagreement as my engagement, I am more likely to counter argue. If I'm on a platform where views are more moderate, I am more likely to carefully consider a different viewpoint.

I agree there are risks of bubbles though.

> I am doubtful that volunteers can provide the level of moderation needed in a full scale social network.

They don’t have to. Unlike Twitter, where sports Twitter and investing Twitter, are both just Twitter, Sports Mastadon is simply a different social network than Investing Mastadon.

The mental model of a different subgroups within the same platform is simply the wrong mental model.

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