The Fediverse has some big problems coming
mastinator.com
mastinator.com
A better name would be Feudiverse, since it's feudalism by design — complete with instances feuding over control of how the entire thing is run.
The admins of the instance have absolute control over accounts (i.e. people) that sign up with them. The instance admins are the law of the land, and can kick accounts off the net for whatever reason, as well as draw up the bridges and prohibit passing through their lands.
Like in any feudal system, people are judged by which Lord they belong to (i.e. which instance they sign up with), and will be treated accordingly. Each instance is a clan, with collective responsibility built-in.
There is no Federation without a Federal government that ensures rights of the citizens via a constitution.
And there's no Fediverse without a central account authority that limits what instance admins can do to any individual account.
Mastodon is a Feudiverse.
Yeah, and I can literally just run my own email server too.
I don't, and chances are you don't either.
Guess why.
He should be able to talk and interact with anyone, regardless what they want!
1. Do you run your own email server?
2. How do you feel about your email provider reading your messages and banning you based on what you write?
3. How do you feel about not being able to email your friend because their email server admins don't like what someone else writes in Google Groups from an email from your provider?
>He should be able to talk and interact with anyone, regardless what they want!
Oh right. Like I care about "freeze peach".
On that note, this doesn't stop bad actors either, who just create an account on a different instance.
You should think of social media- forums for example.
I expect my forum moderators to read my posts, ban people as needed, and to generally curate a community.
Your final argument is that blocking bad actors is ineffective- they could just move.
Well, if a bad actor did move- I would report them to the instance admin.
If their admin was not interested in dealing with them, I would consult my admin and discuss blocking that instance.
My experience with defederation is that in the real world, on the real network, that it is incredibly effective. I do NOT see bad actors on my instance.
That's a non-sequitur, and a rather ignorant one at that.
It is like a forum, it is software for mostly public/semi private posts.
The email equivalent would be a mailing list, and mailing lists have moderation.
I joined my Mastodon instance, just as I would join a mailing list, for the community and moderation. When I ran my own instance, I associated with instances with similar policies.
Now, I gave you a real response, and I would appreciate a response from you that is more than yelling out a logical fallacy like a grade schooler.
We are on Hacker News. You can't in good faith ignore the technical details.
Especially when they directly affect the functioning of the entire system, and "run your own instance" is every other "objection" to my criticism.
>The email equivalent would be a mailing list, and mailing lists have moderation.
>I joined my Mastodon instance, just as I would join a mailing list, for the community and moderation
Great!
Except this is not how Mastodon is pitched as: a Twitter alternative, a federated social network, where an account represents a person.
What you describe is a good, old webforum (or, indeed, a mail list), with admins who can kick you off of one, end of story.... with the caveat that should a post on a mail list anger a moderator, they can nuke your entire email account.
Mastodon instance accounts, as you said, are akin to forum accounts. It's phpBB with benefits.
Which is fine, but that falls very short of the promise of a federated Twitter.
>I would appreciate a response from you that is more than yelling out a logical fallacy like a grade schooler.
You are welcome to point out the fallacy instead of yelling like a grade schooler.
Please cite specific passages in either of my comment that you find fallacious, what you think is instead true, and we can go from there.
"I will ignore your questions, and call you names because I like Mastodon and this feels critical" isn't a logical argument.
“Federated twitter” does not imply any of the things you think it does.
Twitter has moderation. Federated twitter has moderation. Twitter is a platform focused on communities. Federated twitter is even more focused on communities.
Twitter is run by faceless nobodies and Elon Musk. Mastodon is run by Eugen if you join his instance, or your friends if you join their instance.
In NO WAY does federation imply
1) That it’s like email
2) Less moderation
3) Privacy
4) No politics
5) Any of the other weird shit you assumed
The only single thing federation implies is that the servers are run by independent operators.
Yes, and if Elon Musk and faceless nobodies change the content policy that affects which accounts get banned, it's international news.
If Eugen kicks you off his server without notice because you mentioned your Twitter account, nobody cares.
Unless you pre-emptively prepare for being banned, you're SOL, and all your data is gone. [1]
A Federated Twitter would allow the user to get their data and migrate to another instance after being banned from the one they signed up with.
Being tied to your particular fiefdom (pardon me, instance) for life (of the account) is a feudal model.
>In NO WAY does federation imply... that it’s like email
The way Mastodon implements "federation" does.
It's exactly like email in the aspect of joining servers, and depending on that server for having access to the service. Including compliance with whatever rules that server sets.
It's exactly like email in that if your email server admin decides they don't like @gmail.com accounts, you won't be able to send or receive messages from that domain, regardless of how you feel about that[2].
>Any of the other weird shit you assumed
See [1] and [2].
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/zusr5l/what_happe...
The author of this violated a similar cultural norm and got all the shouting. (They should feel lucky they didn't get the fisticuffs. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on point of view, we haven't invented the technology to punch someone remotely via the internet yet.) Given the above analogy, this shouldn't be a surprise. (Part of why this is a very useful analogy.) ' The author suggests that the Fediverse should do more technical things to better enforce these cultural norms, but discounts the existing cultural enforcement in the process (which was clearly noticed given the complaints about it). Not every problem can be solved technically and there's always a balancing act between "building a nice public space" (building a restaurant) and "giving people the expectation of privacy inside it" (letting your patrons have chill conversations). It's still a good idea to add additional technical enforcement of cultural norms as best as possible, but it isn't and shouldn't be necessary. Sure, there will likely always be bad actors, but bad actors exist in real life, too.
We're coming off an era of social media where cultural norms were enforced by centralized Terms of Service agreements and centralized gatekeepers that often had something of a "if you can technically do it, it's fine to do" laissez faire attitude. A lot of developers aren't used to dealing with cultural norms such as "restaurant privacy", but in lieu of central Terms of Service enforcers (and lawsuits) most of what something like the Fediverse has *are* cultural norms, so there will be a necessary adjustment period for developers to learn that just because something is technically possible according to the specs/protocols/technologies/platforms it may violate cultural norms and may not be ethically right to do. Not every sociopolitical problem can be solved technically, especially in a distributed web of different instances.
That leads me to what I think may be the best missing suggestion here: this is a documentation problem. Some of these cultural norms should probably be better documented somewhere, preferably not too far removed from W3C's ActivityPub specification, some of these cultural norms of what not to do with the specs to avoid many more developers falling into similar traps as this one.