You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon
micro.coyotetracks.org
micro.coyotetracks.org
This issue alone made me set up my own instance, but many users don't have that option.
Why does anyone?
Reddit mods, Fediverse maintainers, corporate social media. This whole "curate and censor" bamboozle is antithetical to the internet I grew up on. The most upsetting part is that so many folks today are happy about this status quo and delight in the fact that their opposition gets canceled or de-platformed. All it takes is one political pendulum swing for the cheerleaders to become the oppressed.
Social media needs to be P2P. Not centralized, not federated, and not controlled.
End users should have complete autonomy over who they follow, who they (de-)boost, and how their filter/attention algorithm works.
Users should have the capability to share their { follow, block, boost, mute } lists with others, but it should be optional and not something mandated from the top by a third party.
Some forums let you pay to regain entry, others would downvote but not outright ban (like Slashdot).
Banning was practically impossible given dynamic IP addresses and dial-up.
The internet was much smaller, its users more technical, and its software much more bug-filled. It was entirely possible that banning someone would lead to them exploiting your server and taking it offline. I witnessed that happen several times.
People focused on mostly getting along. Nobody was sensitive about the bullshit we whine about today.
It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives, so liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech. (Remember the Church of Satan?) That's completely reversed now.
The internet of today is so incredibly different to the internet of the 90's and early 2000's. Despite all we've gained, we've actually lost a lot too.
The Fediverse is the same way: You can have the wild west, but much of it is kept separate with active defederation so you may need to find smaller instances, run your own or simply have a second account. That doesn't mean it's not there.
The internet was open and unmoderated when nobody was abusing it. Once people start abusing it, it will be moderated. It's unavoidable.
> It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives
I don't think that's true. The 1990s saw the rise of conservative talk radio and of Fox News, but they weren't as dominant as they became later, and the 1990s were a pretty liberal time in much of the western world.
> liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech.
Still are. But even then, they didn't tolerate intolerance. It's just that at the time, intolerance was universally seen as bad, and not central to a rising ideology as it is now.
Most people just don't want to be forced to wade through that shit. Keep it in your own corner if you really want it, but don't bother others with it.
> Social media needs to be P2P.
I do agree with that. It would be great if everybody had their own social media hub to use in whatever way they prefer. I think that might be the idea behind Hubzilla. But even then, people will want to discover valuable content, and they don't want to run into trolls, spam and nazis, so there's still going to be some curation. It's unavoidable if you don't want your internet experience to turn to shit.
I'm not sure I see a meaningful difference between P2P and federation. If every user in a federated system is running their own instance, how is that different from a P2P system?
A good analogy is that some instance operators are acting like the Reddit moderators that ban users with post histories in communities they dislike.
This is why p2p is superior to federation. Unless there's a law being broken, nobody should have control over what you see or who you talk to. Your attention and interests belong to you.
Meanwhile people are also free to choose to give some degree of control to instance admins because a lot of people want a nice walled garden but don't want to be forced to tend to the walls.
If you don't want to be all alone, you shouldn't have to opt in to becoming a part of the hivemind. You can be contrarian or a minority or whatever without presenting a threat to the larger group. You don't have to agree in order to coexist meaningfully and peacefully.
Companies censor because it benefits the bottom line. Reddit moderators and the Fediverse have no excuse except perhaps that being lazy and aggressive with bans is the easiest policy to implement. Surely I hope that's the rationale and that it's not simply one of enjoying power over others.
Where are the censorship police in public parks and libraries, asking people to leave? These spaces are perfectly fine and nobody is being harmed in them. There's no reason our internet deserves special padded walls, memory holes, and horse blinders.
Remember that just twenty years ago, democrats and liberals were the protectors of free speech. The pendulum swung to the right (and it'll probably swing back left again).
Keep communication lanes open and be civil. If you want to block someone, do it yourself and don't make a big public deal over it. It's not good to win points by building platform- and infrastructure-level censorship tools. That's why this is so upsetting. Tools that "protect everyone" today might be turned against everyone tomorrow.
The more chances for people that disagree and don't see eye to interact non-confrontationally, the better. Banning and score keeping are not the way.
You don't need to be all alone, you just need to be mindful that maximising freedom for all includes the freedom for others to choose not to want to associate with you if you insist on being disruptive, and what different groups find disruptive varies, and you can not expect everyone to voluntarily subject themselves to disruption, and in many cases harassment and threats.
You don't need to opt in to a "hivemind". You just need to find a community that does not consider your speech offensive, or create your own. The Fediverse has communities that span the political and social spectrums, from the furthest left to actual Nazis, many of which certainly very much refuse to engage with each other but all of which still are able to exist and exercise their speech to those willing to listen.
> and the Fediverse
"The Fediverse" does not censor. Individual instances and sometimes groups of instances censor. Nobody stops you from hosting your own discussions and federating with those who are willing to consent to engage with you and saying whatever you want.
What you have no right to expect of others is for them to yield and put you in charge of what they're forced to listen to.
> Where are the censorship police in public parks and libraries, asking people to leave? These spaces are perfectly fine and nobody is being harmed in them. There's no reason our internet deserves special padded walls, memory holes, and horse blinders.
Try to strip off completely in most parks, or shout in the library, or going up to random people and harassing them with speech they find threatening or offensive, and you'll see that every space have community norms that are enforced, and will censor you if you act in ways incompatible with what we've decided is appropriate for that space even if you're entirely free to act the exact same way elsewhere.
Protecting the freedom of all also means enabling the creation of spaces with restrictions.
> Remember that just twenty years ago, democrats and liberals were the protectors of free speech. The pendulum swung to the right (and it'll probably swing back left again). That's why this platform- and infrastructure-level censorship is so upsetting. Tools that "protect" today might be turned against you tomorrow.
This maximalist view of wanting us all to carry speech we don't want to has nothing to do with free speech, but about a desire to force us to listen, and it has a deeply authoritarian undertone to it.
I'm all for broad and strong protections for people to say what they want, but not to be forced to let them do so in my own space.
If they want to end up alone disconnected from the rest of the network that’s their prerogative? Users of their instance should just bail.
Is anyone really holding anyone hostage when the "hostages" can easily leave that instance and join one or more friendlier ones instead?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
I have to say that I expected a bit more, as you mentioned "most content on the internet".
§ 130 iii StGB
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html
> Mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu fünf Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe wird bestraft, wer eine unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus begangene Handlung [...] öffentlich oder in einer Versammlung billigt, leugnet oder verharmlost.
When you follow someone on a peered instance, the instance you use must store and forward their posts to you. So if an instance contains mostly content you find disagreeable you may not want to have those on your server.
Also if you go to the "global" timeline, you will see posts from all instances which are peered with your instance. So the operators of your instance might not want to "pollute" that timeline with content from instances they find disagreeable.
I prefer the alternative architecture used by the nostr protocol. There, your account is not tied to a relay, but to a public key which is used to verify everything you post. You can send your posts to multiple relays which can then be read by anyone who chooses to pull from there.
This allows relays to freely block/curate content in the way they like without restricting the freedom of their users to pull content from other sources.
Currently, the network is in its infancy, and is mostly populated by bitcoiners, since this is the community where the protocol grew out of. But there is no reason why it can't eventually grow far beyond that, for those with no interest in that topic.
It's very disappointing to see something that should have encouraged people from disparate backgrounds and views to come together and discuss topics without "engagement" driven controversy baiting, just being used as "Twitter, but you get to make your personal Pyongyang".
Because it's their server and they have opinions of what their server is about and what's acceptable there. But more importantly: because their users don't want to have to individually block every troll and nazi out there. There are entire instances dedicated to just shitting all over everybody else, and most people on other instances don't want to have to wade through that shit.
Users can choose their server based on its policies. Maybe admins should be more up-front about their server's policies. But some degree of moderation is simply unavoidable on the internet today, because we've seen time and time again that everything turns to crap if you don't moderate. HN moderates too.
For people who don't want to spin up their own, they can likely find instances whose policies are in line with their own and join those.
The strength of federation is that every instance operator can set the rules that best suit themselves and the audience they cater to. You can leverage this ability just as much as everyone else can.
It's pretty hard to think up a better scheme than this for ensuring that everyone has the sort of space they are OK with.
Or you can follow them outside of Mastodon on RSS by adding ".rss" to their public profile URL.
Who decides what is "illegal"?
Admins have access (through the owner or directly) to that database, which means they can already censor content if they so choose, through manipulating the database. As such, making it an explicit option is needed because it destroys any illusion that censorship cannot occur, because it can occur by the system's design, even if the option isn't present in the software.
That's the exact problem with mastodon and the reason I'm sticking with twitter. Self-righteous people censoring the shit out of an open platform. All the defederation talk did a lot of damage imho. Plus a lot of badly working instances performance-wise. Mastodon has had it's moment imho and the people behaving as outlined above destroyed it. It's just not fun and quite dead for me. My crowed just isn't on mastodon.
* Mastodon is just one server/client software in a gigantic decentralized network.
Uh, I'm like 99% sure _every_ server defederates with many other servers. You have to to not federate anime waifus and other generally undesirable content.
Defederation is merely a moderation tool to prune your graph to nodes with similar moderation criteria. People right now are talking about defederating with Threads on ideological grounds but whether or not it happens doesn't really matter. If they want to cut out that part of the social graph, that's their prerogative and others can make the other decision.
Yeah? Where are they?
> If you prefer closed source spyware social media apps, by all means, stick with Twitter and refuse to do your research.
No, I prefer social media which doesn't engage in censorship.
It should be possible to talk about this. It should be possible to disagree about this. I'm personally strongly on the side of wait and see. If Threads turns out to have a terrible effect on the Fediverse, we can always defederate them later. I do caution against special deals and NDAs with Facebook, but other than that, I'd rather keep things as open as possible until there's a real need for something else. And please let's not let this issue divide the Fediverse.
(I'm not on Mastodon but on Friendica.)
Then they're part of the problem. Just don't subscribe to them. I'd prefer to see the world how it is, including all idiots and extremists. Closing your eyes does nothing.
No, but throwing away the trash leaves a nicer common area for the people that hang out there. The Nazis will pop up in your replies, your followed hashtags, fuckin' everywhere. It's dramatically nicer without them.
(Assuming you're not on a single user server) The problem is, in order for a user to see them, they don't need to explicitly subscribe to them, they need to not block them, which is the default state. Sure, your home feed is people that you're subscribed to, but searching (via hashtags and otherwise) and your federated feed are both looking through all content that the server has found that hasn't been explicitly blocked. Not to mention replies to posts aswell could be from anywhere. This will inevitably, at some point, by the nature of anyone being able to post anything on their own servers, include "unsavory" photos including: Literal suicide, murder, abuse, uncensored pornography, death threats, witch hunts, and more. And yes, this will be included in normal use. I myself saw a spammer that spammed uncensored pornography to a bunch of "welcome to Mastodon" hashtags in the first 30 minutes of my server being up.
> Closing your eyes does nothing.
While this will not cause the actions occurring to stop existing, acting as if the mental health of the viewer is irrelevant is not acceptable. I've known servers where people weren't able to sleep at night because someone spammed videos of animal harm/abuse... and in that case, the admins eventually deleted it and banned them. Your suggestion is to just "let it be shown" and "let the user block it if they don't want to see it". While seeing things once and then blocking is better than not being able to block at all, trusted authorities (admins?) should have the ability to stop content from being spread to users that trust them to handle unwanted content. Sometimes never seeing things is the best option.
Perhaps the middle group here is to allow users to disable administrative "suggestions" and see all content, if they so choose? (Although this is not truly possible with Mastodon, perhaps future federated networks could implement a similar idea)
There's a fine line between closing your eyes to reality and having to endure pictures of brains on the floor. Spamming and fraud is another issue which even Twitter sucks at and I don't have a good idea how to solve that.
I'd just like an internet where people don't entirely live in a bubble and become triggered by everyone and everything. But that doesn't mean that we should have to look at sensitive content if we don't want to. It's a very fine line between a dystopia and freedom of speech tbh and I don't have an answer ;)
Which is totally a valid stance. It sounds like you have your solution already -- stay on Twitter and don't use a federated system.
Defederating from any service prepared to federate needs to be a really extreme measure taken rarely for the network to build the strength it will need to weather the centralising forces that will come.
It seems like we will end up with two fediverses- most of the one as we know it, and a much smaller one that can talk to Threads.
How Threads will implement "replies from Mastodon" is not really a question I care about. (Maybe I should?)
Meta, as the submitted essay argues, probably cares more about the optics than going after those 0.1% of users.
But of course, who knows what's actually going through Zuck's head. (Other than the fists of other martial arts trainees.)
I remember when Facebook trumpeted their open APIs. The Internet forgets so quickly.
Mind you, given I still can't access my Akkoma instance from Ivory or Elk, I don't think Threads is in any danger here.
> Because Threads is not a Mastodon instance. It is its own self-contained, centralized social network with plans to let its users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa.
Spotify also is not podcasts, as they host the shows themselves. Podcast and its infrastructure should be unaffected by this following the author's logic. But it definitely affected how podcasts are consumed and perceived and it was not for the better of the open standard of podcasts. Nowadays many people think podcasts just are on Spotify.
They do?? This blew my mind, and made me very sad.
I guess the flip side, though, is figuring out just how podcasts and their infrastructure have been affected. They’re still out there, still open, and over the last year, Spotify has been pulling back from investing in podcasts and making more of their previously Spotify-exclusive shows fully open again. I have no idea if there’s any analogy to make from that to Threads.