Incredibly repetitive for being only 2 minutes long.
We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.
We get it, VC funded social networks become worse over time so you have to periodically jump ship to something new, which will quickly let you down again once it gains critical mass.
Stop chasing "VC funded social networks". Let's look at the indieweb for a sustainable model. Let's patronize separate, small, independent service providers to keep the servers running.
That's all that it takes to fix this mess.
That's a fantasy solution. Person A can send you abuse, so you block them. Person B though is free to send you abuse, and so can the next 10,000 people. They might be a minority but even if you block them all, you've still received 10,000 hate messages and you have to spend a lot of time doing your own policing.
And then everyone else still has to wade through all this crap, or see "blocked message" everywhere.
Moderation is essential for most online communities. And then those 10,000 people can do the same to everyone else.
That's a completely fantastical example. A normal person will never have close to unmanageably many replies. This is at most a problem for celebrities, which can be granted other solutions, e.g. only people they follow can reply, which solves the problem.
> Moderation is essential for most online communities.
There is a big difference between forums and social media, where you choose your own filter bubble anyway.
Yeah, it's a trick question.
I'm not a fan of the moderation policies from some in the more popular servers and I certainly don't like the idea of some overzealous moderator blocking whole instances, but this has nothing to do with (system-wide) censorship.
If each instance is a home, we should expect to follow their owner's rules when we are there. No owner is forced to give you a soapbox in their home for you to talk. If you want to have your own space, with your own rules, you are free to do so. You can invite whoever you want to your home and no one is going to come after you for the things you say in your home.
It has a lot to do with system wide censorship, as in the end the effect is approximately similar.
> If each instance is a home
That analogy is bad, as you could equally say that each social network "is a home" and therefore can censor everyone without mercy. You could even say that each country is "a home", and if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
And that would be perfectly justifiable. None of the big social media networks are forced to provide service to a customer that they don't want. It's not an utility, it should not be treated as such.
> if you don't like state censorship, just emigrate etc.
- The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself is negligible compared to the cost of moving to a different country
- To "emigrate" to a different country implies having to abandon your original home country. In some cases, it even means having to renounce your original citizenship. Online, you can have different digital identities.
All that is being asked of you is to respect the rules of the home you are in. If this is difficult for you to understand, it's not a problem of your social peers.
The effect of big social media sites blocking free speech are not much different from the state doing it. It's like saying: "You are perfectly allowed to state your opinions! (but only at home, where nobody hears them)" This wouldn't be functionally different from the situation in China.
> The cost of creating a Mastodon instance for yourself
Doesn't solve the problem, as free speech instances get blocked by the other big instances.
Sorry, this is complete bullshit.
> but only at home, where nobody hears them
You can still invite people to your own home. If nobody is hearing it, it's because they are not interested to join you.
That's false. On social media, everyone is free to follow just the people they want to follow. Muting is also an option.
Your problem is that you hate free speech. You don't want to just choose what you see yourself, you want also censor what other people are allowed see.
> You can still invite people to your own home.
Yes, that's possible in China as well. According to you, this justifies state censorship. After all, you are only censored in public on social media.
This right here shows why you don´t understand why instance-wide blocking might be needed.
I can give you one clear example: my instance is running in Germany. As such, I need to comply with German laws. Now, if anyone from my instance follows someone from a "free speech extremist" instance and my server ends up with Nazi propaganda, guess who will be under investigation?
Substitute "Nazi propaganda" for "instances for sex-workers who might be victims of people trafficking" if you prefer.
> Yes, that's possible in China as well.
No, it's not. The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition and they will have the power to hurt you without a fair trial.
Eugen is not going to do anything with you if you go talk shit about him on your instance. I know because I did it. ;)
Of course no admin can do anything about the law. That's in fact what Elon Musk said: The platform should only censor as much as is required by the law. But in practice on Mastodon much more is censored than on Twitter.
> The Chinese police will come after you if you try to organize any type of opposition
The Chinese police will certainly not come if you utter your opinions in your own home, precisely because nobody will hear them. Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared isn't free speech.
> Restricting free speech only to areas where it can't be heared (sic) isn't free speech.
You missed the part where I said you can invite others and use that space to organize opposition. Was that intentional?
Also, I can't believe that you are making me say it:
- There is no global/universal definition of what is Free Speech.
- You don't get to decide what is or not "Free Speech".
- Even in the US, "Protection of Free Speech" is only about avoid persecution from the Government, not about being able to say whatever crap you want without consequences.
God, even for a conservative like me, this shit is tiring...
The same thing could be said to you when your political opinions get censored. But it seems you can't imagine that.
Let me try again: can you give one example of something you said that got you in trouble in any social network?
Shit, has it never occurred to them? Are you telling me that the overwhelming majority of the right wing influencers sees themselves as beholden to Big Tech that much? Wouldn't you at least consider the possibility that all this talk about "censorship" is just a lame excuse to rile up gullible people into a "fight" that doesn't really benefit anyone but themselves?
And yes, countries do indeed also get to choose their own laws through their own government process. I'm happy to live in a country where our laws forbid government restrictions on speech but allow private "homes" to make their own rules. I think that's the right balance. But I don't get to tell other nations what their laws should be.
Not really if you censor speech that challenge the status quo.
And if the major social networks are doing it, wouldn't that also be bad?
I was initially inclined to invite you to my instance as well, but I'm starting to get the feeling that you are more interested in not being called out for any BS you put out than in a healthy social discourse.
- Why doesn't Jordan Peterson (which I bought the book, watched the videos and love to rewatch destroying Cathy Newman) take his thinkspot.com platform and make a Mastodon version out of it?
- Why no popular conservative figurehead left Twitter to create their own server on the Fediverse?
Some more questions for you to ponder:
- why hasn't the right wing got out of Twitter when it was dominated by the left?
- why was Mastodon popular for the woke leftist crowd since, I don't know, 2020?
- Jordan Peterson is still complaining about YouTube censoring/blocking/demonetizing his videos. Why doesn't he make his own Peertube?
2) I don't think Mastodon was more than a rounding error before Musk bought Twitter.
Why couldn't other right-wing influencers get together and do something similar? Perhaps because there never was actual censorship?
Perhaps they just attracted more suckers to support them by bitching and moaning about "censorship" and "deplatforming" than if they went on and actually took control of their own social media presence.
No one worries about censorship of mainstream opinions, and that’s the Mastodon mainstream
And yes, every mainstream social media network absolutely does remove toxic radical posts across the spectrum, left right and neither. And toxic radicals across the spectrum all complain that it is only they who are being "censored", while the rest of us roll our eyes.
This is a uniquely internet-era phenomenon, where people feel they are entitled not just to speak, but to be heard.
Nobody ever argued about whether the Wall Street Journal has an obligation to publish any article sent to them by anyone, or whether CBS is required to broadcast any television programming sent to them. It's an absurd idea.
However, these messes are of a much smaller scale, have less long-lasting effects and are easier to work around.
Either you are a generous person who is paying out of his pocket to host a platform, or you require people to pay for usage (or your platform it truly p2p but good luck with people having the means to self-host nodes).
Fact is, most people are freeloaders so this is not sustainable either way.
Let's just say it like it is: most web communities are not worth the price it would take to keep them afloat. If I had $20 to spend I'd rather buy a bunch of books instead of 4 months of whatever mastodon server would ask me to pay for.
Usenet days, in which you paid a single amount to a single provider and all the boards were populated by technical people, are over. There is absolutely no single place on the web where you can interact with knowledgeable people in every field all clumped together (except sci-hub + email heh)
Maybe this is more a problem with how we've structured the web and less a problem with the type of app or our expectation of it.
99% of what I view on the web doesn't have to be absolutely up to date. I can tolerate some latency. If we dropped the whole request-response thing in favor of pub-sub, and just had the servers wake up for one minute every hour to propagate state changes, we'd only need to pay for 1/60th of the uptime that we currently are--the cicada approach.
I realize that this would be very inconvenient for advertisers who are trying to create a controlled experience re: which material I see when. They would absolutely hate it if the default mode of consumption happened in an offline-friendly way. But given that I don't give a damn about what they want, I think it would be ok.
If you really need something larger, the text could be an IPFS CID. Sure, you have to pin the data, so maybe that's a few more pennies, but IPFS has nice scalability features that would keep this overhead fairly low.
We may have to wait for the solar flare that knocks out the internet. Then point-to-point stuff like SSB will be the only thing that's working... between the seventeen people that were using it in the first place.
Ask random people on the street whether they care about their data or privacy, and if they care enough about it to boycott a popular web service, and you'll likely get blank stares or be laughed at for making such a proposition.
Most people don't care. Which is why this cycle of service hopping will never[1] be broken, and only privacy and tech enthusiasts will keep using privacy-respecting services. All this technobabble about privacy falls on deaf ears.
[1] Service hopping will still exist, but the only way privacy-respecting services will catch on in the mainstream is if they also offer a clear user experience advantage, and if they gain enough momentum for everyone else to want to use them. This is unlikely to happen with the modern indieweb movement, which is focused on the wrong things.
It's about ad-funded internet that can makes content creators prioritize quantity over quality.
It's about the destruction of healthy civic debate by having media channels that increasingly polarize public opinion, because it's easier to sell sensationalism than good reporting.
It's about how unsustainable the current model is.
They also worked back in the starting days of telephony (imagine everybody being forced on the same telephone network because telephone numbers were unrelated between networks, that would be pretty shitty, so ... we did something about it! [1])
If that is the case then it is because we just let it happen.
That would be amazing, by the way. Make it look like a video, and then the progress bar just slows and stops, and you're still there looking at new silly names and dumb stunts, hours later…
Repetitive is the point, because we repeat ourselves, but in time periods long enough that we forget and don't notice. This is our stupidity, compressed.