Every greenfield OSS project should join Mastodon
blog.erlend.sh
blog.erlend.sh
In the fediverse, organizations shouldn't have to homestead on someone else's Mastodon instance. But unfortunately, self-hosting Mastodon at anything more than "toy" scale is incredibly onerous.
On the bright side, a vendor recently posted about their proprietary Mastodon clone operating at 100 the efficiency of Mastodon, so happily this doesn't appear to be an intrinsic problem with ActivityPub. Let's hope there are better open-source solutions soon.
> So why make the effort? Because the fediverse, like open source, is a movement.
Statements like this make me very sad about the probable future of the fediverse. Nobody cares about "movements" other than zealots. In order to succeed, federated services must be better and at least as convenient as centralized alternatives.
Email is probably the most convenient federated service out there and it is both (i) not that convenient (compared to things like WhatsApp etc) and (ii) not that decentralised (now being gatekept by a few big names like Google).
That's not to say we should treat the fediverse as an ideological movement or that we shouldn't try make it as convenient as possible. But I think it will pretty much always be the case that when you choose an open, federated service over a centralised one you are giving up a bit of ease of use for other considerations.
And it had a censorship problem.
The one nice thing about Twitter was that people with very different viewpoints shared the same platform. C didn't get blocked by A just because C wanted to be able to see tweets by B, just because B blocked A for a different reason. Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
> Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
Define ‘should’. Instances have freedom of association. If an instance decides that it, say, doesn’t want to federate with the instance with all the Nazis, why should should it? Anyone using the instance who doesn’t agree can just go to an instance which suits their preferences better. Personally, if my instance decided “okay, we’re federating with the Nazis now because not doing that is censorship (? still baffled by the logic there)” I would simply move to an instance with a view more in line with mine on how much oxygen of publicity Nazis should be given.
If your problem is that there aren't enough instances for people who believe what you believe, congratulations! The Fediverse empowers you to solve that problem.
Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted.
For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway.
The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks.
The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together.
Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.
Indeed it would! It's also a terrible analogy for the behavior of the vast majority of admins. Given that, I think you are either very poorly informed or arguing in bad faith.
Some examples of reasons stated for blocking individual instances from the Fediverse:
* “libertarianism”
* “TERFism” (feminists that oppose modern trans ideology)
* “Trumpism” (blocking nearly half the American electorate based on their political views?)
* “free speech”
* “federate with evil instances”
Sounds sketchy, right?
At least Twitter 1.0 had concrete guidelines that it could use to justify its censorship.
As can be seen from the list above, Fediblock is highly partisan and arbitrary. An ideal tool for political weaponisation of the Fediverse.
And if I join another instance and discuss “free speech” I will be swiftly booted out, lest Fediblock comes for their instance, too.
Can you see the issue with that?
Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”?
Am I the asshole?
Not really, no. I understand maybe being a little irritated, but not being upset about it. Just associate with instances where you're welcomed instead.
There are many groups who wouldn't want me to be around, in real life and otherwise. That's just life.
> Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”?
I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly. Your comments here don't make that very clear-cut. But it doesn't matter for this point.
The point is that it's a matter of freedom of association. Do you really want to hang around where you're not welcome, for whatever reason? I know I wouldn't. Life is too short.
I would think that the fediverse would be a thing that you, or anyone who is concerned about deplatforming and censorship, would be very happy about precisely because you can't be deplatformed or silenced on it.
You can join like-minded instances, neutral instances, or even start your own, do whatever you want. You have total freedom of speech. You just don't have the freedom to impose your speech on people who don't want to hear it. Freedom of speech does not in any way imply that you have the right to force others to listen.
1. Do or advocate for something unreasonable (banning and blocking people for having different politics than you, even if they're inside the Overton Window, even if their opinion is mainstream and perfectly fine);
2. Pretend the other party is being unreasonable ("I'm not seeing the problem here.", "Can you see the issue with that?" "Not really, no"), "gaslighting" them as the kids say;
3. When further pressed for detail or explanation deflect and feign ignorance ("I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly"), even if what the other person is asking is very clear (Do you think people should be de-federated or otherwise censored for expressing political opinions which are not your own?).
It is extremely, extremely obvious what the person you are replying to is concerned about but you don't actually care, do you?
I am neither banning/blocking anyone, nor am I advocating doing so. I am arguing that that instances have the right to do so, and that them doing so doesn't make the platform useless to others.
I never asserted that I agree with instances actually doing this.
> "gaslighting" them as the kids say
In what world does "I disagree" count as gaslighting?
> It is extremely, extremely obvious what the person you are replying to is concerned about but you don't actually care, do you?
It is not so obvious to me, no. If I take what he's saying literally, then I struggle with inconsistencies. If I don't, then I'm assuming that he has a certain perspective, and I don't want to do that because I can't actually read his mind.
However, as I said in my comment, for the purposes of this conversation it doesn't really matter what he's concerned about. My stance and argument would be the same regardless of his sociopolitical viewpoint.
Yes, because saying that is so strongly associated with people that many instances want to actively avoid. Nobody owes you anything, they protect their own community interests and favor over-blocking rather than the alternative of risking people having to see posts that violate their community's values.
> Am I the asshole?
Probably not.
1. I endorse freedom of speech, even if I disagree with what you have to say. (This also means anyone can criticize what someone else (or themself) writes; if they cannot, then it is not real free speech.)
2. Even if an instance allows such a thing and some people support Trump or other stuff, this does not necessarily mean that everyone does; an entire instance is not a single person.
3. Blocking and downscoring at the user level may be possible, independently from instances.
4. You do not have to display all of the messages on the instance. You might view only those by a specific user account for a person or project, or only individual messages being linked to; not everything.
5. Nevertheless, excessive flooding may be a reason to block the federation (e.g. if they send too many millions of large data which is meaningless in less than a nanosecond, which would clearly overload the computer).
6. I don't know if there is possibility of federation but blocking certain types of messages, e.g. if you only want text and not video. Although this seems to be supported by the ActivityPub protocol (there is a Video object, so you can easily filter that), I don't know if the software supports it.
do you merely need to be able to say it, or do you insist that the person you are criticising, and/or their associates, need to hear what you have to say?
I view it much like a cocktail party being thrown in someone's house. The host has every right to decide who will be at the party. If they don't want someone to come because they know that the person will make the party unpleasant for the other guests, they exclude them.
It sucks, but it's not actually infringing on anyone's rights.
Or, to put it in totally nonpolitical terms: if an instance is all about awesome a particular movie is, they may want to defederate from others who are all about how that movie is terrible.
I genuinely don't see the problem with that, and while it is technically "censorship", it's not the sort that is actually problematic. Nobody is saying that the movie haters can't express their viewpoint, they're just saying that they can't do it in their particular clubhouse.
When many instances co-ordinate to block an instance based on activism (Fediblock), they are censoring everyone on the targeted instance, many of whom may be innocent.
People deciding "whether they want to follow someone" is completely different from what's happening here.
It's the equivalent of sending an e-mail to my neighborhood listserv saying "the guy who lives down the street is a bit of a dick, let's not invite him to the chili cook-off next time."
And censorship power is further concentrated by the existence of Fediblock
Fortunately, there’s a solution; you’re perfectly free to make your own defederated protocol without freedom of association, if you can figure out how to do that.
Granted, you are correct that the best approach is to just look for different instances.
edit: There are a lot of users they lost because Mastodon got known for their strict content curation. This damaged all activity pub instances.
Governments need a very different kind of convincing, and its partly happening on its own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37067357
> Bluecheck-bros are prioritized. Content is heavily rate limited. DMs are restricted. Obtuse algorithms rule supreme. You'll also be sharing the space with an increasing amount of far-right influencers and a diminishing number of reputable scientists.
There are some problems with Twitter, including some of the things listed here (and many others beyond these), but some is unclear. How much rate limiting? Send or receive or both? And if there are other people on there, that isn't such significant; at least on Nitter (I don't know if you can directly on Twitter, but probably you can), you can view messages from an individual user account or messages belonging to an individual thread, so you do not have to display everything.
> I will argue that the 10+ million people already on the fediverse are actually the exact group of nerdy open culture enthusiasts you wanna be reaching out to. As the common startup advice goes (which I can attest also holds true for community building), this is where you'll find the first 10-100 people who love your project.
It would be a good idea, because currently hardly anyone has the interest of my projects (other than myself). It would be helpful to make them well-known, although for the mainly discussions forums of my projects I would want to use NNTP instead (which I already have set up).
> [Fediverse] runs on the same interoperable internet protocols that enable you to view this HTML document in a standards-based web browser.
It is true, but both protocols are too complicated, and have some other technical problems.
I would want to make the discussion forums for my projects to be on NNTP, and I have a NNTP server set up for such a thing, but currently it is hardly in use by anyone. Furthermore, I think what I had read is Mastodon does not implement ActivityPub client-server protocol anyways, and only server-server protocol is implemented.
Mastodon also is requiring their own protocol which is not indicated by the URL (since many instances are possible) and which does not seem to be a way to identify it. And then you will have to use their HTML and JavaScripts etc (and, I do not want my messages to be blocked by such a things, if I can avoid it), and if you want to customize you will have to know each one, to do it.
> Hachyderm checks all the boxes most OSS folks should care about
That is hardly even half of them. Also, some of them are not clear enough.
Another note about Mastodon (and about Fediverse in general): When blocking users or instances, there should be possibility of (if the blocked instance does not cause excessive flooding) to hide them from displays which are not explicitly showing them (e.g. replies to a thread which is being displayed; users can still hide messages from individual users or instances or whatever else if they wish to do so), rather than necessarily having to be blocked entirely. (Although the things people say about it suggests it doesn't work that way, even though I am not sure why it shouldn't work that way.)
I use Linux because it is just better than the alternatives, not because it is a super special secret club for the smart. It isn't. Using it doesn't make you special. Going on about it constantly doesn't attract people, it turns them off, especially when framed like this.
> It used to be that you had to use Twitter because of its network power and consequent reach.
No, you didn't. Most people have never had an account and have never even been to it. Facebook is something that was nearly universal. Twitter has always been that weird esoteric platform for journalists and celebrities and their (pretty pathetic) groupies. It is certainly not necessary for open source software developers to have an account.
> You'll also be sharing the space with an increasing amount of far-right influencers and a diminishing number of reputable scientists.
Where "far right" presumably means you aren't a communist and don't believe in gender ideology.
>I will argue that the 10+ million people already on the fediverse are actually the exact group of nerdy open culture enthusiasts you wanna be reaching out to.
I cannot imagine a group of people I would want to "reach out to" LESS than the people I see on Mastodon when I look at it. Yes I really want to go to a social network where I will get verbally abused for not putting alt text on images. Yes I really want to share a social network with people that will ban me for using the "wrong" pronouns. No.
>Diverse leadership and community.
>Tech-leaning but open to all.
>Highly safety-minded, as most recently evidenced by their Federation Safety Enhancement Project.
Reminder: when these people say "safety" they mean safety from ideas and sentiments that challenge them. They do not mean "safety from pedophiles" (fediverse is full of them, including people advocating for children to go to burlesque and drag performances). They do not mean "safety to express ideas without fear of censorship". They mean "safety from anything that might challenge leftist orthodoxy".
If so, then that means that they are using FSEP for bad things (many things can be used for bad things). FSEP itself seems to be more neutral, and most of it seems to be OK although there are a few problems (although it also (fortunately) seems to avoid some of the possible problems with such a thing); one problem I can see is that it does not say that reasons are specified for being blocked (which might be helpful in case you wanted to filter them). The other thing that FSEP does not seems to say is if you want to only partially block another instance (item 3.1 seems to suggest that it is all or nothing, although Fig. 07 makes that less clear).