Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Mozilla is not going to like the outcome of a decentralized social networking future, seeing as they're political ideologues in favor of censorship[1]. What they're trying to do is hop into a new fad to increase their reach. I honestly don't think most people care whether Mozilla operates a fediverse instance or not.

At any rate, the future of social networking is not the fediverse, it's Nostr. ActivityPub simply has too many architectural shortcomings to be more than a novelty, in particular, you cannot guarantee that your audience receives your messages to them unless they're restricted to a subset of the network's servers. The fact that your identity is owned by a server admin is a centralizing force on the network, and different groups isolating from one another is a fragmenting force. It may be the case that such an architecture becomes standard, but it is not ideal, and seeing as it is early days with these social networking alternatives and there's already an architecurally superior option leads me to the conclusion that the fediverse will be eclipsed relatively soon.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

> Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken:

> - Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.

> - Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.

> - Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.

> - Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.

Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices", these all seem like pretty reasonable and inarguable improvements? How are these pro-censorship? If anything, calling for more transparency in promoted content is anti-censorship.

Or, are we just getting hung up over a shallow interpretation of the heading?

Yeah, these all seem like arguments in favour of transparency and openness, in fact, not censorship. The only other advocacy in this post that lands within a stones throw of "censorship" is condemning hate speech.

> Except for the "tools to amplify factual voices"

They felt the need to include it, if they didn't I would agree with what they are trying to do. Why do they need to launder that line item with the rest?

Many people prefer facts over the lies, propaganda, misrepresentations, exaggerations, cheats, scams, accusations, and other FUD promulgated by some of the media and many agencies, politicians and advertisers. They're not that hard to discern, for adults at least.

This move seems to fit right in with the rest of Mozilla's program.Seems like a good move ... and the majority of people on the Fediverse seem likely to agree.

Adults disagree on many things and are willing to kill each over those disagreements in some cases, even when it comes to what the "truth" is. So color me quite skeptical that any tool that anyone uses is going to be free from such biases unless it's solely in the domain of verifying mathematical correctness in some strictly defined ontological system.

You're so right.

The whole idea of universal 'Truth' is a big part of most of our problems, yes. As the pre-Platonic Protagoras tried to assert, we need to temper our judgements by recognizing that different perspectives lead to relatively different conclusions.

Facts that all can observe and agree on are the basis of tolerance of interpretations we can't agree on. For millenia, some have insisted that they have been gifted with some ultimate truths. Nonsense. So yes, agreed-on, observed facts are the basis what we need more of, with other sorts of assertions carrying much less weight.

We'll see, but I would argue that at least for most of the conversations worth having, fragmentation is good. It is of course annoying and not what anyone wants in the short term, but it's also the only thing that has been observed in practice to semi-reliably prevent a social space from going to shit. Broad reach implies the strength of any one social relationship going to zero, and you have to multiply that small value by a big number to get any value worth the effort. And we all know where that logic leads.

On the other hand, people will probably do everything they can to "fix" it or work around it and broaden their reach, so it's hard to say anything about any specific technology or frontend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com