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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that it's hard to make the Fediverse work content-wise. The Big Techs have very expensive systems to do content moderation. I (kind of) trust Instagram, or X, or whatever to prevent my daughter from seeing gore or weird porn stuff. It's hard to trust these other platforms. But I'll change my mind if good arguments come up :)

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The thing is, I've never really bumped into that stuff on the Fediverse myself. And it's not something that was super common on communities before social media too. You don't need a huge budget and moderation team to keep a pleasant community, it usually doesn't become an issue until your site/service becomes a massive deal in the first place.

as someone who has actively gone out looking for weird porn on the fediverse, I struggled

Just can't be done /s aha

you just need to join the right instances ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

any pointers? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I assume it's better these days, but Mastodon avoided adding proper search for years because the core devs knew there was plenty of questionable content or there and making it discoverable would put many hosts at legal risk.

That's not at all why mastodon doesn't have search. It's all about stopping "bullying" when you post something stupid.

I'll see if I can find the links, it's been a while since I last saw them, but there was a very active GitHub issue on the main Mastodon repo back in 2017 or 2018 related to search. It came down to concerns over content that is considered acceptable in some cultures and child pornography in others.

Have you actually used federated social media? In my experience, it's more heavily moderated than any of the big centralized platforms. Like, to the point where one of the major reasons I still use the big centralized platforms is to get away from overbearing Fediverse moderation practices. None of this should be surprising when you consider that each of the little servers which make up the Fediverse are themselves tight-knit curated communities which selectively federate with other tight-knit curated communities. I prefer that my kids participate in the intentionally crafted spaces of the Fediverse over the three major algorithmically disorganized marketing machines any day of the week.

It makes a lot of sense to have Mastodon instances that only accepts verified under-18 people from a single country. Far far easier to moderate such communities.

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