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Comment by Diti | Hacker News Reader

For context (if you’re wondering why that post is written in both English and Brazilian Portuguese), Twitter/X is currently blocked in Brazil [1], which prompted users to massively flock to Bluesky’s main frontend, bsky.app.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Twitter_in_Brazil

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Did they also flock to the Fediverse? If not, why not?

It seems weird to me that a media organizations like the New York times doesn’t set up a mastodon server for their journalists. Governments would also be a good option.

You obviously wouldn’t let people outside the organization register an account, but anyone can read, and if you want to comment or follow, sign up to any of the free federated servers.

Even if you have all the software handled, building a team of moderators who are willing to sift through all the crap and stop the child porn, cat in a blender videos, war footage, sexual harassment, upskirt crimes, etc. etc. is tough.

It's not the software that's hard. It's the moderation.

Pure text like Hacker News is a safe zone from this kind of crap. But multimedia sites like Twitter, Threads or BlueSky need to deal with the filthiest content and sanitize their servers. Even as their members complain about borderline not-a-child porn just a petite lady who is over 18 (yadda yadda) flame wars. Moderator teams grow tired of that bullshit.

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Ex: it's not Twitch that's hard to make. But instead the difficult thing is effectively moderating the hot-tub meta, as streamers like to call it.

> Even if you have all the software handled, building a team of moderators who are willing to sift through all the crap and stop the child porn, cat in a blender videos, war footage, sexual harassment, upskirt crimes, etc. etc. is tough.

In the context I think we're discussing, you deal with that by controlling who has accounts on the instance, not by policing posts one by one.

Do you allow replies to your Mastodon instance?

If so, you'll be policing the replies. And those replies can potentially be coming from across the Fediverse from other servers.

> Pure text like Hacker News is a safe zone from this kind of crap. But multimedia sites like Twitter, Threads or BlueSky need to deal with the filthiest content and sanitize their servers

I'm guessing Hacker News is safe because of the context and the small size. Other text-only forums I've moderated in the past have needed plenty of moderation for various horrible stuff that's been linked. And links we have on HN as well, but it doesn't get nowhere near as much misuse as I've seen in other text-only places.

Is anyone around here posting unmoderated videos as part of the discussion?

That's the thing: if a link comes from Facebook, YouTube or whatever, you know it's at least passed the first steps of moderation.

I'd expect that constantly posting links to OnlyFans or other riskier sites will get you flagged or banned around here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It’s a valid point. Renting servers sucks, setting up mastodon sucks. When do we see “Hosted mastodon AAS”?

It exists: https://masto.host/

Couple more on this list: https://delightful.club/delightful_libre_hosters/

Happy customer here too. Not affiliated, just impressed with how smoothly it all goes.

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of decentralisation and the fediverse?

Now, you've just moved everyone to hosted Mastodon, and why not make it even easier - instead of hosting multiple mastodons, just make one single mastodon everyone signs up to... and we've just reinvented Twitter.

Yes, exactly. Every decentralized service eventually backend dominated by a small number of service access providers who are actually willing to deal with hardware.

It is one of the reasons I appreciate masto.host as the owner has made it clear that signups are gated in part by how much of the fediverse it collectively hosts, because they don't want to be a central point of failure, they do want to encourage competition, and they also don't want the headaches of running that big of an instance population.

And even the self hosted instances are mostly in a couple of ISPs. (OVH; Hetzner; …).

*eventually becomes

There's also: https://fedihost.co/

FWIW, I have social accounts on X/BSky/Mastodon/Threads and post to all of them. I have noticed most of my engagement this month originating from Mastodon.

They did not. IIRC, one of Brazil’s leading politicians posted his addresses when this went down, and BlueSky was at the top, and fedi was nowhere to be found. Could be that simple.

Yes, they did. Portuguese engagement jumped big time on Mastodon.

"Big Time" on Fediverse: 20k users joined mastodon.social. That's less than 1% of the people that went to bluesky.

The main TV news program in Brazil (Jornal Nacional) is now promoting their bluesky. There is no real comparison.

Bluesky / ATProto is a federated protocol

Because nobody outside of the tech bubble knows about it

no; marketing, and because social media's whole point is to connect large numbers of people, therefore marketing is product quality

An unexpected side effect of this is that my Bluesky feed will now spoil the weekend's F1 qualifying and race.

It took a lot of Brazilians (and their love of Lewis Hamilton) to make that change.

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