So if you choose to host something like this, be very aware that there are some sick, sick people out there.
If you spin up a fediverse app like Lemmy, you spin up a platform. It is platform software. And you get the responsibility, but also the opportunity, to set that up well. Curate the content in your instance. Lemmy and any other fediverse apps comes with a set of moderation tools that allow you to handle this, and there is a strong focus in the developer community to improve them on a continual basis.
How do i do that without getting PTSD as well? Or is there some magic method that works without me looking at CSAM and gore constantly?
If a 6-day old account making highly voted posts and no comments? Bot, part of a botnet (check who upvoted, and purge as neccesary).
6 month old account, combination of high and low effort comments? Does not emit hatred with every fibre of their being? Appears to understand debate? Rational human, trust.
You do it on case-by-case basis and slowly increase your trust network
Thus reopening yourself to the trauma of viewing CSAM.
This is speculation; they may look at ips and other fingerprint data to determine if they accept your acc application.
You can avoid this in both real life and or the internet by making very closed clubs in which only very trusted people are added.
Even though you want nothing to do with those images in the first place, while Big Social is intentionally keeping the stuff around "for science", yeah right.
Consider how some Muslim cultures have sidestepped this issue by banning representational imagery altogether; while the Russians just sent telegrams.
But if you get popular then you better have a monetization strategy.
Imgur is a good case study I think.
So despite the fact I am very interested in the federated social media to keep my intelletual property out of the cashflow of businesses whose actions are much louder than their pretty sounds in court, it's still one-shot-and-out digital graffiti. I don't think it's worth it.
I wouldn't run any kind of publishing system for anons myself. It's potentially valuable for an actual social group though.
That's pretty much how it works on the federated Internet.
There are large open-access services run by communities with sufficient moderation capacity (to not get themselves nuked, anyway.) Turns out many "impossibilities" are trivial when you're not trying to abuse 1 billion active users at the same time through the power of their own (distr)actions - but instead you are simply trying to run a board for messages.
And then there plenty of private servers, where publishing either is by invite, or does not have outsized reach in the first place. Those also defederate each other a lot, and many don't show you stuff from the big publics at all.
There've been "bad people out there" always (or at least that's what the "good people in there" have been broadcasting, for about as long as I remember). The design/engineering problem here is how to figure out and deploy a relational dynamic that keeps hostiles at a safe distance.
The practical problem stems from a technicality of how federation currently works: to display content from other services to your users, you have to mirror it on your storage.
This mode of federating hazardous data is a real problem, and also it's exactly what some cheap-ass subcontractor of current-gen social media incumbents would be doing if said incumbents had the amount of good sense that they've demonstrated having (see e.g. https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series). Yeah cuz... it's war out there.
I don't expect things to get better until everyone's phone is their personal server and cryptographic root of trust, and this is exposed to non-technicals in a way which neither scares them nor screws them over. Once civilization accomplishes that, I reckon things will be fine once again.
EDIT: "Heck, even Instagram had a horrific "mirror world" incident where the moderation bit got flipped on a number of images which ordinary users were exposed to." I don't think I've heard about this before, but I must admit I find it completely hilarious - besides obviously sad and horrifying.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19975375
> Social news site Reddit will not censor "distasteful" sections of its website, its chief executive has said.
jailbait, upskirt, etc. were all huge subreddits back then.
I wonder what he'd say about this today, because it comes off as extreme naivety, and I even held similar views, though I don't get how your mindset could be so extreme that your first instinct would not be to disallow content which is this distasteful. It really shows how deeply "free speech" was embedded into net culture of the time above all else.
Not to misuse this argument, but I really really wonder how he feels given 1) who he's married to 2) how he presents himself today and 3) that he has a daughter now. I'd guess this is NOT his view of running Digg,
Personally I'd love to add in something like the old slashdot comment model, where people would mark content as "helpful", "funny", "insightful", "controversial" etc, and based on how much you trust the people labeling it, you could have things filtered out, or brought forward.
Some of the social media systems, including Bluesky, started as invite-only, but that was only ever really for rate-limiting and in particular there were no negative consequences for inviting someone who was subsequently banned.
Any attempt to generalize this by allowing multiple weak vouches instead of a single strong one, or allowing people to join before getting vouched for, or removing the stakes in vouching for someone, etc. always end up failing for fairly predictable reasons. No matter how much cool cryptography you add
HN's mirror-universe counterpart, Lobste.rs, works basically this way.