The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh impossible to find interesting content if you're not on the main big instances.
People have a right to ignore speech, and to establish standards for speech on their private property. If there is market demand for a service that filters out content based on ideology, whether mastodon.social or Fox News, so be it.
It can be toxic and a social negative, but any fix is worse than the problem.
Furthermore, there is no anti-trust legislation, and as a result, there are only a few companies that control all meeting places: the parks, the coffee shops, the roads, the pubs. And they have set up constant monitoring technology.
If you want to set up a protest on a street corner, it better align with the corporation’s views, or they will ban your access to the roads. If you want to talk with friends at the pub, don’t say anything out of line or you’re not coming back. Events can take place in parks, but make sure you only discuss the weather.
Of course, this is fine: you can always just meet at your own home and say what you think, because that is your own property.
…
I realize the analogy is overwrought, but there just doesn’t exist an online equivalent of a public space, and ideological enforcement is trivial. Comparing it to the rules we have for physical spaces mean we need to imagine what those physical spaces would be like if they operated like online spaces, and frankly the result is dystopian (in my opinion).
Surely the solution isn’t just to dismiss it as a non-problem? Or, I suppose, to stop looking for a solution because… solutions so far considered have negative side effects, which feels (practically speaking) the same to me.
There are countless online spaces which operated like physical public spaces, where anything legal goes. Move off of the mainstream web and even the illegal stuff is allowed. You can literally run your own instance of whatever application on the Fediverse and follow whomever you want. No matter how radical or extremist your ideology is, someone will happily host it.
It's only a problem if one insists that all online spaces must be run under the same anarchic principles and must be forced to give anyone a platform, but that's far more dystopian than what we have now.
Thank you for this tight summary. As a greybeard, I'll note this conflation was present from very early on, and it was partly responsible for the heat death of Usenet. No amount of logical, prepared rebuttal budges people from the idea that the two things are the same. The conflation might be a human tendency, a cognitive bias that almost everyone has.
Why where all the others on the same instance blocked?
They did nothing and their only connection to me is we are registered on the same instance.
BTW You have the right to speak, not the right to be heard is nonsense.
By that logic even North Korea has freedom speech.
Freedom of speech just doesn’t mean unlimited reach and limitless speech
The fact that other people want to be on a system that blocks you is their business, not yours. The point of the fediverse is you get to choose your own censorship.
The Fediverse is to Nostr what the legacy telephone system was to the Internet.
That is not censorship!
This conversation is frustrating exactly because people think a group “excluding” someone is “censoring” them. Except that's not what censorship is.
Censorship is about you not being allowed to say what you want on a sign outside your own bar.
You complaining about a different bar, not letting you in because they don’t like you. That’s not censorship, that’s just people being jerks to you… and that is allowed. Nobody has to listen to you if they don't like you. Nobody has to even let you in the door to where they hang out if they don't like you, especially if the reason they kicked you out was something you said.
It's called moderating the space you operate. This is literally why you can’t walk into a bar like you own the place. If you don't like it, start your own damn instance. You don't have any right to make people tolerate you if they don't want to.
Which instance are you referring to? Who specifically blocked you?
A single user’s action doesn’t represent the entire Fediverse.
Somebody posts abhorrent Nazi racist crap, or lies about what is happening, you shut them off, and they'll never be heard by you again. Yes, you need to see/hear the crap or propaganda once for each Nazi or liar, but that's it.
The problem is nearly every social platform needs to increase your engagement get you to click or scroll just another time so they get to show you more adverts and make more money and claim more 'engagement' to juice their stock price. So along with having to listen to the advertisements, you ALSO are REQUIRED to see/listen to the crap and lies.
The good solution — "you don't have to listen" — is not an actual option in the real world.
(NB: This is why Section 230 should only protect web providers if they have no algorithm. Once they have an algo, they exercise more editorial control than any newspaper or broadcast editor — they ARE responsible for the content, not because they posted it, their users did, but because they routed it to you.)
When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die.
Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it, and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.
> When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community
can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
> Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it
there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with. it's a personal choice about how to spend your time.
> and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.
what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.
Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.
> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?
How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.
> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.
No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.
This isn't an academic debate, we've been seeing this play out online for at least 30 years. Probably longer - I wasn't around for Usenet's heyday but it wasn't immune either.
Only allowing posts between mutual friends is instant messaging, not a social network. Discovery, engagement, and platform growth comes from people wanting to hear from and interact with followers who they don't necessarily follow themselves.
Genuine question, then: why are you here, in the Hacker News comments section?
“It looks like you hated that Nickleback song! You’ll probably also hate this Chad Kroeger solo project!”
There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.
There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.
The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.
On mastodon, porn-like content is mostly welcomed. Especially with anime or fox characters. Not sure why.
I liked the Internet better when it was all nerds and only code cared, rather than gender identity or listing neuroses in own's social media profile as if it was an audition for an echo chamber choir.
If there's nothing to win and you're only losing time around here... why are you here in the first place?
Stop losing by trying to convince us how cool it is to lose... because all of your suggestions amount to urging good men to do nothing.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
If I've got a profile on let's say, mastodon.social, and I have a following, and people I follow across other servers, and then mastodon.social decides that due to a few people over on outrageousposts.social, I can no longer access their content, nor they mine, I am left with exactly two choices: write that portion of my network off as a complete loss, or create a completely new profile on a new instance, and build up a new network from scratch.
That anyone puts up with this state of affairs suggests to me that people just don't know Nostr solved this problem 3 years ago.
I get that compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc, Mastodon does seem like an improvement even with this state of affairs -- after all, you at least CAN just create a new profile rather than getting booted off of the network entirely. It was handy for a few years. But a better alternative has been created, and I for one won't be looking back.
Are they choosing what people can read, or are they choosing what they're willing to federate? No one is stopping people writing and publishing things on federated services. People are only choosing what they're willing to broadcast over the part of the service they run.
It doesn't matter which instance you join if you're just getting started, and don't know enough to make a meaningful decision about which instance to join.
After a week or a month, you might understand how it works a bit better, and also which communities exist, and might have an informed opinion about which community you resonate with.
Also, I would certainly not want an e-mail service where the spam filter is based on the admin’s political opinions.
Also, I’d like to see if anyone has ever been banned from Gmail for sending an e-mail saying that hating all men is not nice.
They report content they don't agree with. And if the instance owner shared that, the federated user or even instance gets banned.
Most prominent example is the Ukraine. Even if you post truthfully and in context, that the Ukraine did support the 3rd Reich with link to the Wikipedia article, you get banned, no warning.
So there is political censorship. And the fediverse is super political. The 3 big content areas in the Fediverse are politics, LGBT and nudes/nudes drawings including sadly CSAM.
Blocking (and reporting) an instance because of CSAM I can understand. But that too should happen at an individual level.
The right to speak is not the same as the right to an audience. If users want to hear you they will seek you out. If not, you've said your peace, and that's all you're entitled to.
Yeah, that’s definitely citation needed.
If you're using someone else's email domain (like, eg. gmail.com), you cannot migrate to another provider. If you use your own domain, you can change who is hosting it.
Like email, there are plenty of Mastodon hosting companies. You can use your own domain, and migrate between them at will. If you use eg. mastodon.social, you can even migrate in most circumstances (but not if the instance vanishes).
Most of the people who started on Mastodon are people of the LGBT+ community that were getting constantly harassed on other platforms. This 'cancel culture' is just a healthy attitude to having a zero tolerance policy on abuse, it is how it avoids being the enormous bigoted alt-right techbro mess that is now X.
Since Mastodon is federated, you can choose the instance you want to use, and what you see. Just don't expect other instances to actively want to engage there.
Not true. You cannot federate with tech news and bigoted alt-right techbro (based) instances. That decision is made for you by the janitors of the instances you federate with. Just like reddit, where the janitors of the subreddits decide what you're allowed to see. Your agency is gone.
Compare this to X, where if it's not illegal, you can choose to see or say it with no repercussions beyond an individual blocking you, which solves their problem of not wanting to see what you say. It's the perfect system!