[HN Gopher] My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
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My personal wishlist for a decentralized social network
Author : csande17
Score : 225 points
Date : 2021-01-11 16:40 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (carter.sande.duodecima.technology)
(TXT) w3m dump (carter.sande.duodecima.technology)
| TLightful wrote:
| Data independency.
|
| Social media companies to compete on features not the network
| effects.
|
| I feel like there needs to be a new internet standard.
|
| We have emails, phones, texts, etc ...
|
| Why can't we have a standard for social media and messaging which
| doesn't lock you in?
|
| Imagine if I could only use one phone provider because all my
| other friends and family use that one provider.
|
| Social media has been broken from the start.
|
| Someone please fix it. It's bullsh!t.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| I honestly do not understand this fetish with decentralization,
| do you really want a social network filled with child
| pornography, violence and other shady stuff? Because that's
| what's gonna happen guaranteed. People are just animals without
| rules
| random_dork1 wrote:
| Decentralisation is best exemplified by email or http. Yes,
| they enable all kind of things, including bad ones. They behave
| like infrastructure, just like roads. I enjoy Mastodon because
| I can find the instance I like best and still be in touch with
| people from other instances. My instance blocks other instances
| that they don't like and publicly explains why. When I won't
| like it any more, I will take my data and move somewhere else
| without looks my contacts or anything. Once Nextcloud will have
| a decent implementation of Activity Pub, I will start my own
| instance just for myself and I will only see content that I
| want to see.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| All of that terrible stuff exists on the decentralized
| internet, yet through a combination of selecting the right
| platforms and right client software, I never have to see it.
|
| You don't want a centralized internet and trust someone else to
| control it for you. You want control over your connection to a
| decentralized internet.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| Thank you, that gives me a better understanding.
| CivBase wrote:
| > do you really want a social network filled with child
| pornography, violence and other shady stuff?
|
| You have just described the world wide web. I may not want that
| stuff to exist, but I also certainly don't want the world wide
| web to _not_ exist.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| I mean you can try to share child pornography through your
| ISP's network and we can see what happens? Shady stuff are
| mostly shared through decentralized networks and its the
| centralized www that's preventing them. To me this
| decentralization fetish feels like people think government
| are stupid and inefficient so we should have no government at
| all
| CivBase wrote:
| Any reason why an ISP couldn't shut you down for sharing
| child porn on a decentralized social network?
| feanaro wrote:
| How exactly is decentralisation related to the idea that
| there should be no governments?
|
| That said, governments are just organizations and very
| powerful organizations at that. Like any powerful
| organization, a government can become corrupt or tyrannical
| and start working against the populace. It is always a good
| idea to keep it in check so that its power cannot grow
| boundless.
| markessien wrote:
| How about a timeline on peoples personal blog that follows other
| blogs (like the fb timeline)? This way, you write your own
| content on your own website, you read other peoples content on
| your own website in a consistent format. You tweet on your own
| website, and others who want to follow can follow from their own
| website.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Isn't that "trackback"? As popular in the first wave of '00s
| blogging.
| slg wrote:
| I agree with this article that a social network without
| moderation is worthless. However what this describes is not
| moderation, it is filtering. There needs to be some form of
| moderation.
|
| Imagine a scenario in which a revenge porn image is posted to the
| site. Is the victim's primary recourse simply to block the image
| on their end? That would leave them without any power to prevent
| the poster from sharing that image with anyone and everyone the
| victim knows. The victim might not even be immediately aware of
| that harassment if they block the image. Putting the burden on
| the end user to control what they see is not moderation. There
| needs to be some way for that content to be removed from the
| system globally for moderation to be effective.
| robryk wrote:
| The Web does not really have any such mechanisms (and certainly
| didn't have them back in the times where we had more search
| engines). Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it
| not require them, or that it suffers from their lack?
| slg wrote:
| > Do you think Web is different in a way that makes it not
| require them
|
| The web is a pull based model while social media is push
| based. That means social media is much more prone to this
| type of harassing behavior. I would also argue that the web
| as a whole doesn't address this problem well as is seen with
| what the NYT recently revealed about Pornhub.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Yes, the purpose of moderation is far wider than "I don't want
| to see this post". It is there to protect people from malicious
| activities, and also very importantly, it is there to shape the
| community. Moderation is needed to set limits of what is and
| isn't accepted in a community. If those limits are not present,
| communities quickly succumb to its worst elements.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Scuttlebutt protocol is a decentralized encrypted protocol where
| data-at-rest is encrypted by keys not on the chat server.
|
| Chat server can be scaled to many via docker.
|
| An average end-user can fire up such a chat server to cover his
| own group chat.
|
| Manyverse (Sweden) is that mobile app.
|
| I've toyed with it. Looks interesting.
|
| Very much like Gnutella except there are no seed servers,
| Manyverse instead uses cipher-link hash tags as a joining
| mechanism which often requires a posting at external websites to
| get started.
|
| Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not a contributor to Manyverse nor
| Scuttlebutt.
| root_axis wrote:
| The internet is already decentralized, another layer of
| decentralization solves nothing. When the most popular nodes
| start banning people we're going to hear the exact same
| complaints from the usual suspects.
| offtop5 wrote:
| I don't think social media networks can scale at all. During
| quarantine I'm a part of several Online Social circles, which are
| basically bi-weekly zoom calls to crack jokes on. The owner of
| the group still needs to ban people from time to time for saying
| racist or sexist things.
|
| I honestly don't think it can scale much beyond 20 people, with 1
| person determining if certain conduct is okay or not. And say you
| get kicked out for making a joke or whatever, then like in real
| life you have to find another Social circle
| asdff wrote:
| What if we just went to email? "Follow my mailing list"
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's what substack aims to be.
| anticristi wrote:
| Yes, but then you would have a single Inbox, and a single place
| to triage and filter messages. You wouldn't be exposed to the
| myriads of VC-funded start-ups that degenerate into a
| text/video chat and news feed. In fact, you might have to
| install only your favourite tool, instead of 10s to keep up
| with the cool kids.
|
| You would likely be too focused on what's important to you,
| since noone is incentivised to artificially keep their "average
| session time" up. You would also not be tracked, hence miss out
| on important ads about stuff you don't need on a website that
| shouldn't know what you did last weekend.
|
| I think you suggest a terrible idea. If I sounded sarcastic,
| it's probably because I am.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| The key feature you want in a network: all your friends and/or
| people you want to follow should be on it.
|
| So in addition to privacy (the author addresses this) you want
| ease of use and a funding model, as well as some momentum.
| lvspiff wrote:
| Essentially people want a free social network that doesn't use
| its users data for mining and advertising, doesn't track user
| data, doesn't archive their messages if they delete them/their
| account/they die, and free from moderation. Is that really too
| much to ask for?
|
| The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for - you don't get
| a free service without paying for it in some other way - mostly
| these days through the data mining/advertising side of things. If
| there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay for it
| to be setup?
| Naac wrote:
| >> The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for
|
| How can that be so when we have websites like Wikipedia, or
| Openstreemap?
| laumars wrote:
| Quite a lot of people (myself included) do actually pay for
| Wikipedia.
| andrewprock wrote:
| I'm not sure about Openstreetmap, but Wikipedia has a huge
| budget. It does get paid for, and the people paying for it
| definitely consider what it is they are supporting.
| pydry wrote:
| I'd rather host this and most other internet services on a box
| in my house, next to my router. Or, it could be my router.
| Either way.
|
| It's just really annoying to do that right now and the
| solutions that attempt to make it easy and slick aren't quite
| there.
|
| This type of thing could be made more popular with normal
| people if it's easy enough since popular features which "break"
| the business models of companies like Facebook become popular
| (e.g. filtering of news feed that under the users direct
| control or lossless storage of photos).
|
| I think most people would be happier owning the hardware than
| renting an online service.
| adrianpike wrote:
| Is that not just a blog?
| cyberdelica wrote:
| Before people abused the term "social network" to include
| all manner of things, including forums such as Reddit and
| Hacker News, using Twitter was referred to as "micro
| blogging".
| [deleted]
| paul_f wrote:
| "Free from moderation" Isn't that what got Parler in trouble?
| Is it possible to have an unmoderated social network anymore?
| user-the-name wrote:
| > The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for
|
| Mastodon exists. It is what you described. It is paid for
| either by generous individuals or by donations.
| musingsole wrote:
| > If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay
| for it to be setup?
|
| I hear your argument. No VC-funded start-up is likely to make
| moves in this space. But your question ignores a whole sector
| of the economy: non-profits. I believe there even have been
| some non-profit social network attempts (perhaps even still
| active), though I can't recall their names.
| iib wrote:
| I think this attempt by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (but
| unrelated to Wikipedia itself) comes close [1].
|
| Honestly, if it manages to approximately implement the
| community approach that works under Wikimedia itself, it may
| well become the most non-toxic social network, as they self-
| advertise it.
|
| https://wt.social/ [1]
| wayoutthere wrote:
| > If there's no way to turn a profit then why would someone pay
| for it to be setup?
|
| If it is generally useful to society but unprofitable to
| provide, isn't that the category of things that the government
| should fund and operate like a utility?
|
| That said, I don't think the government should be in the
| business of running social networks. But at the same time I
| didn't think China would get so much more right about the
| Internet than we have.
| chipsa wrote:
| Ask Signal.
| lvspiff wrote:
| Signal is a messaging service not a social network
| chipsa wrote:
| It is a messaging service, but it's also free, with a non-
| trivial server requirement, and with no monetization
| available for the service (neither ads nor subscription).
| alwdgxzubpxnzcy wrote:
| I was just thinking about "customizable moderation" that this
| article mentioned earlier today. I came up with a similar idea of
| lists that you can opt into following just like AdBlock filter
| lists or Twitter shared blocklists just like he mentioned. In
| terms of feature set I had a couple ideas this this post didn't
| mention. There could be two levels of blocking that filter lists
| could set, warm before showing and never show. Also blocking
| could be applied on a per user or a per post basis.
| runjake wrote:
| HTTPS + RSS + Webring/etc. Existing, well-defined protocols that
| are nimble and able to meet changing needs.
|
| I'm not sure why everyone wants to over-complicate this.
|
| If you want to make it easy enough to use for any mom and
| grandma, and you want any hope of gaining traction then you're
| going to need capital, which is going to necessitate a business.
|
| And perhaps it should require some effort, some learning, and
| some know-how before one can jump on their Internet soapbox. The
| signal to noise ratio is pretty low.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| By the same rationale, why do you need a "social network" at
| all? What is wrong with email?
| rektide wrote:
| Email is a protocol for using the internet to transmit
| messages. Part of what I find interesting/valuable/different
| about "social networks" is that the content is & remains
| online. Email does not have this capability. Email is an
| exchange.
| IvanSologub wrote:
| I am a question about decentralized social networks in several
| communities and have not received much feedback. I think because
| I'm not a techie and considered completely different aspects.
|
| For example the aspect of ownership. Whether the account should
| belong to the person who registered it. Some people, for example,
| invest in design, promotion and content creation.
|
| It seems to me that the technical solutions proposed by you
| remove the issue of ownership. What do you think?
| hehehaha wrote:
| It should really be an open social network that government
| entities cannot shut down. The real test for anyone trying this
| will be the Great Wall of China. Until then...
| kube-system wrote:
| That technology doesn't exist and never will.
| https://xkcd.com/538/
|
| China's firewall is relatively open compared to North Korea,
| for instance.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail
| because it's a copy of something, but without the impetus that
| produced the original.It's the "make something people want," but
| more "make something they use for X."
|
| You need the original purpose. It has to be to make something
| that isn't itself. Myspace was mainly novelty and music, Facebook
| was for status minting from ivy colleges, other ones are for an
| exogenous purpose as well. Politics isn't a useful unifying
| principle. I helped run a progressive political precursor to one
| of the major ones about 20+ years ago, and it only existed
| because it was tolerated by part of the establishment, and it
| could not survive a truly hostile environment.
|
| Gamers made discord a thing because it was for playing games.
| Hipchat was about making code, and Slack was a way to manage
| people. Reddit was for sharing alternative/emerging culture.
|
| A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture, and the
| current generation of censors came up in divergent/alternative
| culture, so they have a more sophisticated idea of what nascent
| opposition looks like than the old ones.
|
| Short version is, we don't need a decentralized social network,
| we need new culture that produces networks, and courage to create
| that culture.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What we need is a distributed content distribution network,
| which just happens to be social. Something like a social
| bittorrent network with distributed search and inline website
| display.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Isn't this what Diaspora is?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Does Diaspora have torrent sharing built in now? I don't
| see any mention.
| gfodor wrote:
| The product feature of intellectual freedom is suddenly a real
| value proposition.
| swalsh wrote:
| I partially agree with you. Right now the people most likely to
| switch are going to be the people who have no home. The
| crackdown has started, but it's pretty early. The people
| kicked, or leaving at this point are not the ones you want to
| be the early founders of your social network. Remember, the
| first users set the tone for the community.
| gfodor wrote:
| Your last point isn't a truism as networks approach global
| scale. Early users of Facebook and Twitter have not set the
| tone - they may have influenced it, but particularly in
| Facebooks cause, any such influence has been largely diluted
| away.
| swalsh wrote:
| You're not going to get to Facebook/Twitter scale without
| good content in the beginning.
| gfodor wrote:
| Agree if that was your point it's well made.
| EGreg wrote:
| This platform doesn't exactly match everything on the wishlist,
| but it matches what you've written here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25735243
| chartpath wrote:
| True about Facebook. But didn't they completely re-invent
| themselves once the white suburban soccer moms took over, and
| then again when all the drunk racist uncles came on?
|
| I feel like you are right about the need for an original
| purpose. And would add that at such a momentous time when
| everyone can see the consequences of private, centralized media
| selling attention so efficiently, is it really impossible that
| the situation rises to that level of original purpose? The seed
| of a new community might just need a great spark.
| r00fus wrote:
| > Thinking a new social network platform is destined to fail
| because it's a copy of something,
|
| TikTok would beg to differ.
|
| You are correct about having a base, but once you grow out of
| that base, you can compete as a general purpose social network
| (ultimately an advertising/lead channel - even if only for the
| market of ideas).
|
| It's all about execution and as you said, purpose. So what's
| FB's purpose anymore?
| noizejoy wrote:
| Parent post also said the following
|
| > A divergent platform needs a basis in the culture
|
| And arguably TikTok found that.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Old people need to yell at each other? FB has peaked I think.
| Their endgame looks like Equifaxbook.
|
| Smart view on TikTok though. I thought the purpose of TikTok
| was for teenagers to be on a platform without their parents
| checking up on them, and the CCP was right there to collect
| kompromat on the next generation of potential western
| leaders.
|
| I am suddenly very optimistic about the purposes for how new
| platforms will emerge. Younger people will figure it out.
| tomaszs wrote:
| TikTok was not a copy. It was unique in a way it was a short
| video platform for dancing when it started.
| rayvd wrote:
| Tell that to MySpace, Friendster, etc. There is room for prove
| product disruption if the iteration adds significant value, or
| if the quality of service of the current leader drops off.
| rohan1024 wrote:
| I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet
| infrastructure although I have no idea what it is.
|
| Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than
| personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while
| self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own
| a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with
| centralization.
|
| The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not
| as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are
| ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized
| services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves
| issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for
| minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet
| forever.
|
| tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of
| software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host
| Schoolmeister wrote:
| I think you might want to look at something like Solid[0]. It
| resembles your idea, but is more general. People host their
| data in a personal data store (a pod, which can be either
| self-hosted or by a 3rd party) and Web applications read
| to/write from this data store. It is more general in the
| sense that this data can then also be used by other
| applications to provide their own features (which is a hard
| problem to tackle, since you don't want to restrict all
| current and future different types of data to one interface).
|
| E.g. When you create a new blog post this is stored in a pod
| of whichever data provider you chose. The fact that you wrote
| this blog post can then be discovered e.g. on your social
| media, after which people can read it in their favorite blog
| post reader.
|
| I find the implications of such a platform to be the most
| interesting thing. It effectively creates two different
| markets: that of data providers, which compete to provide the
| best service, and of application providers, which compete to
| provide the best features.
|
| [0] https://solidproject.org/
| prox wrote:
| And there has never been the incentive. People complain about
| walled gardens, but unless you dedicated to FOSS, any
| commercial venture (with a few exceptions) produces apps and
| tools that feed the master and excludes other parties.
|
| It might even be profitable to start a venture that allows
| complete easy self hosting of content.
|
| Wasn't Berners-Lee working on something like this with his
| pods?
| rohan1024 wrote:
| > And there has never been the incentive.
|
| For FAANG. Instead of improving standards such as XMPP and
| RSS, they actively ditched them to create walled gardens..
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| The real problem is that the data generated by the user is
| very valuable to the social network owner, there's no way to
| make money allowing a user to have a private self hosted
| federated infra unless you charge the user and then no one
| wants it since Facebook is free. If you really wanted to, you
| could easily build a federated easy to use distributed social
| network, but no one does because you don't make money on it
| and passion projects only go so far.
| didibus wrote:
| I don't think the missing bit is the "ease" of self-hosting a
| blog.
|
| The missing piece is that social networks are not about
| publishing your thoughts ideas or knowledge, they are about
| propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The
| emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka,
| propaganda.
|
| Social networks push opinions into people's face, it
| promotes, markets and advertises messages in ways that people
| can't avoid reading even if they're not looking for it.
|
| They're not designed to make accessible information for those
| looking for it, but to allow you to advertise yourself and
| your ideas to others. And definitely not designed in any way
| to filter for accurate and high quality information.
|
| What social networks do is make it really easy to voluntarily
| subscribe to propaganda and be subjected to it day in/day
| out. It's bonkers when you think about it that we all agree
| to participate in this.
| rohan1024 wrote:
| > they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and
| knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on
| "propagation" aka, propaganda.
|
| That is the issue with centralization: you have no control
| over your feed, no control over your data, no control over
| discussion on your content.
|
| On the other hand blogs/websites are all federated by
| design. You can control who views your content, shares your
| content. You control discussion on your website. You are
| also responsible for your content and moderation. You can
| also curate your own feed with RSS.
| didibus wrote:
| You missed my point, I'm saying that the reason for
| social networks being popular is because they allow
| various actors to submit others to their propaganda.
|
| The reason people prefer posting to facebook or twitter
| (or even medium) say compared to their own blog, isn't
| the challenges in setting up a personal blog. It's
| because on facebook and twitter they can push their post
| to a big audience, even if no one is searching for the
| kind of content you're publishing.
|
| A self hosted blog/website does not have this feature.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| I've spent years creating my version of what I think is
| missing: It's here:
|
| https://quanta.wiki
|
| One narrow incomplete summary of Quanta is that it's
| Federated Social Media.
| koalaman wrote:
| I think 'Social Networking' is really just a bad name for an
| internet identity and sharing model no different from the
| same problem in Operating Systems. The internet is the
| computer but it's missing identity and acls. With those
| things anybody could write an indexer that could build a feed
| for you.
| motohagiography wrote:
| That's the salient point. When you re-frame social media as
| collaboration tools, the answer to the question,
| "collaboration on what?" comes to the fore.
|
| What is the underlying project that requires collaboration?
| I have a few ideas, but I hope framing that way yields
| ideas for others.
| gritzko wrote:
| Eventually, all what media does is information routing
| from producer to consumer. The existing Big Tech paradigm
| is just one of [many][1], if you think that way.
|
| [1]: http://doc.replicated.cc:8080/%5EWiki/owner.sm
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| >What is the underlying project that requires
| collaboration?
|
| Gossip.
|
| I'm not being (entirely) snide: https://journals.sagepub.
| com/doi/abs/10.1177/106939711455438...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I might also add that a social network like Goodreads or Stack
| Overflow that is based around some purpose or topic, is so
| different in tone from general purpose social networks that
| lots of people don't even notice that it has essentially the
| same set of features. Also, way less toxic and icky feeling
| when you use it.
|
| Of course, special-purpose social networks never become nearly
| as big as Facebook, but in my mind that's a feature, not a bug.
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| It's absolutely staggering to me that people believe everyone
| will self-host the decentralized social network, without thinking
| through the economics of the incentive layer, let alone how to
| achieve consensus/verification on compute and storage layers.
|
| The first successful decentralized social network will be using
| the decentralized compute and storage systems being developed in
| the crypto space.
| xmly wrote:
| Socialize and being anonymous at the same time...
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Look, any truly decentralized network will need to involve users
| hosting their own instances, along with using an entire suite of
| encryption and anonymity tools.
|
| No way the average person will be doing that.
|
| That means most/all of the people you'll be talking to on these
| networks would be hardcore techno-libertarians. A plus for some,
| a very strong negative for others.
|
| Semi-relevant XKCD:
|
| https://xkcd.com/191/
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| That's the unfortunate thing about this site's userbase. That
| because there is a technical solution, they feel the problem
| has been solved. However, the technical solution requires more
| investment and technical know-how than your base user cares to
| employ.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Does no one here know about https://notabug.io ? Pretty sure
| that's decentralized.
| swalsh wrote:
| My big wish, I want to truely own my own data. If I decide to
| delete something, I would hope there's not a hundred copies
| replicated in a hundred caches somewhere. When I delete my own
| data, I want it truely gone. If someones node is offline, I hope
| there's nothing of mine left on it.
| kevincox wrote:
| This is really impossible to do perfectly. If you want to share
| something with someone they can take a copy. Unless you are
| going to go down the DRM route you really just have to accept
| that. There are definitely some decentralized system that
| encourage duplicating data, but even for those that don't you
| can't escape some users wanting to mirror or archive everything
| they see.
| jellicle wrote:
| The primary requirement for a decentralized social network is
| "one app and it works". If your network requires _anything_ other
| than installing a single application via the normal, easiest
| software installation pathway, it has failed and will never be
| adopted. No matter how l337 it is, if the installation
| instructions start with "Unzip this file, open port 999 on your
| router and prepare to edit the text file to start the server..."
| then it will never and can never work.
|
| Better yet if one can just open up a web browser (installing
| nothing!) and use it.
|
| ALL other requirements are secondary.
| _peeley wrote:
| Looks like there's a typo in the link for Urbit, should be
| https://urbit.org if anyone wants to take a look. Personally it
| seems like vaporware to me, there's not much based on the lofty
| promises of a new OS/language/social network.
|
| Probably the only reason anyone has even heard of it is because
| it's the pet project of Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, known
| (somewhat infamously, a few of his talks at conferences have been
| pulled) for his association with the neo-reactionary
| political/philosophical movement.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Arguably that's the reason most people stay away from it. If
| you can put aside your feelings about the now-departed founder
| and boot it, you may find that it's everything you're looking
| for. I'm totally dumbfounded at the rationale people are
| invoking in recent days _not_ to use urbit but instead some
| other derivation of previously tried technology.
|
| It's not vaporware -- I use it everyday to interact with many
| people. It's not where it _hopes_ to be but it 's going there
| at quite a clip.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Regardless of technical viability, any service without moderation
| is a service mainstream society will shun, which really just
| means people won't use it, build tools for it, or generally
| accept others who use the service.
|
| People seem to both want a service that is immune from society
| and also used by society. That's a conflict that won't resolve.
| syshum wrote:
| There are different types of moderation, personally I find with
| platforms offering tools to their users to define the type of
| content they want to see, sure that can and will end with
| people in echo chambers of their own making but that is
| preferred to Platform level moderation where the platform
| chooses what is allowed and no allows ending with the entire
| platform being one ideological echo chamber instead if just
| user silo's with in the platform
|
| Reddit used to be an example of this, it allowed communities to
| create their own rules enforced by their own moderation with
| very limited rules at the platform level (i.e illegal speech
| was banned), over the years however due to social pressure on
| Advertisers, reddit has started shifting more and more of those
| moderation from the community level to the Platform level, and
| IMO it is having a negative effect on the site as whole.
|
| In the end Platforms should build TOOLS for moderation but not
| actually do the moderation themselves
| dsr_ wrote:
| There's three levels of moderation.
|
| The platform needs to insulate itself from attacks: DDOS,
| illegal content, reputation attacks.
|
| The groups/fora/subreddits need local moderation that keep it
| on-topic and restrict trolls, flamers, spammers and other bad
| actors that destroy the utility of the group. (There are
| occasional groups that exist to be an outlet for off-topic
| discussion from others, or to out-troll each other, or rant.)
|
| Third is individual content control. Everybody needs to have
| easy access to a killfile: I don't want to see that idiot; I
| don't want to see any thread that idiot started; I don't want
| to see any thread that idiot contributed to; I don't want to
| see an article or thread with these keywords.
| swalsh wrote:
| It is certainly an unresolvable conflict, my major concern is
| to what extent those that control the "Freedom From" internet
| will go to prevent the harm done by the "Freedom To" internet.
| Will my Verizon connection be shutdown if I have a node
| running?
| fulafel wrote:
| We still use email, blogs and the telephone network (including
| sms/mms). And newer decentralized systems like Mastodon. These
| kind of have moderation but it's decentralized and island
| specific (also regulated in case of the telephone network).
| pjkundert wrote:
| Yes, it will resolve, and in fact has been solved.
|
| K-means clustering.
|
| This will scale, is compatible with machine learning, and
| yields an effect that is good for the users of a service -- but
| is not useful to owners of a service that maximizes profit and
| control over user happiness.
|
| If trolls, jackasses, and idiots (by each users _independent_
| definition) get automatically segregated into groups where they
| see only each-others posts, and out-groups just never see their
| posts: problem solved.
|
| Now, you might say "I don't want a service where neo-Nazis
| congregate!". I say: why, again, don't you want your police
| service to be able to infiltrate these groups and observe these
| people, and arrest them as they see fit?
|
| Hmmm. I wonder.
|
| Once it becomes clear to "evildoers" that the site is not
| "friendly" to their evil -- toleration doesn't equal agreement
| -- and that they are not hidden from justice, they will go
| elsewhere (at least the smart ones), and you can round up the
| dumb ones at your leisure.
| user-the-name wrote:
| > I say: why, again, don't you want your police service to be
| able to infiltrate these groups and observe these people, and
| arrest them as they see fit?
|
| That is not how it works. The police does not need this. They
| also will not really use it. However, this does give
| repugnant ideas a place to spread. It normalises them. It
| makes things much, much worse.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >However, this does give repugnant ideas a place to spread.
| It normalizes them. It makes things much, much worse.
|
| I get where you are coming from, but, can we look at three
| historical examples of repugnant ideas?
|
| 1. The earth does not revolve around the sun.
|
| 2. Slavery is immoral and man should never own another.
|
| 3. Women should take part in the voting process.
|
| There are millions I'm sure from _" You need to wash your
| hands to stop the spread of invisible things that kill
| people"_ to _" Public executions as decided on by a King
| are not good for our society"_ to _" The indigenous people
| here should have the same rights and protections we afford
| ourselves"_.
|
| We are wrong about stuff all the fucking time! The humans
| in society that argued for the worst things, were the same
| as us. What if we are drastically wrong about any event in
| the last year? Where do we discuss it without fear of
| reprisal?
|
| I do not think it's a good idea to "pre-decide" on what is
| a "repugnant idea". This is what conversation is supposed
| to be for.
| user-the-name wrote:
| So what is it you're wanting to have a "conversation"
| about?
|
| Whether black people should be allowed to live? Gay
| people? Trans people?
|
| Who is it you still need to have a conversation about
| whether they are allowed to have human rights?
| imesh wrote:
| Have a conversation that's more reasonable. Instead of
| "Do black people deserve to live" which we all agree
| with, we can have talks of, "What are the reasons for
| poverty and violence in the black community." And maybe
| not calling everyone with a non-woke perspective a racist
| or an uncle Tom.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Do we all agree with that now?
|
| Are you entirely sure about that.
| multjoy wrote:
| > which we all agree with
|
| We might, but the users of Parler _et al_ quite
| specifically do not.
|
| You're being deliberately disingenuous. The racism on
| display in any unmoderated space is foul and horrendous.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Uhhm... I'm wondering how you reach the conclusion that the
| police don't trawl social media looking for things. This is
| _precisely_ what they 're doing. Maybe keep up with current
| events!
|
| It's a gold-mine for every law-enforcement service on the
| planet, for good or ill. They drop to their knees every
| night, and thank God for Twitter, Facebook, Parler, etc.
|
| And, you might be partially right -- it'll only work for
| rounding up the really dumb ones. All the smart ones are
| already on Signal, Telegram, ...
|
| But, seriously. This has got to end.
|
| Throwing a kid into juvenile detention because they yell at
| their friend "I'm gonna kill you!" in the middle of a game
| or make a gun shape with their hand at school has got to
| hold different weight than someone posting an instructional
| video on beheading. But, no, you have kids kicked out of
| school because someone saw a toy gun on a Zoom call...
|
| The real problem for police is that they have 5% of the
| population being called "Racist" or "Terrorist" or "Nazi".
| Not 0.001%. They can't possible track down any real risks.
|
| However, a social network using K-means Clustering easily
| isolates the "everyone other than me is a racist" crowd,
| from the "we're normally quiet and tolerant, but holy
| smokes this guy has really lost the plot" crowd.
|
| The police could use _that_ kind of help.
| esja wrote:
| Grouping by user rather than by content has a major weakness.
| Grandma can be lovely 99% of the time and a horrible racist
| the other 1%.
| pjkundert wrote:
| I assume that's what people want!
|
| Having been on the 'Net since before the Eternal September,
| I haven't been able to quite understand this drive to purge
| "things I don't like" from public forums.
|
| If grandma is really lovely, but has some bad habits from
| her youth or a different time or something -- then don't
| mark her post as "racist".
|
| I don't believe, either, that people are incapable of
| learning. If she spews hateful invective and then doesn't
| get happy-birthday wishes, she'll learn! Sheesh.
|
| Remember, your K-means Clustering will be public; its easy
| to see where you stand, and why you got there! If people in
| your preferred group prefer to _not_ see people spouting
| the N-word, you might want to consider reforming your
| habits and beliefs, if you want to remain a functioning
| part of that group!
|
| The problem is _not_ moderation: it 's the _belief_ in a
| consequence-free existence.
|
| Restore evidence-based reality == restore civilized
| society.
|
| But, there are a _lot_ of people who don 't like that idea.
| esja wrote:
| I don't think your system gets you to the result you
| want.
|
| Most people are like Grandma, just on different topics.
| The extreme but possible endgame for your system is
| everyone stuck in clusters of one, because they've banned
| everyone else for different offences (or those people
| have banned them).
|
| In real life people take the bad with the good and learn
| to ignore minor disagreements (and some big ones too, up
| to a limit). That is a stable system which has worked
| pretty well for a very long time.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Also, remember: the ratings, themselves, have different
| meanings to different K-means clusters.
|
| This insane drive to change the meanings of words (eg.
| every traditionally conservative leaning person is now a
| Nazi, and everyone proud of their unique cultural heritage
| is now a Racist, so long as they are also white) is no
| problem!
|
| A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered group
| will quickly find themselves isolated and hearing _only_
| the few people who almost exactly match their identical
| beliefs. And, even those won 't last long (just until the
| first imagined slight or use of the wrong adjective).
|
| This, too, is instructive. Coddling a lack of resilience is
| _not_ helpful to someone -- but, whatever. Fill your boots!
| If it works for you, have a blast with your two currently-
| acceptable friends! ;)
|
| But seriously, the current Kristallnacht purge of social
| media is the best thing that could happen, in my opinion.
| It'll force a Cambrian explosion of new platforms that more
| capably handle differences of belief and tolerance!
| DanBC wrote:
| > A member of a brittle, sensitive, easily-triggered
| group
|
| Hilarious when coming from someone losing their shit
| about the pushback against white supremacy.
| pjkundert wrote:
| Who's that you're referring to? I don't agree with _any_
| "supremacy", let alone "white".
|
| So, are you saying that being brittle, sensitive and
| easily-triggered is a viable life strategy, and should be
| supported at all costs?
| DanBC wrote:
| I'm saying you're being brittle, sensitive, and easily
| triggered, and that maybe you need to stop supporting
| white supremacists.
|
| Also, you should probably read up on Kristallnacht before
| clumsily using it in metaphors. Maybe start here:
|
| https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-
| the-he...
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >This insane drive to change the meanings of words (eg.
| every traditionally conservative leaning person is now a
| Nazi, and everyone proud of their unique cultural
| heritage is now a Racist, so long as they are also white)
| is no problem!
|
| This is a strawman, and is generally unhelpful to a good-
| faith discussion of politics, speech, and moderation.
| jmull wrote:
| > If trolls, jackasses, and idiots (by each users independent
| definition) get automatically segregated into groups where
| they see only each-others posts, and out-groups just never
| see their posts: problem solved.
|
| The events of Jan 6 show that leaves a rather huge problem
| unsolved.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| The problem of Jan 6 being that a narcissistic buffoon got
| elected as president of the united states?
|
| I don't know if any amount of internet censorship can ever
| stop sects from forming. You have to realize that "drinking
| the kool aid" is an idiom that long predates the internet
| going mainstream [0]. You can try to push these people off
| of mainstream platforms, but what will that accomplish?
| Ultimately, someone will create an easy to use darknet chat
| platform, and the more radicalized people will use that. In
| some ways, it's best if we can shine some daylight at the
| neo nazis. At least then we have some idea who they are and
| what they are planning.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid
| dageshi wrote:
| I think what we had in the last 6 or so years was
| actually a lot worse than some "darknet chat platform",
| because honestly the equivalent of that in terms of
| usenet/forums has always existed.
|
| What we had more recently was a kind of social media
| conveyor belt and sieve system that found, nudged and
| filtered people into a specific direction until there
| were enough deluded/lunatic/trolls/whatever you want to
| call them citizens from across the country willing to
| storm the capitol building.
|
| Your darknet chat room just doesn't have that reach,
| potentially it has the reach to organise domestic
| terrorism in terms of bombings or something similar, but
| you'd never get a group of people so self assured in
| their bubble of reality that they'd willingly assault the
| capitol building.
| jmull wrote:
| Well, I know where the phrase comes from.
|
| One day I walk in the house and see my mother crying,
| watching TV, and pictures of a lot of people laying down.
| My mother was NOT a crier, so this scared the crap out of
| me as a child, and is probably why I remember it so
| starkly today. At some point years later I came to learn
| what was actually going on that day. (My mother was also
| not an explainer.)
|
| I wince when I hear the phrase used casually. But of
| course, people have largely forgotten the deeply dark
| connotations it has.
|
| Anyway, even though we can't ensure radicalized sects
| don't form, simply ignoring them as the post above mine
| suggested, is not any kind of solution. As we've seen,
| such groups won't necessarily be satisfied to just talk
| among themselves.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Fortunately, the problem you're talking about has already been
| solved with the concept of federation. If the social media
| system is a protocol and not a company, then society can chase
| down individual bad actors, and blame them for their own
| crimes, instead of blaming you.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| The issue is we're already doing too much chasing down
| individual "bad actors." It's like the #1 hobby these days,
| everyone is looking for the next person to step out of line
| so they can drag them into the village square for their
| stoning. There aren't enough "bad actors" to satiate the mob
| any more so the definition of "bad actor" has to be
| continually expanded by the day.
|
| Just the last week a musician tweeted something dumb about
| making his daughter learn how to use a can opener to open
| beans, and within a day, the very successful podcast he did
| the theme song for, where his track was used for the past
| like 10 years disowned him and stopped using the song. Then
| he was kicked off the cruise gathering where he was good
| friends with the guy who ran it and has been a regular
| headliner for years.
|
| The internet has created a culture problem that I'm not
| convinced decentralized social networks will fix. At best, if
| one was created that people actually used, we wouldn't have
| situations we've seen with Alex Jones and Trump where all the
| platforms unperson someone on the same day, cause they could
| still at least keep their audience on the decentralized
| platform.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Well, there's bad actors, and then there's twitter-assigned
| villains. Really bad actors, as in people who are doing
| things that are clearly bad enough for there to be laws
| against them, need to be controlled somehow. That's what
| most moderation energy goes in to preventing.
| grishka wrote:
| P2P services like the article suggests are impractical in real
| life. It's of extreme importance that you should be able to view,
| and preferably interact with, something posted on a social media
| service with as little friction as possible -- which means it has
| to have a web version, and that all content within must have
| permanent HTTP URLs. No one will be downloading a client and
| syncing it to the P2P network to view a post or to comment on one
| or to like one. This has never worked and never will, because
| it's inevitably a messy experience.
|
| ActivityPub is basically as far as one could push the
| decentralization of social media without severe UX compromises.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I'd like to see a social network that tries to minimize the
| impact of "whale" nodes. I can go to twitter if I want to see
| what's on the mind of the world's top influencers. I can go to
| facebook if I want to see people mass-sharing news articles with
| 10,000 toxic comments about the latest political events. Where's
| the social network built around connecting you to your network
| and _only your network_?
|
| This would likely alleviate the moderation issue too. You aren't
| going to see filth and extremism unless it's posted by your
| social network, which decreases the incentive for bad actors to
| post it in the first place.
| chasd00 wrote:
| don't you setup you're own network in both FB and Twitter? i
| choose who my friends are in FB (I'm not on twitter)
| helen___keller wrote:
| Sure, in theory. But I feel like on both platform you end up
| just seeing tons of shares/retweets of whales/influencers.
| (particularly the way they reorder content on your timeline
| so it's presented by what they think you want to see)
| user-the-name wrote:
| Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home
| timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.
| fassssst wrote:
| Group chats are all you need for that.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Group chats work well for a fixed set of users looking for
| all-to-all broadcast, but that's hardly a social network.
|
| Something like Discord gets even closer. I'd say Discord
| actually makes a pretty good social network, although most
| people don't treat it as such. In my experience, the biggest
| issue with discord-as-a-social-network is the binary nature
| of discord server membership. I've had my one "friends group"
| server split into 3 or 4 servers (each with 80% membership
| overlap) over some people who had drama, and this makes it
| much less manageable as a social network because you tend to
| spend most of your time on one or _maybe_ two servers.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I really liked Path and Orkut while they lasted. Well, not
| always, but I did find them nice. Maybe because I was younger.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| This is how Scuttlebutt works. The problem is that when you
| download the client software, you have no content to read until
| you build up your network. This confuses most people that are
| looking to find new friends and augment their current social
| network with something global. The solution that I found was to
| go to hacker spaces and meetups and turn on the client and see
| who else was on the local network. Not everyone has that
| option.
| hinkley wrote:
| Default content is difficult to manage, especially if the
| goal is to avoid cults of personality, or recreating
| Slashdot/Digg/Reddit on your platform.
|
| I think this is why everyone who started a MySpace account
| has the founder as a friend. You have one example of how the
| thing works, and he's too busy doing other stuff to turn it
| into a soap box.
|
| I think the right solution is exhibited in the way people use
| Slack servers for niche communities. You don't install Slack
| because you heard Slack is neat. You install Slack because
| someone sends you an invite link.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I was having a similar problem with SSB but resolved it by
| subscribing to an SSB Room I ran across online that was for
| folks generically into tech, and that bootstrapped my
| experience really well, as I now have lots of channels and
| pubs that I can access. I agree it's quite hurdle to get over
| compared to what most everyone is used to, though.
| grishka wrote:
| > Where's the social network built around connecting you to
| your network and only your network?
|
| That's exactly what I'm building (with ActivityPub). It's not
| yet production-ready though.
| WClayFerguson wrote:
| One thing I'd add to what people need in a decentralized social
| network is the ability to own their own data, and be able to port
| it from place to place.
|
| So there needs to be some kind of data format that is accepted as
| the standard format everyone uses. I don't mean a protocol like
| ActivityPub, I mean something like JSON or XML tag names that
| describe and hold all social media posts and every other kind of
| microblog or personal data.
|
| I guess this is commonly called the "Semantic Web" and various
| parts of it already do exist.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Regarding anonymity you don't need to use Tor and I2P just to
| stop actors like iknowwhatyoudownload.com from profiling you.
| Something like Dandelion/Dandelion++ is a more lightweight
| solution. That's what Monero uses to disassociate transactions
| and IP addresses (so that the transations cannot be linked
| together).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jmull wrote:
| Really interesting. These ideas are great, but need some work.
|
| E.g., "stick your head in the sand" moderation -- where I can
| decide what I don't see, but the content is still out there for
| anyone else to choose to see -- utterly fails at half the purpose
| of moderation.
|
| How is content moderated that is harmful to one set of people if
| available to another set of people?
|
| Child pornography, revenge pornography, doxxing, coordination of
| violent insurrections.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with
| cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to
| try out the network has to put their credit card information into
| a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank
| account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.''
|
| This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website?
|
| Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make
| content delivery for money easier after it's adopted. Right now
| its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top
| of it.
| chopin24 wrote:
| >If a totally unmoderated platform isn't overrun with spam yet,
| that just means it isn't popular enough for spammers to notice
| it.
|
| This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough
| for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites,
| mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have
| little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc.
| Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is
| overrated.
| SoSoRoCoCo wrote:
| Mastodon is the place to make this happen (IMHO):
|
| https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
| generalizations wrote:
| I mean, that looks decently similar to bitmessage.
| potency wrote:
| Is there a place where people interested in this kind of tech
| gather and discuss possibilities/code? I'd love to participate in
| something like this.
| dboreham wrote:
| nntp?
| pwg wrote:
| The blog author appears to have never heard of Usenet.
| protomyth wrote:
| To be fair, point 1 wasn't really Usenet and 3 was a pain
| sometimes.
|
| The author might want to think about DNS a bit. Google and
| Cloudflare could wreck havoc on any new social network by
| filtering their DNS and with web browsers bypassing the local
| system settings, that could take out a lot of nodes in your
| network. I actually think some rights organization might want
| to start looking at domain names that are not returning their
| proper results from the giants.
| xyst wrote:
| a decentralized social network already exists - it's called
| meeting face to face in your local community.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| I'm the maintainer or a project that does some of that. It's
| called Aether (https://getaether.net). User-customisable
| moderation and grassroots content delivery in particular, with
| less emphasis on total Tor-like anonymity, though we do still
| provide some.
| drummer wrote:
| > Content moderation on a social network could work in a very
| similar way, with different groups of moderators creating
| different lists of banned users and deleted posts.
|
| Serious vulnerability and potential for abuse and censorship.
| People could slip in the id for a user they want banned and
| anyone using that list would not easily realize they are
| prevented from seeing content from that user. Almost like reverse
| shadow banning.
| orbifold wrote:
| What I would prefer is a set of protocols that are interact in a
| well defined way with each others, like the Email or Usenet
| protocols, then you can write different clients for these and
| decentralisation is just a matter of running different servers
| clients that don't necessarily interact with each other.
| Something like the CapeProto RPC framework makes it relatively
| easy to declare the interface of a service.
| finder83 wrote:
| I'm curious if Skynet or something similar could be used for
| that? I don't pretend to understand any of the modern
| blockchain frameworks, but a peer-to-peer distributed and
| encrypted system seems to fit the bill (possibly non-blockchain
| related, I'm not sure). It was trending yesterday:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25710151
| mawise wrote:
| RSS and Webmentions[1] do this pretty well on otherwise
| ordinary websites. The protocols exist, we just need to make
| them easier to use for non-engineers.
|
| [1]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
| turblety wrote:
| Have a look at MaidSafe. It's still not production or even
| testnet ready, but they're getting close.
| e1ven wrote:
| I had written a toy social network a few years back the past
| which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted
| version of usenet.
|
| This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the
| technology doesn't seem like the hard part-
|
| I always understood that having an resilient network means people
| will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really
| internalized the scope of that until later.
|
| I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive
| countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent
| events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the
| midst of people who feel like that describes them.
|
| As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences
| for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with
| stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more
| common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other
| "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect.
|
| Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar
| to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to
| hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to
| keep up. The default experience for the average user will be
| terrible.
|
| Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy
| to built the technological network, but managing the social
| network aspect is an unsolved problem.
| grahamburger wrote:
| IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of
| decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for
| use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own
| moderation policies and decide what other instances they want
| to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances
| related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because
| they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want
| to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.
| folkrav wrote:
| Doesn't this basically boil down to the model we currently
| have, but decentralized, or am I misunderstanding?
| convolvatron wrote:
| more importantly, moderation is an overlay. instead of
| worrying about what and what isn't acceptable speech, let
| subcommunities form with their own policies and they can
| curate their own worldview
|
| that doesn't at all address bubbleism, but trying to decide
| which set of statements is 'ok' for everyone seems like a
| lost cause
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I like the default HN approach (Slashdot used to do this
| too): users can upvote/downvote, and by default you don't
| see content that's downvoted far enough, but if you want to
| see everything, you have the option. That seems to work
| well enough against spammers.
| fuzxi wrote:
| That's the same as reddit's system. HN hasn't fallen into
| the pit of lowest common denominator jokes is the strong
| moderation, but the system still has inherent issues with
| high-quality posts losing visibility because they're less
| appealing.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Well, no, reddit "supplements" it by banning pretty much
| every forum whose regulars don't match the owner's
| political ideology. There's no "uncheck this box to see
| all the stuff I didn't like" option there. I remember
| Reddit before they got ban-happy, and it was a _much_
| friendlier place then - and actually less overtaken by
| extremists.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| You just invented Reddit. The same thing will always
| happen: you say "communities should moderate themselves"
| and then you get "communities" that scream that 'libtards'
| need to be murdered, etc etc etc.. So then what?
|
| Wash, rinse, repeat.
| grahamburger wrote:
| The difference is that each instance is a completely
| separate entity. They live or die on their own. They have
| to secure their own hosting, figure out their own revenue
| stream, and deal with law enforcement on their own. It's
| reddit minus reddit.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| The main difference with mastodon is that there isn't
| just one server hosting all of the material ; you can
| create your own mastodon instance, and likewise, if a
| hateful/illegal mastodon instance is found, people can
| avoid it and/or law enforcement can find it and squash
| it.
|
| It's more analogous to email and shutting down an email
| server than shutting down reddit.
| breuleux wrote:
| It could still address bubbles in a small way, by making
| them more accessible: if you can switch the overlay easily,
| you can get a peek at what other people see and understand
| their point of view a little better. You can also see what
| your favorite overlay is censoring and decide whether
| you're okay with that.
|
| Also, one avenue to radicalization is a feeling that your
| views are being censored. If you get to choose your bubble,
| that argument is undermined, so extreme bubbles might have
| a harder time growing.
| prox wrote:
| Bubbles by themselves aren't necessarily the problem. I
| could live in art related bubble with fellow artists, and
| there is no problem there.
|
| Insulated bubbles are the problem I think, these echo
| chambers are a problem, especially unmoderated or those
| thriving by hate, aggrevation and/or exclusion.
| sneak wrote:
| > _Each instance can set their own moderation policies and
| decide what other instances they want to federate with._
|
| Yeah, this is why the fediverse is terrible, too. Your site
| admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which
| people can follow your feed.
|
| Imagine if email worked that way.
| jonfw wrote:
| The good part is that you can be your own site admin, or
| you can choose one who reflects your ideals.
|
| Moderation is great, the trouble is when a single
| moderation standard is used across a monopolized market.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can
| DM, or which people can follow your feed.
|
| That's a necessary affordance, given the technology. A mail
| server could indeed refuse to forward some of your emails,
| and this could even make some sense e.g. as part of spam
| prevention policy.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| There is certainly an argument for preventing
| _unsolicited_ messages being _received_ from unknown
| users, but rarely do people value a spam filter which
| prevents them from sending messages _to_ people. (I
| suppose there are some corporate filters which try to
| prevent accidental sending of sensitive information to
| unauthorised recipients, but that 's not the "feature" we
| are talking about here).
|
| It is perfectly reasonable for a user to want to DM
| someone on an instance that has different moderation
| policies from their own, and it is equally reasonable to
| want to receive replies to those DMs.
|
| If the specifications or implementations don't allow
| that, then I suppose it has to be justified by saying
| that the DMs could be used for sharing copyright
| infringing material (or worse), and admins don't want to
| run the legal risk of hosting that on their servers.
| Legally, though, that doesn't seem any different to
| operating a mail server, which don't typically have
| Content ID matching systems on them. Perhaps the
| implementation of end-to-end encrypted DMs would assuage
| some of these concerns a little.
| notJim wrote:
| It doesn't quite have to work like that, necessarily. Your
| instance could provide higher-quality tools for users to
| moderate their own feeds. Or there could be different
| degrees of opt-in to the site-wide moderation. Or the
| moderation could be community driven.
|
| I think there is actually a lot of room for experimentation
| around how we interact online, and moderation is one of the
| most important areas. We need to think harder, rather than
| retreating to one of the two default positions.
| grahamburger wrote:
| This seems strictly better than what we have, though, where
| Twitter or Facebook decide the same. At least you can move
| instances, or start your own.
|
| EDIT: also to note, email does kind of work this way with
| administrator applied spam lists. I would not want to use
| an email service that couldn't or wouldn't filter spam.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That's a feature many users want. Plenty of users never
| want to see things they disagree with or take objection to,
| and want to have someone else enforce that pattern.
|
| As long as it's optional - and in the fediverse design it
| is - then it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. Whether or
| not those instances actually survive and have any users or
| just immediately collapse into internal bickering is beyond
| the strict scope.
| ars wrote:
| > Plenty of users never want to see things they disagree
| with or take objection to, and want to have someone else
| enforce that pattern.
|
| Am I unusual? When there is hate speech directed at me, I
| don't really care if I see it or not.
|
| But I do want to prevent _other people_ from seeing that
| hate speech (I don 't want the hate to grow).
| notJim wrote:
| Any idea why Parler took off rather than a right-wing
| instance of Mastodon? Is it about framing?
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Timing.
|
| It was right around the time congressional hearings were
| taking place about Twitter and FB suppressing conservative
| voices. A lot of conservative talk show hosts were talking
| about how they had moved to the platform and urging their
| listeners to do the same if they thought what Twitter and
| FB were doing was wrong.
|
| When you have heavy weight talk show hosts pimping your
| product without paying them and they're touting your
| platform as one that doesn't censor speech, you're going to
| have a huge increase in followers.
| multjoy wrote:
| Because Parler was basically a Twitter clone. These are not
| 'first adopters' by any stretch.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Isn't Gab exactly that? They seem to have "taken off" quite
| successfully among their own audience. Parler simply made a
| different choice wrt. whether to support interop and
| federation.
| deft wrote:
| They were for a bit but they've defederated and the
| software is a huge mess. There are right wing free speech
| instances but they don't have any of the media attention.
| [deleted]
| at_a_remove wrote:
| If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an
| RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station
| it is or what song is playing. However, many stations around
| here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak
| lending. If you cast further back into the mists of time,
| anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was
| naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten milliseconds
| after its invention.
|
| I have since formulated the concept that any communications
| channel, any at all, where it does not cost to transmit per
| message will eventually be colonized by the advertising fungal
| organism. Even low-cost messaging can be colonized, but the
| lower the cost, the faster it comes.
|
| Similarly, like FreeNet, any communications channel that can be
| used to post Things You Do Not Like _will_ be used to do so.
| And that once you implement some kind of wide-scale filter
| against that, absolutely nothing can be done to stop someone
| from attempting to take over, to add and subtract to that
| filter, for their own purposes and their own ideology.
|
| I have no solutions for this.
| nelsondev wrote:
| The author (OP) proposes community generated and shared block
| lists.
|
| I'm imagining an opt in block list, where with enough
| downvotes, if you are a member of the block list, the content
| is hidden.
|
| If the block list starts blocking content you want, you can
| fork it, keep the parts you want, remove the parts you don't.
| mawise wrote:
| There's another dimension that nobody seems to talk about, and
| that's what happens with access to content is restricted. There
| is basically no censorship and no abuse from "those who can't
| get away with stuff on other networks" in the realm of SMS (or
| WhatsApp/WeChat/whatever your country uses). You can have a
| very healthy network if the authors are responsible for access
| control to their content. That's the idea behind my side-
| project of an easy-to-use, easy-to-selfhost private blog.[1]
|
| When people want to use the platform to "become a thought
| leader" or "expand their network" then you're in the realm of
| public publishing which is where all the problems you cite
| become issues. The web makes privacy possible, and I don't
| understand why so few people are interested in that angle. For
| me I want to be able to share photos of my daughter with family
| and friends. I don't care if someone else wants to privately
| rant about the government to their friends--privacy enables
| both of these.
|
| [1] https://github.com/mawise/simpleblog
| hinkley wrote:
| Before I decided that 'game developer' was not in my future
| prospects, I discovered the concept of reckless entitlement,
| where people will do anything the system allows, and a
| persistent subset of those people will rationalize that if you
| didn't want me to do that, then you should have written the
| code differently.
|
| This is tantamount to "Stop hitting yourself."
|
| Like the old line about academia, "the fighting is so vicious
| because the stakes are so low," the stakes for gaming and
| socializing with internet strangers are both pretty low.
|
| Additionally, computers make you an efficient asshole. You can
| make a pretty big mess before you have time to think about
| whether you really should be doing what you just did. To err is
| human. To really foul things up requires the aid of a computer.
| egfx wrote:
| I created https://2fb.me because I felt content was being
| confined by the constraints of the "network". There is no one
| network, or there shouldn't be as the author eludes, but an
| entirely new network will never reach the "network" effects it
| needs. Instead a protocol between the existing monoliths breaks
| through the confines and the content cannot be deleted all at
| once, as it will exist as a copy somewhere else. In short if the
| account goes down on Twitter then the existing tweet from that
| account will exist on Facebook unless it's deleted there too.
| IMO, this is how to to create a better social network where there
| isn't one authority, using what exists already.
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