Why do admins get a say in who their users follow in the first place? As long as the content isn't illegal or challenges the stability of the instance this should be up to the users alone.
This issue alone made me set up my own instance, but many users don't have that option.
I think the architecture of mastadon unintentionally encourages this.
When you follow someone on a peered instance, the instance you use must store and forward their posts to you. So if an instance contains mostly content you find disagreeable you may not want to have those on your server.
Also if you go to the "global" timeline, you will see posts from all instances which are peered with your instance. So the operators of your instance might not want to "pollute" that timeline with content from instances they find disagreeable.
I prefer the alternative architecture used by the nostr protocol. There, your account is not tied to a relay, but to a public key which is used to verify everything you post. You can send your posts to multiple relays which can then be read by anyone who chooses to pull from there.
This allows relays to freely block/curate content in the way they like without restricting the freedom of their users to pull content from other sources.
Currently, the network is in its infancy, and is mostly populated by bitcoiners, since this is the community where the protocol grew out of. But there is no reason why it can't eventually grow far beyond that, for those with no interest in that topic.
Beyond what the architecture encourages, the devs themselves have very much encouraged a narcissistic, block happy culture across the protocol.
It's very disappointing to see something that should have encouraged people from disparate backgrounds and views to come together and discuss topics without "engagement" driven controversy baiting, just being used as "Twitter, but you get to make your personal Pyongyang".
> Why do admins get a say in who their users follow in the first place?
Why does anyone?
Reddit mods, Fediverse maintainers, corporate social media. This whole "curate and censor" bamboozle is antithetical to the internet I grew up on. The most upsetting part is that so many folks today are happy about this status quo and delight in the fact that their opposition gets canceled or de-platformed. All it takes is one political pendulum swing for the cheerleaders to become the oppressed.
Social media needs to be P2P. Not centralized, not federated, and not controlled.
End users should have complete autonomy over who they follow, who they (de-)boost, and how their filter/attention algorithm works.
Users should have the capability to share their { follow, block, boost, mute } lists with others, but it should be optional and not something mandated from the top by a third party.
Moderation has been part of the internet since the 1980s. And ever since the rise of spam and trolls in the mid-1990s, the old guard has reacted very strongly against that.
Most people just don't want to be forced to wade through that shit. Keep it in your own corner if you really want it, but don't bother others with it.
> Social media needs to be P2P.
I do agree with that. It would be great if everybody had their own social media hub to use in whatever way they prefer. I think that might be the idea behind Hubzilla. But even then, people will want to discover valuable content, and they don't want to run into trolls, spam and nazis, so there's still going to be some curation. It's unavoidable if you don't want your internet experience to turn to shit.
I remember the days of the usenet death penalty. It was generally reserved for networks that were enabling spammers and only applied after attempts to rectify the situation had failed.
What are you talking about? Where was this internet where the admins of the service (whether it's BBS board, usenet group or phpBB forum, or whatever) didn't set what conversations are you supposed to talk about?
Usenet and IRC (with its hundreds of servers) were a wild west.
Some forums let you pay to regain entry, others would downvote but not outright ban (like Slashdot).
Banning was practically impossible given dynamic IP addresses and dial-up.
The internet was much smaller, its users more technical, and its software much more bug-filled. It was entirely possible that banning someone would lead to them exploiting your server and taking it offline. I witnessed that happen several times.
People focused on mostly getting along. Nobody was sensitive about the bullshit we whine about today.
It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives, so liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech. (Remember the Church of Satan?) That's completely reversed now.
The internet of today is so incredibly different to the internet of the 90's and early 2000's. Despite all we've gained, we've actually lost a lot too.
Usenet was a wild west outside of the big 7 which was full of moderated groups and policies, but there definitely Is No Cabel [1] keeping an eye on things. Even many alt.* groups had people trying with various degrees of success to keep things on topic and moderated.
The Fediverse is the same way: You can have the wild west, but much of it is kept separate with active defederation so you may need to find smaller instances, run your own or simply have a second account. That doesn't mean it's not there.
I remember when the first spam message showed up on usenet. People weren't happy, complained with the admin of the spammer's system, and the spammer lost his account. That's why spammers started to create their own spam systems and everybody else started to block those systems.
The internet was open and unmoderated when nobody was abusing it. Once people start abusing it, it will be moderated. It's unavoidable.
> It's also interesting that the zeitgeist at the time favored conservatives
I don't think that's true. The 1990s saw the rise of conservative talk radio and of Fox News, but they weren't as dominant as they became later, and the 1990s were a pretty liberal time in much of the western world.
> liberals were the then-staunch supporters of free speech.
Still are. But even then, they didn't tolerate intolerance. It's just that at the time, intolerance was universally seen as bad, and not central to a rising ideology as it is now.
You may want to check out Comment Castles [0] (disclaimer, I'm the creator). There are 50k comments, but I have never moderated anything. Actually, there are no moderation or admin tools built into the project.
> Social media needs to be P2P. Not centralized, not federated
I'm not sure I see a meaningful difference between P2P and federation. If every user in a federated system is running their own instance, how is that different from a P2P system?
> Why do admins get a say in who their users follow in the first place?
Because it's their server and they have opinions of what their server is about and what's acceptable there. But more importantly: because their users don't want to have to individually block every troll and nazi out there. There are entire instances dedicated to just shitting all over everybody else, and most people on other instances don't want to have to wade through that shit.
Users can choose their server based on its policies. Maybe admins should be more up-front about their server's policies. But some degree of moderation is simply unavoidable on the internet today, because we've seen time and time again that everything turns to crap if you don't moderate. HN moderates too.
Spin up your own instance if you don't like that. You are using someone else's platform to follow, so you go by their rules whether you like it or not.
Well then, start your own? Or perhaps ask around in your online social circles to see if someone is running such an instance? Or stick around wherever you currently are (I assume that it's in line with your preferences).
The strength of federation is that every instance operator can set the rules that best suit themselves and the audience they cater to. You can leverage this ability just as much as everyone else can.
It's pretty hard to think up a better scheme than this for ensuring that everyone has the sort of space they are OK with.
To make matters worse for people that shares your stance, many Fediverse users in this movement are of the opinion that your instance should be blocked as well if you dont't block Meta.
There's always about 100x more people talking about the puritan servers that block the friends of the friends of the wicked servers than there are actual puritans.
So you're saying most Mastadon servers won't block servers that allow "TERF"s (a term which includes the very mainstream view that transwomen shouldnt be allowed in woman's sports)?
That opinion is the minimum required for the label. Any prohibition of transwomen from a woman's space is enough, though most "TERF"s will prohibit all pre-op transwomen from all woman's spaces.
Many Mastodon instances do block instances which allow transphobes, yes. However, it's very rarely _transitive_, is the point; few Mastodon instances will block instances which do not block instances which allow transphobes.
I'm not familiar with that term and the subject, what's the issue with checking someone fit in the corresponding physical category? Sport is all about the physical body and performance, not about personality. Physical categories could be abandoned, but if they are maintained there then it's seems logical to check, maybe with a more scientific test like testosterone level being into a range. Regardless of gender people would then compete in their (testosterone?) class, like weight classes exists in some sports.
Yeah, I take issue with forcing anyone including 13 years old to undergo genital checks. It is literally in the sexual harassments category and massively humiliating.
Also, if there is manufactured controversy, it is this one. It is not like there would be hundreds of trans women destroying female sport. This issue exists purely to outrage people and to be cruel to few that exist.
weird take imo, I played multiple sports in highschool and every year I had to go have a doctor (always female, but I'm supposed to be ok with this I guess, but I wasn't) handle my genitals or I wouldn't be allowed to compete.
Because their tenants are free loaders? If you're paying for the service, I'd expect a greater degree of autonomy. Unless the service you're paying for is for somebody else to make moderation and federation decisions for you.
Housing is a scarce commodity, so we have rules about how it’s allocated. Mastodon servers have no such scarcity - if you don’t like the rules on a server, set up your own.
Mastodon instance operators are electing not to federate with other instances that federate with third party instances they dislike. They're holding other parties and parts of the ecosystem hostage over their own ideologies.
A good analogy is that some instance operators are acting like the Reddit moderators that ban users with post histories in communities they dislike.
This is why p2p is superior to federation. Unless there's a law being broken, nobody should have control over what you see or who you talk to. Your attention and interests belong to you.
Nobody forces you to use those instances with policies on defederation you don't like. You can run a single person instance if you so choose (I do) and ignore most of the drama.
Meanwhile people are also free to choose to give some degree of control to instance admins because a lot of people want a nice walled garden but don't want to be forced to tend to the walls.
> Nobody forces you to use those instances with policies on defederation you don't like.
If you don't want to be all alone, you shouldn't have to opt in to becoming a part of the hivemind. You can be contrarian or a minority or whatever without presenting a threat to the larger group. You don't have to agree in order to coexist meaningfully and peacefully.
Companies censor because it benefits the bottom line. Reddit moderators and the Fediverse have no excuse except perhaps that being lazy and aggressive with bans is the easiest policy to implement. Surely I hope that's the rationale and that it's not simply one of enjoying power over others.
Where are the censorship police in public parks and libraries, asking people to leave? These spaces are perfectly fine and nobody is being harmed in them. There's no reason our internet deserves special padded walls, memory holes, and horse blinders.
Remember that just twenty years ago, democrats and liberals were the protectors of free speech. The pendulum swung to the right (and it'll probably swing back left again).
Keep communication lanes open and be civil. If you want to block someone, do it yourself and don't make a big public deal over it. It's not good to win points by building platform- and infrastructure-level censorship tools. That's why this is so upsetting. Tools that "protect everyone" today might be turned against everyone tomorrow.
The more chances for people that disagree and don't see eye to interact non-confrontationally, the better. Banning and score keeping are not the way.
> If you don't want to be all alone, you shouldn't have to opt in to becoming a part of the hivemind.
You don't need to be all alone, you just need to be mindful that maximising freedom for all includes the freedom for others to choose not to want to associate with you if you insist on being disruptive, and what different groups find disruptive varies, and you can not expect everyone to voluntarily subject themselves to disruption, and in many cases harassment and threats.
You don't need to opt in to a "hivemind". You just need to find a community that does not consider your speech offensive, or create your own. The Fediverse has communities that span the political and social spectrums, from the furthest left to actual Nazis, many of which certainly very much refuse to engage with each other but all of which still are able to exist and exercise their speech to those willing to listen.
> and the Fediverse
"The Fediverse" does not censor. Individual instances and sometimes groups of instances censor. Nobody stops you from hosting your own discussions and federating with those who are willing to consent to engage with you and saying whatever you want.
What you have no right to expect of others is for them to yield and put you in charge of what they're forced to listen to.
> Where are the censorship police in public parks and libraries, asking people to leave? These spaces are perfectly fine and nobody is being harmed in them. There's no reason our internet deserves special padded walls, memory holes, and horse blinders.
Try to strip off completely in most parks, or shout in the library, or going up to random people and harassing them with speech they find threatening or offensive, and you'll see that every space have community norms that are enforced, and will censor you if you act in ways incompatible with what we've decided is appropriate for that space even if you're entirely free to act the exact same way elsewhere.
Protecting the freedom of all also means enabling the creation of spaces with restrictions.
> Remember that just twenty years ago, democrats and liberals were the protectors of free speech. The pendulum swung to the right (and it'll probably swing back left again). That's why this platform- and infrastructure-level censorship is so upsetting. Tools that "protect" today might be turned against you tomorrow.
This maximalist view of wanting us all to carry speech we don't want to has nothing to do with free speech, but about a desire to force us to listen, and it has a deeply authoritarian undertone to it.
I'm all for broad and strong protections for people to say what they want, but not to be forced to let them do so in my own space.
Because the whole shitstorm is rooted in Musk managing Twitter as he sees fit, and those who left claimed to akshuarry exercise and defend free speech and tolerance?
I just want to remind you that Mastodon has existed for about a decade, way longer than any of the Twitter stuff has been going on. Culturally it is the same as it always has been. Why would I as a server administrator have to change because new people are interested in our platform? If you join my server and don't like the experience, feel free to move to a different server or to start your own.
You're assuming those who have left share a uniform ideology. Many who left wanted far stricter moderation than Musk. Some wanted less. Some wanted more tolerance, some wanted less. There's also a vast difference in moderation of a single centralised system and a network of thousands of instances - you can be opposed to the moderation policies of a centralised network and still think it's fine for those policies to exist somewhere as long as you don't need to deal with them.
Mastodon works by copying all data their users see from other servers to the server's own local PostgreSQL database.
Admins have access (through the owner or directly) to that database, which means they can already censor content if they so choose, through manipulating the database. As such, making it an explicit option is needed because it destroys any illusion that censorship cannot occur, because it can occur by the system's design, even if the option isn't present in the software.
Precisely part of the problem is that most instances are in Europe, which means that much of the speech you can find online is illegal, and if you aren't Facebook you don't have the muscle to fight a politician or a judge who wants to make an example out of you.
> Mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu fünf Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe wird bestraft, wer eine unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus begangene Handlung [...] öffentlich oder in einer Versammlung billigt, leugnet oder verharmlost.
October, 2018: "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."
Without the need to agree or disagree with the ruling itself (which I cannot read about, as the article is behind a paywall, and I expect that the ruling is more nuanced than what the clickbait title suggests), the fact that a person was condemned for saying something for some reason (provocation to hate I would assume) does not mean that a mastodon server would be liable for relaying the information. Actually, politicians get condemned on a regular basis for diffamation or hate speech, but I never heard of any TV channel or newspaper being sued for having reported on the discourse of said politicians.
I have to say that I expected a bit more, as you mentioned "most content on the internet".
> I’ve seen more than one friend get set up only to pull back, worrying there are dozens of unwritten rules about content warnings and alt text and linking and boosting they will constantly be put on blast over. I have never seen so many self-identified queer leftists reflexively drop into well, actually mode.
That's the exact problem with mastodon and the reason I'm sticking with twitter. Self-righteous people censoring the shit out of an open platform. All the defederation talk did a lot of damage imho. Plus a lot of badly working instances performance-wise. Mastodon has had it's moment imho and the people behaving as outlined above destroyed it. It's just not fun and quite dead for me. My crowed just isn't on mastodon.
There are many, many servers that do not defederate with any other servers. If you're assuming the majority of Fediverse* admins or users engage in these childish games, you are wrong. If you prefer closed source spyware social media apps, by all means, stick with Twitter and refuse to do your research.
* Mastodon is just one server/client software in a gigantic decentralized network.
> There are many, many servers that do not defederate with any other servers.
Uh, I'm like 99% sure _every_ server defederates with many other servers. You have to to not federate anime waifus and other generally undesirable content.
Defederation is merely a moderation tool to prune your graph to nodes with similar moderation criteria. People right now are talking about defederating with Threads on ideological grounds but whether or not it happens doesn't really matter. If they want to cut out that part of the social graph, that's their prerogative and others can make the other decision.
There are also very specific nazi-servers. Defederating them is pretty essential to a lot of people who don't want to see nazis popping up in their comments or streams. But beyond that, all those defederation games really need to die. I've already seen a major Mastodon instance defederate a popular art instance for its admin warning against dealing with Facebook. That defederation was widely condemned.
It should be possible to talk about this. It should be possible to disagree about this. I'm personally strongly on the side of wait and see. If Threads turns out to have a terrible effect on the Fediverse, we can always defederate them later. I do caution against special deals and NDAs with Facebook, but other than that, I'd rather keep things as open as possible until there's a real need for something else. And please let's not let this issue divide the Fediverse.
> There are also very specific nazi-servers. Defederating them is pretty essential to a lot of people who don't want to see nazis popping up in their comments or streams.
Then they're part of the problem. Just don't subscribe to them. I'd prefer to see the world how it is, including all idiots and extremists. Closing your eyes does nothing.
(Assuming you're not on a single user server) The problem is, in order for a user to see them, they don't need to explicitly subscribe to them, they need to not block them, which is the default state. Sure, your home feed is people that you're subscribed to, but searching (via hashtags and otherwise) and your federated feed are both looking through all content that the server has found that hasn't been explicitly blocked. Not to mention replies to posts aswell could be from anywhere.
This will inevitably, at some point, by the nature of anyone being able to post anything on their own servers, include "unsavory" photos including: Literal suicide, murder, abuse, uncensored pornography, death threats, witch hunts, and more. And yes, this will be included in normal use. I myself saw a spammer that spammed uncensored pornography to a bunch of "welcome to Mastodon" hashtags in the first 30 minutes of my server being up.
> Closing your eyes does nothing.
While this will not cause the actions occurring to stop existing, acting as if the mental health of the viewer is irrelevant is not acceptable. I've known servers where people weren't able to sleep at night because someone spammed videos of animal harm/abuse... and in that case, the admins eventually deleted it and banned them. Your suggestion is to just "let it be shown" and "let the user block it if they don't want to see it".
While seeing things once and then blocking is better than not being able to block at all, trusted authorities (admins?) should have the ability to stop content from being spread to users that trust them to handle unwanted content. Sometimes never seeing things is the best option.
Perhaps the middle group here is to allow users to disable administrative "suggestions" and see all content, if they so choose? (Although this is not truly possible with Mastodon, perhaps future federated networks could implement a similar idea)
You're putting words in my mouth, we were talking about nazis. Not gore. This just shows that mastodon sucks at moderation and the only tool available seems to be defederation/blocking. Twitter detects sensitive content and gives a warning. I think that's a fair solution.
There's a fine line between closing your eyes to reality and having to endure pictures of brains on the floor. Spamming and fraud is another issue which even Twitter sucks at and I don't have a good idea how to solve that.
I'd just like an internet where people don't entirely live in a bubble and become triggered by everyone and everything. But that doesn't mean that we should have to look at sensitive content if we don't want to. It's a very fine line between a dystopia and freedom of speech tbh and I don't have an answer ;)
No, but throwing away the trash leaves a nicer common area for the people that hang out there. The Nazis will pop up in your replies, your followed hashtags, fuckin' everywhere. It's dramatically nicer without them.
I believe that the only way the fediverse avoids naturally centralising forces long term is if the value of federating with the network is too big for anyone to give up. The value of the network increases with the number of participants.
Defederating from any service prepared to federate needs to be a really extreme measure taken rarely for the network to build the strength it will need to weather the centralising forces that will come.
From the article it seems like Meta is adding ActivityPub support into threads as a way to let people use Threads to talk to Mastodon users and not the other way around. That’s a pretty good reason to defederate from Threads if you run a Mastodon server
It seems like we will end up with two fediverses- most of the one as we know it, and a much smaller one that can talk to Threads.
If I can follow my friends on Instagram from my Mastodon account it seems like a good outcome. Also, if others can easily share/repost/comment/quote content from Threads on Mastodon, that again seems like a nice outcome to me.
How Threads will implement "replies from Mastodon" is not really a question I care about. (Maybe I should?)
That would be great but it’s most likely not going to work that way- Meta will never let you use Mastodon to act as a threads client so any integration between the two will probably let people view mastodon from threads but not vice versa (except replies)
Facebook and Instagram never killed their robust third-party client ecosystem the way Twitter and Reddit recently did, because they never had one. They understood their business model from the get-go.
I remember when Facebook trumpeted their open APIs. The Internet forgets so quickly.
Indeed. Because of the massive turnover in this industry, it's got a very short memory. Few of us here today were working on this thing a quarter century ago.
While I do understand the argument made by the author, I am of the opinion that it's totally possible to damage some product/concept while being something separate/different - which the author assumes could not happen:
> Because Threads is not a Mastodon instance. It is its own self-contained, centralized social network with plans to let its users follow Mastodon accounts and vice versa.
Spotify also is not podcasts, as they host the shows themselves. Podcast and its infrastructure should be unaffected by this following the author's logic. But it definitely affected how podcasts are consumed and perceived and it was not for the better of the open standard of podcasts. Nowadays many people think podcasts just are on Spotify.
Author finding this thread very late! This is one of the better responses I’ve found. It doesn’t seem likely to me that many people will think Mastodon is just on Threads, but your counterexample about Spotify and podcasts doesn’t seem likely to me either — yet I know it’s true. So it’s definitely something to think about!
I guess the flip side, though, is figuring out just how podcasts and their infrastructure have been affected. They’re still out there, still open, and over the last year, Spotify has been pulling back from investing in podcasts and making more of their previously Spotify-exclusive shows fully open again. I have no idea if there’s any analogy to make from that to Threads.
This whole thread has turned into a massive quagmire. To all of the people saying users should have the right to interact with whatever they want, why does the owner of the server not get any rights about what content passes through their box? If you disagree with the admin, setup your own server. There are even services now that will spin it up and keep it online for you
Putting things in a list is not automatically equivalence. Lists can serve many purposes. In this case, they're enumerating a set of different things because the inclusion of one is not obvious based on the inclusion of the others!
Because most people reacted well? Good one. No, it's representative. Women lost their jobs just for agreeing with JKR on this. People talking about how they want to or how everybody should "punch TERFs" and all that is also not made up either, that reaches into the ranks of German politicians even. The question isn't so much whether that's going on but rather who looks the other way while it does, and why.
> This whole argument of support for a very marginalised group somehow being a "widespread attack on women" is
Your strawman, and basically proves my point. I can, in context of TERF's being mentioned in one breath with Nazis and pedophile, even show you threats of violence for a perfectly valid statement, and you can neither confirm the statement is valid, nor condemn the threats. Instead you attack me as well, that I am "thinly veiling" what you make up from thin air.
And women are also VERY marginalised, and brutalized, and have been for millennia. That lesbians get attacked for "genital preferences" or women for saying "actually, don't call us menstruating bodies, we're women", is just a continuation of that.
Women don't want trans people to not have human rights, they just want to keep theirs, too. To frame that as an attack on trans people is just rich.
But support of trans people does not deny women their rights. That is your strawman. You can support both cis women and trans women. This doesn't have to be a dichotomy.
> That lesbians get attacked for "genital preferences" or women for saying "actually, don't call us menstruating bodies, we're women", is just a continuation of that.
Of course attacking lesbians or women in general is not okay. But that doesn't require throwing trans people under the bus either.
Why? Why does this have to be a problem? As far as I can tell, it's an entirely manufactured problem. For political purposes, to vilify a vulnerable group for electoral gain among bigots and stir up transphobia.
A group of lesbian women want to hold female-only events, but they're not permitted by law to exclude the heterosexual males who call themselves lesbian women.
Similar conflicts apply to most other women's spaces, between the women who want to maintain these spaces as female-only, and the males who want to gain access to these spaces on the basis that they identify themselves as women or female.
Do we need to distinguish between transgender women and men who identify as women for the purpose of gaining access to female-only spaces? Because it does sometimes sound like there are predatory men who see this as some sort of loophole. That obviously needs to be stopped.
To me, it seems the obvious criterium is: have you transitioned? I don't think that's an unreasonable standard, although it can be hurtful to transgenders who are still transitioning and eager to finally get accepted for who they are.
In cases of single-gender events, it also depends on what the exact reason is for making it single gender. There are fuzzy edges around gender, and if you're going to draw a line somewhere, it doesn't hurt to stop and think about why and where exactly you're going to draw it.
In such situations, how does one distinguish a male with bad intentions from the others, though?
That they may insist on access to spaces they know are intended to be female-only, despite being well aware that many women are uncomfortable with this male imposition, is already an indicator of dubious intention. Perhaps not directly predatory, but certainly a violation of boundaries.
I don't think that an advanced stage of transition can broadly override this, in reality. Becoming a modern type of eunuch isn't the same as actually being a woman. It seems unreasonable to compel women to accept these as being equivalent.
I think Mastodon users must know that they are screaming into an empty void because they insist on continuously talking about Mastodon even though they know that nobody cares about it
This issue alone made me set up my own instance, but many users don't have that option.