This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement.
I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.
That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work).
It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).
> It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account.
Maybe not by technical design, but subreddit moderators ban people for merely being subscribed to other subs all the time. I once got banned from participating in r/antiwork because I was subscribed to r/wallstreetsilver. That's not the only time, but that's probably the most stupid example. No, I didn't break any rules.
Yes, but that's not as bad as what satellites is saying. satellites is saying your behavior will be restricted in ALL subreddits (even subreddits that don't want to restrict you) because of the subreddit you signed up with. Your situation is just about being restricted in subreddits that want to restrict you.
Is it really that common? It’s happened to me once, in my 10 years of using Reddit. Not saying my anecdote proves anything but I wonder how rampant it really is.
If you comment in r/conservative, even as someone who isn't subscribed and just happened to end up on the post due to r/all or a crosspost, odds are you'll get hit with a number of bans on other subreddits.
This is for the same reason that mastodon's federation works the way it does: those other groups do not want to associate with or interact with accounts that talk on or interact with these certain communities.
If you interact with a toxic subreddit that has a habit for harassing other communities, those other subreddits likely will ban you just to save themself the trouble of dealing with someone who might bring them more stress or hassle.
Likewise if you federate with a toxic instance or are hosted by a toxic instance, other instances will block yours and you'll be cut off.
The only extension to this is that your instance can do the same to others. But that's really not that massive of a concern as you can pretty easily just move to a new instance or better yet, host your own instance and not have to worry with it at all.
What you're talking about seems quite different from what the blog post is talking about.
You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances.
The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.
I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable.
There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).
The issue is that the instance you join dictates what "being a responsible member of the society" is, and if you don't fit into the restrictions of that one particular instance, you can lose your account which you use to interact with the entire federation.
Given that Mastodon admins can read direct messages of their users and ban them based on that, this is bound to have an effect on how users on Mastodon interact.
>There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances
Except for the fact that people use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to represent themselves. Which means one account. Having pseudonyms defeats the purpose.
In Mastodon, the model, in essence, makes you represent the instance you joined when you speak, with its values and restrictions — not yourself.
When deviance means loss of access, that's bound to result in increase in polarization and echo-chamberism.
Correspondingly, people who run instances block entire other instances based on how they perceive them.
This takes all the problems we have with email, and makes them worse.
"You can run your own instance" is an argument that works as well as "don't like Gmail? Host your own email server!".
I wouldn't have an issue if being banned from the instance you joined still allowed you to migrate to another instance after the ban without losing any data / identity / etc.
That's to say, if your identity wasn't tied to any particular instance.
Right, because reputation isn't a thing, having people know that this account represents you isn't a thing, and so on.
There's a reason Elon Musk messing with verified accounts on Twitter was a bit of an issue.
In short, if you want people to know that an account represents you, then your account is tied to your identity, and your identity, conversely, is tied to your account.
As I said earlier, the problem with Mastodon is that your Mastodon account doesn't represent you. It represents the instance you signed up with. What you say must be filtered through that lens, and will be perceived through those lens by people who make blacklists, creating a positive feedback loop.
The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts. Most people have multiple accounts of their own volition because they don’t want their post and comment history in some communities to be browsable via posts and comments in other communities. I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t. However I could see a future where it’s the norm even for a non-anonymous account to have multiple non-anonymous personas on the fediverse.
>The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts.
This isn't a solution to "this" because this problem doesn't exist on reddit.
You don't get banned from reddit because any single subreddit didn't like what you wrote. Subreddit mods can't ban you from other communities. Admin of the instance you sign up with on Mastodon can.
Mastodon puts the banhammer of the network admins into hands of many, many people who run instances, aren't bound by any rules, and can read your direct messages.
>I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t.
Well that was one issue highlighted in the article linked.
Go figure, there's a place for having an online social network where people can authentically express themselves.
In Mastodon, you can only express yourself to the extent that it complies with the views of the admin of the instance you are with.
The only real workaround is to create separate accounts for each venue that aren't obviously connected. That way, you won't get banned in one place for stuff you do in another.
If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance).
But I agree with the model Mastodon is building out over the model of centralization that Twitter had. I think Twitter encouraged too much topic-free shouting into the void, which decreased the utility of discourse in general.
It's also really unclear to me where the OP is getting the sense that Mastodon instances are so heavily topic-oriented. I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic; the flavor of sites seems to be more about shared interests in the sense of old IRC communities than in the sense of topicality like a subreddit.
> I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic
I myself was banned from a small instance over a misunderstanding without prior notice (since english isn't my native language). This was my only account on mastodon, so I lost all my contacts.
The admin had contact info on the instance, but I didn't have the motivation to be in mastodon anymore.
EDIT: I'd like to add. I don't really see mastodon as a social network.. if we're comparing it to something, it's more like a simple messaging group.
> If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance).
If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors. The suggestion to then "host your own instance" looks a lot like "build your own X" that we had prior to Musk's take over of Twitter from people who didn't really care about the problem (or even see it as a problem). Do you really think people will start hosting their own instances for this?
> the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors
I don't know precisely where people ever got the idea that the kernel of the nature of the Internet was ever anything other than "Admins rule the system."
It has always been the nature of the machine that you either operate as a guest of someone else's system or you own a system (and maintain the social etiquette / business agreements necessary to stay peered to other systems, as well as fight the perpetual fight against those who would use your tool to do harm).
From e-mail to USENET to IRC to web sites to social media platforms, the social aspect of the network itself is and always has been inextricable from its function. it's a network built by, for, and of people. Mostly volunteers. Mostly volunteers who do it for the love of the geekery of making sand think and lightning dance in a bottle, of building a thing that lets people in Akron talk to people in Anchorage, stepping back, and going "Wow, it's neat that that's possible."
I agree with you that it's a tall ask to tell people "If you really want to participate as a peer, you need to technically be a peer," but I have never seen another alternative floated that had any chance of success whatsoever. You cannot force people to talk to each other. You cannot force system operators to allow traffic through private systems that they don't choose to allow through. If you try, they'll leave, and you'll get a network governed by government instead of volunteers (which we can see plenty of examples of already, and they're more restrictive than what we have now).
The 'Net also interprets lack of censorship as damage and routes around it. Always has.
"If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors."
Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.
It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.
Not really. Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit.
If you end up participating in subreddits that discuss political topics the mods of subreddit A will ban you for even participating in subreddit B. Or the mods or some other user on the subreddit will report you after trawling through your post history.
Now I am not fully against this. If you find a user in you subreddit who has a habit of posting opinions on some other subreddit that go on the lines of "Women should not be allowed to work and are only mean to make kids" they probably are functioning on a very different set of axioms and will probably make your space worse with their participation.
But things can get petty pretty quickly.
So you essentially end up maintaining different alts for different topics or subreddits.
We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).
Right now you can emulate this by putting your other instance links in your bio. I do think there should be a dedicated "linked instances" section which is more coordinated (only lets you link when you can access both accounts, and updates every other instance when you add a new one).
I hope they add this feature soon enough. The nice thing is that anyone can add this feature, and if the devs approve it, most active instances will likely update. I won't be the one to though :)
This sort of thing isn't particularly new though. It was the same for anyone that was around during the IRC days, your channel would be under a specific IRC server umbrella and you'd be expected to follow that servers rules.
It's that but expanded to where servers can also communicate with other servers, so the general expectation is that you follow the server rules and other servers can assume the rules tell you how that server will behave in aggregate.
It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.
IRC doesn't have accounts, identity, or federation. It was normal and expected that you would use multiple servers at the same time for different topics.
> It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.
That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
That's incorrect. Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv especially on the larger networks where dealing with certain individuals or impersonation required verification. And your second point is also incorrect as there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world.
> That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.
This is exactly what IRC networks did. They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. Mastodon just makes that explicit.
> Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv
Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't.
> there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world.
Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive.
> They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks.
That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.
> Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't.
Sure, hence why I used the word 'Evolved'. Not all IRC networks did , but it became common place. I'm not sure what your point is here unless you're arguing Mastodon should just toss away the evolution of discussion.
> Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive
Yes? That was the job of the server admin? It's like you weren't around when IRC servers were starting pissing contests between the two. The freenode drama wasn't even very long ago but this kind of stuff goes way back.
> That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.
See above. I've been in plenty of IRC drama where prominent users were told to go back to servers or kicked off.
> Sure, hence why I used the word 'Evolved'. Not all IRC networks did , but it became common place. I'm not sure what your point is here unless you're arguing Mastodon should just toss away the evolution of discussion.
My point is that Mastodon has a global first-class concept of identity, which is quite a big difference from IRC.
> Yes? That was the job of the server admin? It's like you weren't around when IRC servers were starting pissing contests between the two. The freenode drama wasn't even very long ago but this kind of stuff goes way back.
> See above. I've been in plenty of IRC drama where prominent users were told to go back to servers or kicked off.
I saw plenty of spats and petty drama on IRC, sure. At the channel level it usually ended up with someone making a new channel, since you don't need any skill or privileges to do that. At the network level, maybe a network splits (as freenode did), maybe some individuals get banned, but I absolutely never heard of users who were otherwise well-behaved on network X getting banned just because they happened to also chat on network Y (and given the lack of global accounts, how would you even tell?)
>I’m one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for.
You know that you can follow who you want on Twitter, right? You made it political for yourself by following people that talk politics
Does it though? Aside from trending sidebar, I’ve never had the algorithm show me a tweet that wasn’t tweeted or retweeted or liked by someone I’m following.
Most people are in the "home view" which is algorithm based. I've heard reports of twitter switching people back to the "home view" randomly without them doing anything. This has never happened to me, it's never switched to "home" without me doing it explicitly, so who knows what actually happens. I'm always in the timeline view, which only shows tweets and retweets from people I follow.
1) this definitely happens if your timeline is on the algorithmic version and not the chronological one.
2) the problem is precisely that I do not want to know what my very topic oriented follow is doing in terms of political tweeting. I’m sure this is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t want someone to be non-political for the sake of their follows. In most instances, I 100% agree with their views without reservation even. I just don’t want to see it on twitter. I would like to see any non political, topic oriented content they like and retweet however.
It does feel like the author has somewhat missed the fact that Twitter has become a space in which, while you can technically say whatever you want, is driven overwhelmingly by opinions on topic-du-jour social issues.
Further, the communities on Twitter that aren't part of this are largely segregated from the hive by virtue of consisting of users that are explicitly trying to avoid it. And there's a perpetual risk that the forerunners of those communites are eventually sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate regardless - we've all seen this happen in our feeds, and there's a good chance you've unfollowed or muted at least one person for abruptly and loudly picking up on some political or social topic.
This is pretty much exactly what Mastodon is trying to avoid. Having over-subscribed political debate forums hang a sign over their door is definitely fine by me.
Twitter wasn't built as a community platform. It's always had the user-centric model, which works well for the types of people who helped it gain popularity to begin with, namely journalists, celebrities, politicians, brands, gov agencies etc.
No wonder I never really got the point of Twitter. This makes a lot more sense, or why there is a concern for making sure identity -- or brand -- is cohesive. I prefer visiting among different communities and affinity groups.
In a lot of cases, twitter’s model is better. In topic oriented websites (reddit is a good example), it becomes a shithole if you happen to share any interest that hits closer to 100k people. So a math or programming oriented topic is effectively able to moderate by pushing the memes and shitposts to mathmemes or programminghumor, but science gets overrun with shitty bots because of how wide the topic is.
In many other cases, reddit’s model works better too. It just isn’t definitively one or the other.
I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit.
Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account.
> Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account.
Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.
> moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with
I made a user-centric version of this and it's the only thing that has made Reddit usable. All the people who participate in toxic communities are just gone, invisible. I don't have to see them, their replies don't show up in my inbox. It's absolute bliss. I'm sure there are plenty of false positives but I really don't care since the value of any particular user's comments is zero.
Like people seem to intuitively get that /r/all is only usable once you filter out basically everything; my own list has a little over 1200 subreddits on it and then you add in keywords.
It was the same with Twitter. The enjoyment and usability skyrocketed once you used a recursive blocker on worst kinds of people.
I can understand the frustration but it's really hard to argue with the results.
I have spent an unhealthy amount of time on reddit over the past 14 years and have never heard of such a thing. I find it unlikely that it's a significant problem which I've just been lucky to never brush against.
It exists, but it only really happens on either subs with zealot moderators who are trying to maintain ideological purity, or on normal subs who are just trying to get rid of particularly obnoxious users who are more often than not part of the first category.
You're lucky. Naturally this isn't something that the moderators in question particularly like to talk about as it instantly gives them away as nutjobs. The thing with malicious moderation is that if it is done well, lurkers never realize. That in turn contributes to a warped view of reality. That said, reddit is still better than other social networks because, with some very big caveats, moderation is somewhat isolated from one subreddit to the next.
I just can’t believe you’ve never heard of this. It’s extremely common and is prevalent in some of the largest subreddit. Or was when I left Reddit for good last year
Reddit is popularity of the subreddit centric. So your own personal popularity doesn't really matter. Its why people make throw-away accounts all the darn time.
Twitter is about personal popularity. This is why it is so important on twitter to have personal recognition.
Mastodon is reddit style moderation, with twitter style identity/popularity.
>Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.
Broken analogy. You can get banned from any subreddit for any reason, but you won't need a new account, because you can still be on all the other subreddits and communicate with other users.
Also, with over 140K combined karma (90K comment, 45K post karma, roughly), I have never experienced that issue on that 6-year-old account.
Last I checked, the ban bots exist in default subreddits (like /r/TwoXChromosomes) and there are reason you might want to comment in one of the shunned subs - not that you will usually know a sub is on that list until the bots get you. This kind of guilt by association is horrible.
As far as I can tell, default subs haven't been a thing for many years now. The new reddit UI will ask you to pick topics you are interested in and show you subs related to those. And that UI shows an absolutely huge number number of subs so if you pick your country as an interest, it will show you quite small local related subs for example.
It happens on /worldnews which is a huge sub and shouldn't (in theory) be hyperpolitical. I've even seen it on subs like /nhl that have have nothing to do with politics at all, banning people for posts on other subs that don't align with the mods politics. Not that it matters, Reddit is essentially useless now but at one point it was a great source of information.
r/comics went on one the other day from what I saw.
Basically a mod (anonymous because modmail) telling someone "Republicans are all the racists, say this or continue to be banned." ... in the fucking comics sub.
But to me, mods going off the deep end is just the latest cherry on top.
They killed themselves to me back in 2016/2017(?) when they changed their algorithms to try and stop r/the_donald, it all feels stale now, like it is only updated at most once a day.
Yeah I'd rather a client that can transparently create new accounts for each community. You can't interact honestly or freely on places like reddit because nut cases will read every one of your comments to piece together enough info to dox you. You have to be hyper vigilant and post enough fake or in accurate info to throw them off but it's just not as good as a private community you can trust.
That's just because Reddit lets people see where someone posts. On Matrix and Discord, you can use the same identity to join two different rooms, and only people that are in the same two rooms will know that you're there. It's always cute serendipity when I join a different Matrix room or Discord guild and find someone I know from one of the others. Quite charming. Reddit's public-timeline-by-default is what encourages the crazy stalking and cross-sub banning behavior, but its norms come from a time when Reddit and the web was a lot smaller.
This is arguably a client issue and not a federation issue. In the days of instant messaging we had no problem managing our AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc all in Trillian. We manage lots of accounts all the time anyway.
The alternative is we revive OpenID, but good luck with that
Popularity of clients like a trillan do not even reach 1% of what social media is today. It worked back then mostly because the internet was more often composed of techies with sufficient tech knowledge.
i want to be able to go to a geopolitical mastodon and enjoy posting/reading there, and ignore the rest of the federation, but sometimes I want to see all like reddit's /r/all or the front page.
True, but personal popularity is for me at least based on a useful property of people. When I was trying to explain why I enjoy Twitter so much, I would say, it is like Reddit but you only see people on your allow list, or vetted by your allow list. Reddit has too much junk and people I do not enjoy reading, but with twitter even if someone I follow doesn’t know that much about something, I think they are intelligent, funny, and reasonable, and that outweighs the dilution of expertise. Sure, if I want to buy some audiophile equipment, then I might follow reddit links in the search, but for conversation, I like people of a certain wit and style.
I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.
Mastodon servers are very different from subreddits. I could participate in 100s of subreddits and follow each of their rules just fine. I'm not going to make even 10s of accounts on various Mastodon servers and create bespoke networks for each.
If Mastodon wants to have communities, it should have a first class concept of communities where people can participate in as many of them as interests that they have. Servers aren't that.
anytime de/centralization comes up I'm reminded about Taleb's take on the decentralzation of Switzerland's. It has messy federalized politics compared to the rest of the world that is obsessed with centralized governance. And Mastodon is like Switzerland quite literally how Taleb describes it in Antifragile ... Boring and full of small town drama (when it comes to moderation).
It also seems not appealing to the many accounts who are only about influence or optimizing their follower count. Mastodon is like a reset button which is either a nightmare or a boon depending on what your original strategy was on twitter.
Reddit and Discord are absolutely awful on this. Hundreds of the most valuable subreddits have been destroyed by corrupt mods, lifetime appointments, and absolute power over the subreddit. We should find better solutions and in no way seek to replicate their flaws.
This problem was 'fixed' before Reddit even became a massive platform. Discoverability means people can easily leave draconian instances/sites in the dust, as is the case with almost all of the community splits back in the 2000s. Unfortunately, anti-discoverability is the norm now.
>This is not a bug. It's a feature. [...] I'm one of those people that
...that didn't read the article fully, because it addresses this point exactly.
Small communities aren't a problem. Having your account linked with just one of them is.
Imagine what reddit was like if you had to pick a subreddit and stick with it for the entire history of the account. You'd only be allowed to post on other subreddits if you are following the rules of That One Subreddit.
forgive me if i’m wrong, but this comes across as if you’ve never used mastodon.
i’ve been on there for a few years and i can’t for the life of me see how any of this is even a concern for using it.
if you’re upset that some servers are more lenient than others, or that some servers have more active moderation, then just move servers. i’ve done it twice and it took like five minutes—you don’t lose followers or anything, they come right along with you as move…
Twitter has communities just like the other platforms, however, it's follow/follower model is a fatal flaw that encourages toxicity.
Every single community that flourishes on Twitter eventually devolves into a set of people who spend all their energy complaining about something. You can choose to ignore the complaints, but after a while it just becomes too much. Once you've followed enough people to be part of a Twitter community, it's annoyingly difficult to undo that.
People will be people and the same toxic crap happens on Reddit and Discord. These other platforms just provide an easy way to leave an entire community if you unhappy with the moderation policies and/or general group dynamics.
I personally enjoy being part of a community, getting to know the people around it, and get to chat about it in small discussion groups. I hope the Fediverse continues to evolve, and helps to build communities. Twitter has become too much about building an audience.
I think it's a very apt analogy that's broadly correct. The crucial difference is that Mastodon servers are not a scarce resource (unlike land & buildings), so you can shop around until you find an HOA that you like, or just start your own.
There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues.
You must have joined Twitter quite late then. In the early days people complained that Twitter was silly because people tweeted things like what they were having for breakfast. Those complaints were a form of social control - peer pressure really - that drove people to use Twitter for Serious Things instead.
>Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement.
quoting DIRECTLY from the post
> the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.
How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?
The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well.
If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action.
If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.
Now imagine how inconvenient it would be if you needed to create a new account for each subreddit or discord server. That's how Mastodon works because accounts are tied to communities.
This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse.
For all the talk of peculiar rules, I haven't seen any servers with peculiar rules. There seems to be a general understanding that a server may be set up to focus on tabletop gamers, or STEM nerds, or journalists, that doesn't mean they can't also talk about politics, or movies, or whatever they want.
But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves. That is, in fact, a point in favor of the federation model. There are a number of dedicated mastodon hosts already[0] for those who don't want to roll their own from scratch, and more will probably come online with time.
The peculiar rules aren't written down. Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1] This can include DMs that both parties are fine with (but not the server admin, who can read them), or behavior off of the site.[2][3]
The problem isn't solved if you go through the trouble of setting up your own server. De-federation is common[4] (often for absurd reasons[5]), and blacklists are shared across many instances.[6]
That was true in the "blogosphere" too, and nobody freaked out about it. We only take it seriously now because we've spent over a decade hypnotized into believing that a "social network" presenting a single global unified namespace of participants is somehow so important that it's practically a public utility. In a single unified namespace, who's blocked and who isn't is very important.
The fediverse implicitly asks the question: what if that assumption is wrong? What if we had as many of the affordances of (say) Twitter as we could get, but the global connectivity model of blogs? In the blogosphere, it hardly even makes sense to ask who's "blocked".
I remember the height of the blogosphere as a pretty happening time for discourse on the Internet, so it's not a silly question.
> That was true in the "blogosphere" too, and nobody freaked out about it.
It wasn't; the blogosphere had no-one sitting in the place where Mastodon server admins sit. The closest equivalent would be, what, webring admins? But a single blog could be part of any number of webrings, so getting dropped from one wasn't a big deal, and I don't remember any shenannigans like banning members of another webring from commenting (and even if that kind of spat did happen, comment banning happened at the individual blog level, not at the "server" level).
Some people did get banned from the actual servers, e.g. Livejournal or Wordpress, but that was a Big Deal rather than something that happened over social drama between tinpot admins. I remember e.g. Dreamwidth being set up in response to some content policy, but that was a one-time event and a clear content policy. And even then, no-one was trying to block these whole servers off from each other; if anything they went out of their way to allow e.g. commenting under an account from somewhere else.
I think it's closer to the shared gzlines on the smaller IRC networks or Usenet's KillFiles that people used to promote group-think and group-ban people, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for deviating from group-think. I suspect Mastodon will become a medium sized bubble or silo as a result. I personally will just hang back and watch the show. Mastodon appears to be a continuation of the Twitter fallout and peeled some tribes off into their own medium sized bubble. It will be good for growth but I have no idea what the end result will look like.
I believe the biggest threat to Mastodon is that it breaks up some of the control centralized governmental and corporate powers have to influence the way people think and feel a.k.a. winning the hearts and minds of the people. An interesting project might be to create some machine learning that tries to identify when Mastodon is being infiltrated by these entities.
As the article says, that's just a P2P social network by the back door, with a software system that's overcomplicated and poorly tuned for that use case.
I don't understand the argument. It seems like precisely the same thing is true of the "network" of blog hosts at the height of the blogosphere, which included large shared blogging platforms like Blogger that might have "censored" you.
I mentioned Livejournal, Wordpress, and Dreamwidth. Yes, it was possible to get banned from these large hosts. But that was an extreme action, and the people with the power to do that were seen as quite distinct from the much smaller communities on the platform.
No-one at the particular social rank of a Mastodon server admin existed in that world - an elevated position that has powers that regular users don't, but nevertheless interacts directly with the user community. And that really does change the social dynamics a lot. (Some other platforms did have comparable roles - BBS operators, forum mods - and I don't think it's coincidence that they tended to have more drama)
I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding Mastodon servers where the admins go on stupid power-trips. But there's nothing in the whole system working against you just standing your own instance up, or, for that matter, running 10 concurrent accounts different servers, like RSS feeds in Google Reader. It just doesn't seem like a real issue, unlike on Twitter, where it is quite obviously a clear and present issue,.
I feel it's mostly not stupid power trips, but some more benign psychological effect: you left Twitter, set up your own Mastodon instance and told everyone how cool it is that the power to police your community (your safe space) isn't in Elon's hands, but in "ours".
Now some trivial fight happens on your server, or a misunderstanding. You could sit back and observe the situation for a bit, but damn, you went this whole Mastodon route, so you can finally act! The pressure to act is immense, even it it may be self-imposed.
Now add all the other people who feel similar pressures and are therefore quick to call you complicit. The post is there, what else do you need? Of course you must ban, de-federate, whatever. Now! That was the whole point of it. Even if nobody actually demands it, you can imagine it quite well. Better act before someone calls you out.
How did people in IRC handle it back in the time? By having a mostly homogenous group of users?
No. IRC was also a sort of global namespace. There's no such thing (that I can see) in the fediverse. Handles are closer to RSS links than they are to Twitter accounts, and the tooling just blurs the difference.
"Better than Twitter" is a very low bar, certainly far below "social network I'm interested in using".
Standing up a private instance is possible but not yet easy, AIUI; you need a server running 24/7, you need your own domain, the mainstream server software can't currently be used with SNI-style shared hosting. I don't know how good the client support for multiple accounts is, and even if it's good, it seems to rather undermine the point of a federated social network - at that point I might as well use old-school forums via something like TapaTalk. Possible is a good first step, but if the system isn't designed and focused on that kind of use case (and the fact that it's not built as a pure P2P system suggests it's not), then it's never going to be easy, and that matters.
Blogs getting banned was much rarer back then because people were less censorious. But the proper model isn't blogs, it's e-mail. Imagine getting banned from your email provider because you sent a political opinion, or even a sarcastic comment. That would be absurd.
The early Internet was full of professionals. There wasn't that much to censor because people were mostly crafting pages connected to their professional work, or showcasing their cool hobbies.
Once the normal people started flooding in, there was a lot of drama and a lot of censorship, it was just contained in silos. Forums had moderation, cliques and weird rules. A discussion about a game for kids could explode in drama, banning and rivalries, it just didn't spread very far like it does today, when you have whole sites and groups dedicated to cataloguing all the drama happening elsewhere.
> …was much rarer back then because people were less censorious.
i wish this absurd idea would disappear.
communities on the internet have _always_ banned people for all sorts of reasons. always. since bbs’, since irc, since forums, since email lists, and on and on and on.
According to whom were people less censorious? You? Where's your data on this point? What eras of the internet have you lived through?
Because I've gone through the whole IRC and early forums era of 20+ years ago. People got banned, formed their own IRC channels or forums colloquially called treehouses and life went on. Blogs were no different and if a blog was particularly bad it would get banned and the user would go and host their own blog elsewhere. Hell, you can go further back and see Usenet banning stuff related to white power groups.
To give you some idea of the eras of the internet I've been through: I used BBSes. I posted on alt.2600.hackerz. I attended the defcon shoot before deviant took it over.
In the past, you had to do some crazy stuff to get your blog taken down or get k-lined. Now your internet presence (and possibly your career) are at risk if you don't keep up with the new taboos.
People definitely got banned back then. There were three key differences:
1. Getting banned from Twitter means leaving a global namespace. Getting banned from the comments on someone’s blog was far less serious, and if someone on a group blog had a falling out it just meant that they setup another one (the Mastodon model). Earlier things like Usenet groups had moderation but people could easily move to another group.
2. The stakes were lower: the early internet was full of academics, professionals, etc. and still had this aura of not really mattering. That doesn’t mean that everyone was nice but the ratio was a lot better and it wasn’t anywhere near as coordinated – the creationists and Scientologists were both annoying but they certainly didn’t work together. The odds of some online flap even reaching the awareness of your friends, family, or coworkers were low and it probably would have seemed more like an amusing joke than something serious.
3. An American specialization of the previous point: the hardcore right-wing took over the Republican Party, successfully purged the moderates, and started recruiting young reactionaries. 9/11 changed what a lot of people felt was acceptable to say or do – I remember when Glenn Reynolds was a fairly normal-sounding law professor with a blog in that brief span before 9/11 & the war blogs broke him – and over the 2000s they felt fewer checks as their power & numbers grew. Obama getting elected brought a LOT of voices out which many of us had thought had disappeared in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and by the mid-2010s they were recruiting young people from anti-feminist communities in places like 4chan and Reddit (before GamerGate but that’s when it really ramped up). Nothing unprecedented in terms of message but the numbers and degree to which they were welcomed into the party and started setting the tone was dramatic. There’s a fair argument that some of those views were not uncommon before but had been more genteelly expressed, but I am reminded of how aggressively GOP leaders shut down David Duke in the 90s.
I mention politics not just because I think that normalized a lot of bad behavior but also because it changed how people responded. “Internet drama” wasn’t taken seriously but when it started having real-world consequences and impacting national politics, a lot of people - even those who self-described as free speech advocates – started reconsidering how best to respond. Volume also enters into the picture: the first time you see something, you might try to engage. By the dozenth time, you’re a lot more inclined to get out the ban hammer.
> The fediverse implicitly asks the question: what if that assumption is wrong?
Yep. And I and maybe others are answering that question: Nope, we want a single namespace. And then fediverse proponents pop up to tell us actually we're wrong about what we want.
The primary thing I want from social media is algorithmic discovery. I love bumping into cool, interesting people I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. With the fediverse I can't even reliably see the past posts of someone I follow if they're on a different server.
You can want whatever you want. 2 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. But I remember the blogosphere now, and: it was better than what we had 2 months ago. I wrote off Mastodon, but this is a better situation than Twitter. I'm psyched. The tooling isn't perfect yet, but it'll be better than Twitter's tooling within 12 months --- not least because there won't be a giant public company doing its level best to make sure the tooling doesn't get too good.
> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.[1]
from the link you provided, the admins respond:
"This post was removed by mistake and we apologize. We’ve recently hired more moderators and the post in question was falsely interpreted to be implying something it was not."
for [5], the journa.host server had a lot of problems out of the gate, including some suspicion they were sharing ban-evasion tools, but is not currently defederated for the most part. I follow lots of people on that host and I'm on a different server. the thread there illustrates the reasons which IMO were not unreasonable for a brand new server attracting a lot of attention with odd moves.
not that moderation isn't fraught with tons of problems, but I dont think large servers have admins that are capriciously banning people for made-up reasons the way Musk has been doing on Twitter.
And to your point, in addition to those examples being unreliable, they're a small smattering of one-offs in a context of vast numbers of users on huge servers. By and large the typical server doesn't have idiosyncratic rules, and the scenario contemplated here is a fever dream.
As Twitter has imploded, people have increasingly complained about unrepresentative strange examples that don't accurately reflect the day-to-day experience of being on Mastodon.
Mastodon servers can hire moderators?? How do they make money? I thought Mastodon was all about not-for-profit social media and there's no way for Mastodon server admins to make any money as there's no ads?? Not a Mastodon user, just trying to understand who is a Mastodon admin (given the large powers they seem to have) and what's in it for them.
> Admins will ban you for whatever reason they want.
Apparently the same thing happens on Twitter now. If the "Twitter Files" are to be believed, it's happened for a long time before that.
Frankly, I think all of this absurd rule-making is fine. If you disagree with it, nobody can stop you from creating your own instance and federating with all the great/terrible sites you want. The irony that these 'sky is falling' posts come from lifelong Twitter users feels like the icing on the cake. Nobody owes you anything on the internet; not Twitter, not Elon, and not the few-thousand instance admins who host servers out-of-pocket.
The problem is that if you federate with the bad instances, you'll get de-federated from other instances. The people running the biggest instances think that anyone who reads anything on poa.st or gab or truth.social for any reason must be a nazi, and therefore worthy of banning.
In practice this is not true. De-federating based on association is not common, and mostly used by very tight and usually small servers. The big ones don't do that.
You only see the objectionable stuff if you follow those accounts or people who retweet those accounts. De-federation prevents people who want to communicate from communicating.
Right, this is true with any website that you don’t run. dang can come in here and ban whoever he wants for whatever reason. At the end of the day, if you’re going to a platform (specific mastodon instance) ran by someone else, you’ve got to have an amount of trust in who’s running it.
But Mastodon and ActivityPub do attempt to mitigate this - you can run your own instance (and of course, you’re not entitled for someone else to republish you) to seize back some of that control. Followers and follows are a lot more portable, so it’s easier to move instances (which is party automated)
The defederation "wars" will end. People who want to be in walled garden instances, with their own sense of community, cut off from unpredictable sets of other users will have what they want. But I think most users will migrate to places where only the truly bad actor instances are cut off. I've already observed this from my old Tweeps. Defederation is way too blunt of a tool for most cases.
It will likely end as culture warring weirdos in their spectrum's echo chamber while normal people leave for commercial sites or go back to Twitter. Mastodon needs a culture of openness and general tolerance that it does not have and has made no real effort to foster.
Yech. Sounds exactly like what you'd expect to happen if subreddits were federated like this. The "mod" role and wielding this kind of petty power over others attracts a certain kind of fragile egomaniac.
Not that it's not a problem on a centralized site either mind you, as the Twitter Files have been revealing.
To make my second point even stronger, I've noticed that the site I linked doesn't even include two popular newer mastodon hosts, iKnox[0] and Elestio[1].
> But ultimately, even if the fever dream hypothetical dystopia were real, people are free to set up their own dedicated servers just for themselves.
I’ve been wondering how much this scales. Surely if a large number of people did this, it would create a massive NxN mesh that would force instances to only federate with larger instances?
>This is the dumbest assessment of the fediverse I've seen in a month full of dumb assessments of the fediverse.
>Just a really, really dumb assessment.
Your argument boils down to "run your own instance", which has specifically been addressed in the article. Perhaps instead of repeating the word "dumb", you could read it.
Regarding "run your own instance": sure, just like we all are running are email servers, right? Shouldn't be that hard to set up, right?
Not like there would be any issues with getting on one of the many blacklists[1] maintained by God knows who that you'd have no practical means to get removed from, right?
Not at all, but I do think it peculiar to be subject to what from my perspective is a random set of jurisdictions. Of course I understand why this is the case, but out of a handful of servers I looked at, only two specified where their data is hosted - for the rest, the same legal provisions obviously apply, but I have no way of knowing what they are.
I also don't know the specifics of German law, so the fact that my account could get suspended for violating something I am not aware of is peculiar in itself. The point is that there is no single privacy policy and single jurisdiction to worry about - it is a guess, depending on where the instance is hosted, and may even move under you without notice.
[edit: I am in the process of selecting an instance personally - I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught.]
> I have not decided yet, and the process of picking one seems somewhat fraught
as someone who has been on mastodon for quite some time, i highly recommend one of the general servers and then not worrying about it from there. there’s an awful of lot of nonsense panic from people about “oh noes! which instance!”
i just looked and these are a few of general servers that are open right now
also, after you join, one of the first things you may want to do is use one of the tools to find people who you followed on twitter. something like movetodon (super easy) or fedifinder (a little more difficult).
I proposed a solution to both have more relaxed rules for personal profiles and have dedicated and highly regulated places for discussion. Seems like you just want to call things dumb
I don't have a history of calling things dumb, but you wrote this:
> admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish. what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?
You then proposed two things that don't make sense to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I first started dabbling with Mastodon 5 years ago. In my country there only were 6 instances at the time. 3 were made up by anarcho-communists, 1 was dedicated to music, 1 was dedicated to video games and only 1 self-touted as a "generalist" instance.
Of course I made my first profile on the generalist one, but I quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one. I could only reply to already existing discussions, which was fine but gave me a big sense of passivity. This is a real problem for which I now propose a solution.
If you think it's fine that the only people who can post in a specific community are the ones who have an account there (= giving all your data to the server admins) then maybe you have a completely different view of what should be possible on Mastodon.
"quicky discover I couldn't post on the timeline of the music or videogames one"
That's technically true, but who cares? The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline. The communities of videogame and music enthusiasts are larger than any one instance, and can follow one another across instances, and see each others' tagged posts in searches across instances.
> The instance timeline isn't a "community", it's just a particular filter applied to the global timeline.
Defaults matter. Usability matters. If that particular filter is the one that the community uses to communicate with each other, then who's included or excluded from that filter becomes very relevant.
While I agree with the principles of what you're saying, the facts are a bit off here: the instance timeline isn't the default, and the lead dev has tried to nerf it a lot in many ways – I think it doesn't even show up in the official iOS app? Also, anything posted "to the instance timeline" also shows up in federated timelines if you follow the poster, unless you're running a fork allowing "local-only" posting.
Maybe a better title of this would have been, "Mastodon isn't a good social network for me". It sounds like you'd rather be on some kind of discussion forum with different areas for different topics all united under the same consistent moderation policies.
I also agree with the OP. My personal take on the experience so far:
Joining a server feels like I'm hanging out in someone else's backyard. There's this feeling that at any point I could be asked to leave if I overstay my welcome. The server I'm attached to is run by someone who seems very friendly and so far I'm enjoying the community they're trying to build. However, I am struggling to wrap my head around this weird intersection of public broadcast over a semi-public (someone's backyard) space.
Unlike Reddit or Discord where I can partake in multiple forums through my single account, my entire public persona on Mastodon is tied to the server I'm on. It really limits what I want to share as I don't feel as free to talk openly about any topic.
I’m hopeful for this. Email has managed to survive this consolidation without the big providers somehow capturing the technology and squeezing it. I still feel like I could change my email provider at any point. There’s even some options for keeping your address.
I like the idea of leveraging some profit-motivated actors to make the experience smooth, but the open and federated nature helps ensure they don’t “own” the entire network.
Moderation is less of an issue with email, though. Very few people have been banned by their email provider, but how many users have gotten moderated on Facebook and Twitter?
I’d originally hoped to run my own, but I’d been expecting to see a variety of implementations to pick from and only found the official Ruby server.
Am I missing something, and there are other implementations out there that interoperate? Or is the reference implementation of this standard the only implementation?
Yes there are a variety of implementations - perhaps you were searching "Mastodon" (the name of a single implementation) instead of "ActivityPub" (the name of the protocol)?
Disclaimer: I’ve only been looking into this for a few days, so I may say something incorrect.
My understanding is that there is a single Mastodon implementation, but there are a number of similar projects which can interoperate by sharing data via ActivityPub to become federated. Some of these other projects implement all/most/some of the Mastodon REST API so that GUI clients (phone apps, etc) can be used for reading and posting. There was an article on LWN recently which listed several of these with some commentary [1].
There are others, Pleroma was explicitly designed to be lightweight for small nodes, written in Elixir and thus running on the battle tested Earlang ecosystem BEAM VM. Also have heard and run across a few instances of Misskey which runs on node.js. Both use Postgres and I see from the install instructions the latter also uses Redis. Have heard of others as well but have no idea at all about them, a search on the above two backends will find you more.
You've also got some choices in front ends, I know Pleroma supports several. I strongly recommend not using Soapbox for a variety of reasons unless you really like its UI.
As someone that runs an interest-based instance, this take is just does not ring true. Sure, if you want to join my server you probably should have an interest in palaeontology or zoology, but I have no problem at all if people want to talk about whatever they want to talk about§. This seems to be true of most such instances.
Hacker News seems to have an interest in finding things wrong with Mastodon. There are things wrong with Mastodon of course, but they pale in comparison to the problems of centralised internet that had nearly devoured the entire world. I'd like to see more talk about how to build and improve or solve actual problems rather than these usually pretty off-base complainy takes.
Agreed - I run an AI-focused instance, but our FAQ explicitly states it's fine to post about non AI stuff. It's more about making a community that shares the interest rather than forcing all conversations to focus on that one interest.
From my experience Mastodon is more obsessed with creating bubbles than Reddit hypermodding.
So it's great your FAQ says that and your topic is non-controversial and niche. But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles. Nothing wrong with that. Niche forums are perfectly fine.
But lets not pretend that's a social network anything like Twitter, or FB, or Reddit circa 2012. Popular Mastodon servers ban hundreds of servers where users may have signed up but not known the extensive rules list of each other sub server (in addition to the [n] amount of moderated content).
> But when applied en masse it's just a mass collection of extremely segmented bubbles.
We don’t exist in mastodon bubbles. we go out with friends. we visit families houses. we visit friends families. we visit dozens of other web sites. we interact with countless numbers of people every single day. we go to work. we go to school.
this “you’re going to live in a bubble!” panic is wild.
You can't permanently silence/exclude random people's opinions at social events or a family dinner with the touch of a button. So even that's not a good example of an ideological bubble of ideas.
I also said there's nothing wrong with niche forums but social networks were a new phenomenon circa 2005+ and hundreds of millions of people like the idea of public information networks... for the same reason why newspapers, broadcast news, and cultural TV shows are so popular, but now with more direct participation.
So if you want to toss aside the new concept of public platforms for discourse and culture then that at least be honest about it. Don't pretend it didn't exist.
> You can't permanently silence/exclude random people's opinions at social events or a family dinner with the touch of a button.
thats my point. we don't exist in bubbles. and while you didn't explicitly say this, i disagree with this notion that people keep panicking about, that mastodon or any other social media is creating some terrifying horrible "be very afraid" bubble.
again, we don't exist in bubbles, we exist in the real world where there are all kinds of different ideas. if i choose to spend my freetime online with people i get along with, this would be absolutely no different from spending my freetime in the real world with irl friends that i get along with--its no different. whether its mastodon or discord or going out to clubs with friends. if i go out with friends, its not some "be very afraid" bubble just because we don't have racists or homophobes out with us.
even if i were to start a mastodon server tomorrow and curate the users, this is no more a terrifying bubble than if i owned a music club and curated metal-heads or gothkids or whatever.
i'll say it again: it'll be ok--we don't exist in a bubble. we'll be ok.
Cool... niche forums and social groups are a good thing but the world is increasingly lived on the internet and that has a big ripple effect even in real life.
The people who are raised on hypermodded Subreddits (and a hypothetical world where super constrained Mastadon servers replace Twitter/FB/<=2012 internet forums and comment threads) are not being taught to tolerate other opinions in their family, workplace, at universities, and high schools. And today much more broadly to newspaper columnists, blog platforms, Patreon accounts, Paypal/Mastercard merchant accounts etc, etc.
This isn't merely about which communities you opt-in and choose to follow. The market options to opt-in to are continually constrained and limited.
You see these same pressures exponentially being applied to everything, not just niche opt-in communities. It's a new culture of intolerance for the greater good. Guilt by association and zero nuance outrage campaigns.
Our culture is developing a zero tolerance policy to dissent and anything outside the Overton window. The only people I see how have no problem with this are people who:
A) have boring non controversial opinions or simply don't care
B) their ideologies happen to fit squarely in the overton window
C) generally don't participate in public discourse and are unaware of recent cultural developments... Or are simply naive they can't see the danger in slippery slopes where increasingly more moderate ideas get treated like Gaellio and blasphemy against God, but the mainstream safe culture is the new religion.
The "push a button to silence dissent" thing is what is expanding everywhere. Family dinners and IRL parties are one of the few bastions of tolerance but even that won't last long if the current culture continues.
from what i see, we (the US) have more tolerance than we've ever had. there is of course a very loud tiny number of people crying about that exact tolerance and doing their best to destroy tolerance, but they've always been here.
you're gonna feel the way you feel, but i personally think much of this is similar to the "kids these days don't know good music. its not rock like zeppelin!" type nonsense.
the kids are alright. kids spending their freetime with like minded friends online is not terrifying, its not nefarious, its not spooky. i just listened to a podcast that was discussing the early days of dungeons and dragons. apparently adults used to spaz out that kids were playing dnd. it sent the parents into a weird type of satanic panic--they were convinced that if kids spent so much of their freetime playing dnd with their friends it was going to turn them into murderers or something. some of the recordings of the parents were wild. they were fully convinced this activity would turn little johnny into a satanic flying demon or something. it was just kids spending their freetime time with like minded friends (a dnd bubble if you will).
> The "push a button to silence dissent" thing is what is expanding everywhere.
this is no different from someone turning and walking away from the racist nutball screeching on a street corner. its the literal same outcome. there is nothing wrong with being able to walk away from a quack screaming at you on the street, just as there is nothing wrong with pushing a button and blocking the racist nutball screeching at you online.
it doesn't even have to be a screeching nutball on a street corner. there are a million reasons why we may just not like another person. when we don't like someone, we just turn and walk away and go find our friends. this is normal. this is totally normal.
What you describe is, of course, possible. You can create a personal fidonet/usenet-like echo conference with nothing more than a bunch of e-mail redirection rules. But people don't want that. I checked.
There is no such thing as an "intellectual need". All the needs are fundamentally emotional. Mastodon addresses the identity need, it creates the sense of a community, and, as all the social media, it grants both cheap entertainment and immediate gratitude for conformity. It is a good "social network", it's just what we call a phenomena of "social network" is essentially shit.
> the social network itslef [sic] should be as boring and generic as possible.
Well, in a certain sense, he is describing one mechanism of the peculiar popularity of sites like 4chan; however, I think it just highlights how incomplete the thesis is. There's clearly much more to it than just these simple mechanics.
> imagine if the only online profile where you could express yourself was through your old "Ancient Greek Literature Forum" account. that would be quite limiting, wouldn't it?
I remember the days of small forums dedicated to niche topics. They usually had an “off-topic” board where members could socialize and talk about whatever. It was not limiting at all.
it was separate , though and you could ignore it. I purposely remove people who mix their politics in their science from twitter, and it works, but i am left with a small number of people. Separate rooms is good.
Not seeing a problem here either. It's free to create an account on however many instances and it lends itself to per-topic pseudonyms which is probably better than one identity everywhere anyway unless you're explicitly trying to build a self-brand.
Even in the case of a single identity everywhere, it gives your followers a way to control which types of posts they see from you. Maybe they don't care about my explorations in UI design and programming and just want to see what pastries I've been cooking lately, in which case they can follow my account on a cooking-oriented Mastodon instance.
That's actually one of my minor gripes with Twitter; it had no way to filter for topic which meant that even though I followed people I had an interest in my timeline still had a lot of stuff in it I didn't care about.
This is looking really hard for a problem that isn't there.
Has the author actually used Mastodon? I wonder what server they ended up on to have this impression. And I find the claim that people don't want to run generalist instances... interesting. I ran a few of these and while they all had a theme and a few cultural baselines (which is okay, other instances have other standards), none of them really restricted what you post about.
yeah i just use mas.to and it pretty much just feels like twitter without the algorithm. I post what I want and people who follow me or tags I use see my posts
Maybe what we need is a decoupling of user-hosting instances and post-hosting instances. Probably the biggest issue I have with twitter is that I have multiple interests/communities I'm involved with. If I post a lot about topic A, get some followers who know me through A, that's great! But then I want to talk about B with the community who knows me through topic B and I feel the need to self-censor as to not spam the topic A followers.
I've always felt I would like to be able to tweet only to the TopicA people or only to the TopicB people. But I don't really care that my user data is stored on the same instance as the people in TopicA or TopicB. So maybe a better model for federation would be that you can host your user on an instance, and then also when you post, you are deciding which instance to post on.
At the same time, being on a generalist server (mastodon.social) I really couldn't possibly care less about looking at the trending posts on my server as that is just a general slice of mastodon users and I am not in any specific community with them. I want to subscribe to specific niche/thematic mastodon instances for my feed.
This is precisely how things worked back in the days of FidoNet, and it was one of the big arguments that was never fully resolved, as you had one group of sysops who felt that if you wanted to be a FidoNet sysop you should be obligated to carry whatever topics are on the network backbone, and another group of sysops who felt "my computer, my rules". Fundamentally it was a disagreement over what being part of a federated service meant. Such disagreements eventually led sysops to leave the network and start their own. I have little doubt that is going to happen with the Fediverse as well since some nodes seem hellbent on making sure it happens.
It does, in the sense that it seems to mirror sentence-level emphasis in speech.
(Even your comment sort of works - I'd drop the emphasis on "up" and "place" though.)
It's definitely atypical. I think it wouldn't impact readability all that much, if not for the lack of capitalization at the start of sentences - the two abnormalities together make the text much harder to read than it should be.
Except when we read sentences, we expect to be reading sentences, not someone’s interpretation of what their voice would sound like transposed onto a sentence, using obscure formatting cues to accomplish this.
Generally I find that the more people rely on emphasis and formatting, the poorer their writing skills are.
Maybe don’t use “we” like that; I certainly enjoy when I can get a sense of a writers vocal pattern, and I am supportive of using text formatting to help with that.
wild, i had to go back to the article after reading this comment to double check. my brain completely autocorrected everything and i didn't notice the formatting at all!
First of all, a forum is a social network. A primitive one, sure, with origins before "social network" had really entered our lexicon, but a social network nonetheless.
The ability of people in a federated social network to create arbitrary, independent instances with rules tailored for particular discussion topics is a feature, not a bug. If you don't like that... well, don't go on topic-specific Mastodon servers I guess.
Are you advocating for Mastodon to have SSO? If so, I can get on board with that.
Are you advocating for a cap on the number of members of a particular instance? Mastodon can already do that - all you have to do is not approve new accounts. Of course, the inherent problem with that is that activity in member-capped servers will gradually die out, and now you need way more admins... your idea, not mine.
One issue with this article is that there is nothing preventing a person from having multiple accounts on different servers. I have three I still use because I was uncertain which community to join in 2019. There are many apps for Fediverse that allow one to use multiple accounts on different instances and flip between them as easily as flipping between Discord servers or alt accounts is in the Discord app.
I also agree with madrox's comment that having specific instances with peculiar rules according to taste is a feature, not a bug.
Heck, I agree with everyone calling out this article here, because it's just a bad take.
Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one.
Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks.
"the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets"
Self expression, humor, and fun are bad! I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines! Only boring domains should be allowed! Only rules I like should be allowed!
this implies you haven't actually read the terms of service. How much you want to be there's info in there about not sending threats and using their service to abuse people.
just because you agree with the prescription doesn't mean it isn't a prescription.
which part did i misrepresent?
Yes, i was hyperbolic. but i don't think i misrepresented anything.
they said: "admins create these highly specific instances with peculiar rules, and people who want to create a profile there have to submit themselves to a highly limited set of conversations and content they can publish."
I said "Email is not a good messaging platform. Every server has its own rules and expectations. Completely different terms of service on each one."
i simply replaced the concept of social network with the dominant alternate federated messaging protocal that has the same properties. (every email server has terms of service that dictate rules and expectation of usage) I didn't address the "highly limited set of conversations and content" part because it's a complete misapprehension of how those server rules work. While i'm sure there's 1 or 2 exceptions to this servers do not dictate what you can talk about beyond "no hate speech" kind of dictation. A Star Trek server, for example doesn't mean people are ONLY allowed to talk about Star Trek. It just means it's a server for folks who like Star Trek.
they said: "what if I feel strongly about some geopolitical topic yet those kind of conversations are banned on my "LEGOholics" instance?"
I responded "Communities of like minded people are bad. We shouldn't encourage people to gather with like minded folks.
All groups of like-minded people have rules about what is and is not acceptable speech amongst them. To suggest otherwise is ignorance in the extreme. He's specifically advocating for NOT having instances like that. He's advocating against a core aspect of groups of like minded people if you don't have common (spoken or unspoken) rules around acceptable topics the group will NOT continue to exist. It's WHY we stick with a group. To advocate against something is to make a valuation of it being "bad". He's advocating against groups of people with rules about acceptable conversation topics. Therefore they are saying that communities of like minded people with the rules that cause them to come into existence and stay in existence are (to them) "bad". this isn't a misrepresentation. It's actually thinking about the logical implications of their words.
they said "the ideal solution would be to distribute all these users between many small and generic instances with no silly domain names or draconic rule sets"
Their commentary about "silly domain names" in context is obviously derogatory. Silly domain names ARE self expression and humor and fun. He is advocating against them, thus he's saying they are bad. Yes, i was hyperbolic, but it's not actually a misrepresentation. Suggesting that the rules of most servers are "draconic" is itself either hyperbole or massive misunderstanding of those rules. It seems hyperbolic, and thus he is suggesting that being forced to adhere to other people's rules is undesirable. I said "I shouldn't be forced to adhere to your community guidelines!" again. not misrepresenting anything. Hypebolic yes, but also accurate. Saying "Only rules I like should be allowed!" is just repeating the same idea another way. It's, again, not a misrepresentation. They never say they're unwilling to follow rules. Only that rules of small servers are "draconic" and there is the _strong_ implication that they don't want to be forced to adhere to them.
So. with that in mind. What _exactly_ do you think i've actually misrepresented? What interpretation of their statements did i get wrong?
Can you provide an example of a popular e-mail provider that bans users based on the content of their e-mails (and not just for straight up illegal stuff)?
I'm aware of very few instances that insist that people only post about whatever the "theme" of the instance is, so I don't think this is actually a big issue in practice.
One of the running jokes around mastodon right now is innocent people singing up on an instance like meow.social because they like cats. Then they realize it's specifically a furry instance. Some stick around because they like the people, others migrate to a new instance.
Which instance would get more users and hold more power, @mastodon.com or @mylittlepony4ever.net? Which instance would you want to hold your entire online persona? @mozilla.com or @stopclimatechange.org?
very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV or writing to a friend or collegue with fuckjoebiden@racism.ftw is insane. but somehow when creating their main online account on mastodon they sign up to the silliest instances and bind their own identity to these niche communities
Are you limited to one instance or persona? Feels like an assumption based on twitter style advertising requirements where they don't want multiple sign ups as it maks it harder to track you.
No, you are not. I have one persona that moved over from twitter, one for ttrpgs.
I think, we need to go back to the basics with people. You are allowed to have more than one email, for example. Facebook brainwashed people into believing they can only be one thing online.
Slight tangent though; but i'm starting to believe we're going back to only being a single thing online. I used to rotate accounts frequently for privacy sake. These days it's becoming shockingly easy to link accounts.. ML is only going to make it easier.
I prefer many anonymous accounts.. but i think those days are moving further and further behind us.
Twitter makes it very easy to manage multiple accounts. You can be logged in with several accounts at once, and easily switch between them in the twitter UI.
Isn't the same true on Mastodon? In fact, it's even easier since they're separate websites, so you can be actively logged into multiple at once. My mastodon.social and porn.social (not sure the latter actually exists) sessions remain as seamlessly separate as my hackernews and reddit logins.
That's visually separate, but how easily would your identity be traceable by prying users or admins? Who would be able to see your IP and link your political/hobbyist persona to your porn account?
Pinafore (web FE) allows you to be logged into multiple instances with an easy switch between them.
Soapbox (web FE, also Pulpit, Mangane since they are forks) handles multiple ogged in accounts on the same instance (which is handy if e.g. you've got an admin/mod role account or you've got a lot of bots on there.)
Pretty sure this will be a common feature in frontends that get popular in 2023.
I think this is possible on the Mastodon app. There's an option to login to multiple accounts but I haven't try it yet since I only have a single account.
You're not limited, but most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona.
By having so few generalist instances the risk is that they grow too large and gain too much power over the fediverse.
>most people just want to have at least one profile which has their name and photo where they can have a presence online linked to their real life persona.
I am so absurdly out of touch with "most people"...
>very few people have silly email addresses because they realize sending their CV
Back when I was a teenager, I was told not to create accounts under my own name. I have many silly E-mail accounts.
E-mail can be a professional medium. You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope.
>bind their own identity to these niche communities
I was hiring recently, and one of the ways we advertised the position was that I tweeted the job description, and I arranged with the our social media team for them to retweet it for additional visibility. Candidates responding to that tweet generally contacted me via twitter DM - why wouldn't they?
It's not like I conducted interviews in that medium, but it's not really any different than the people who initiated contact via email.
Why would your teenager years be relevant here? Nowadays companies are online and jobs are online. There are an infinite amount of reasons why you would want to link your online identity to your personal one. You're not forced to and you should still be able to make anonymous and silly accounts, but this is not the point.
>You don't apply via Twitter DM, I hope.
If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications.
>just migrate
Mastodon handles migration terribly. You can either redirect or straight up move. In both cases your old profile is still in full display and your posts don't transfer.
>If a company has a Twitter, why wouldn't I? Many young businesses less revering of e-mail gladly use Twitter as a valid avenue for these kinds of communications.
I prefer the approach taken by nostr[1] and Scuttlebutt[2], where identity is a public key not tied to any particular server. However Mastodon is gaining a lot more traction and seems to be good enough in practice.
I get the gist of this sentiment. It took me a while to migrate from the generic mainstream instance (mastodon.social) to a more specific one (hachyderm.io) because a lot of instances were regional (e.g. some country in the EU) or too narrowly defined (e.g. tabletop games). But the about page of hachyderm.io included a lot of broader interests that let me feel like joining that instance wouldn't give off the impression of a particularly deep but narrow interest (that isn't accurate).
But who you are within Mastodon is not limited by the instance you created your account on! Especially since follows and posts are federated.
A gentle reminder that your follows, Home feed, hashtags and the Federated timeline are not (overly) limited or filtered by the instance your account lives on. Only the Local timeline is 100% a view specific to that instance.
No, it doesn't really encourage closed off instances.
I've been using for a while and, especially during recent times,my gut says the author's just wrong here; not my experience and also not likely to happen -- even if that's what some people think they want.
My belief is that the collective "want" for something like Twitter, plus the superior model for doing so, will drive Mastodon to be effectively the new Twitter.
Roughly, I think the human desire to "be up on everything" aka the desire for a "town square" will override this "divided up little spaces" thing.
Two things make me optimistic about that. The first is the personal experience of watching a strong push for "Content Warnings" and the subsequent mostly-dismantling of that idea (owing to the fact that it became apparent that the sort of thing some people wanted to be warned against was also the very thing you should be paying attention to, mostly in the realm of racism).
But the second and bigger feels like the killer here, if companies are smart enough to figure it out.
On Mastodon, companies and corporations can be their OWN primary source of truth. No Eli Lilly Situation. They're starting to catch on.
Can we please go back to forums? The author is right, social media is about "me me me", users accumulating points in r/funny and then using it as social proof in r/geopolitics. Topical bubbles are the best, especially because they present only one aspect of each user. Since people don't use their real-life network in twitter/mastodon, i even thing that model is not social.
Just spitballing here, but one solution is mandatory tagging, where you must pick at least one tag before posting. Additionally other users and mods on your Mastodon instance can vote to add tags as they see fit, and the mods may at their discretion discipline people who tag deceptively.
The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW. Don't have one of those? Your post won't be federated.
Then if you're on a Mastodon instance dedicated to (for example) Porsche cars, you would have custom tags available by default for models, engines, make years, and so on to enrich the metadata.
Mastodon already lets users subscribe to hashtags so much of the baseline functionality already exists, other than the control aspect.
>The protocol itself could be amended to include a set of very high-level tags. Say for example, politics, sports, TV, movies, gaming, celebrities, fashion, personal, and NSFW.
Or rather tags have groups under an hierarchy to which groups someone post. Something like comp.os.linux or comp.lang.python. Oh, wait...
The benefit of tagging over categorization is you can have multiples coupled together. So if you're posting about a Lego set for the new Wonder Woman 1993 flick, you could tag #LEGO, #SUPERHERO, and #MOVIE rather than posting under rec.toys.lego.
And this is how its supposed to be. Small communities working, or not working together.
I've been using Mastodon for years, part of a community of no more than 10,000 people (we have a cap for reasons I'm not going to get into) and it's fine.
I also got my own instance, like I have my own email.
Mastodon isn't Twitter or Facebook, it's not designed to be that way.
I'm split on this. On one hand I want to run an instance with freedom, and I want users to resolve conflicts amongst themselves, and using the mute button if push come to shove.
But on the other hand, if I allow that, other servers will de-federate from me.
So these last few months I've been put into a lot of hard moderating situations. Where for example an entire instance reports a user on my instance, saying it's spreading hate speech, or transphobia, but it's not. The user just happened to use an aggressive tone in a thread with a famous person, for example, or just piss off the wrong admin.
And now I have to make a decision on how to handle this user, who didn't break any of my server rules.
And I even ran into a straight up racist on my instance, but didn't suspend their account because while they were clearly a supporter of the right-wing party, that same right-wing party has a majority vote. So why should I suspend them for voicing their political affiliation? Again, not breaking any rules, not breaking any laws, just voicing opinions in line with the current right-wing majority party.
I just don't believe in sweeping people under the rug. In that case, of the right-wing person, they ended up getting muted by other instances, fortunately not de-federated.
But it feels like I'm always balancing on a knife's edge between free speech and a de-federated instance.
Basically, I feel myself becoming a "language-police", and that's not what I want.
Small instance here. One user (me) hade a few mostly technical posts about a bitcoin lightning network client they were developing on, and reposted some content along similar lines. From the perspective of software, among contributors and operators. We're now defederated by at least a few instances for "crypto grifters" or similar. We won't be bothered to investigate and follow up to see if/how it's propagated until one of our users raise an issue about it.
Much of the active fediverse have had quite particular culture with very narrow corridors around some things, of all varieties. Some of these groups (in lack of better word) demonize each other. Those who take up running open general instances for years with no financial incentive are sometimes also of a particular kind within that.
Some are also intentionally insular ("safe spaces" come to mind) and will mute or defederate anyone identified as not part of their in-group.
I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation.
If the fediverse does get traction over time and the demography widens, I think we'll have much fracturing, possibly pushing protocol changes and incompatible forks.
For now: Haters gonna hate, what can you do about it
"I've also seen instances blanket-blocking anything Pleroma, because "all the bad people come from Pleroma". I've even seen it called evil software because it affords more customization of filtering, rewriting, and federation."
And God help you if you use or let your users have the option of using the Soapbox Front End (FE) on top of Pleroma.
A problem right now is the conflation between instance and community.
The instance is really a technical concept, which allows for the federated hosting model. It hosts your Fediverse identity and while you can migrate, it's not seamless.
Most people don't want to belong to just one community, so while an instance gives you a default community, it should not be the only mechanism of community. I don't think there's a widely distributed community concept, but hopefully, one will evolve. Something akin to the feature set of Facebook groups.
This is very solvable, and I'm guessing that if Mastodon continues to gain in popularity, we'll see something emerge.
I think the key point being missed here is that mastodon isn't one website segregated into communities.
It's a bunch of small websites each with their own community.
Instead of one garbage Twitter replacement, we have thousands of individual Twitter-like websites each aimed at a particular community. There's one for any subset of interests you care to look for.
The magic of mastodon is that these websites can interact with each other. If you live on the LGBT programmer instance, you can follow and talk to people on the clam science facts server, or artists on the art server.
Then you also get to see all the accounts anyone on your server follows, and you discover new accounts and servers that way.
If you find a new server you like better, you can just pack up and move in a few clicks.
The model is closer to subreddits than it is to Twitter.
Mastodon is a fundamentally different thing, and people keep having panic attacks because they want to frame it as Twitter and it doesn't fit. It's different, and you need to adjust your perspective. Once you appreciate mastodon for what it is, it's a pretty neat platform.
1. Nobody wants to maintain a generalist instance, partly because it's harder to apply generalist moderation policies and partly because it attracts so many more users.
2. Running your own instance does solve (1), but Mastodon was not designed as a P2P network and likely can't function that way.
Running your own instance works, as long as everyone else isn't.
I run my own and while my local feed is dead (even though I am not the only one on it), "home" and "federated" are fairly lively after following a few people.
I think this completely wrong. The fact that anybody can create an instance for any purpose they want is a good thing. The rest of the fediverse can choose the degree they wish to interact with that instance. But the possibilities of what can exist on the fediverse is not constrained at all.
This feels like... an issue that the author has just imagined, to be honest. Sure, many instances have some sort of theme, but by no means all (the majority of users, I'd think, are on one of the generic ones), and in most cases there's no rule enforcing keeping to the theme.
Is there a single instance which forbids you from talking about a certain topic?
I really don't see the issue, even hyper specific instances let you talk about other things. Where is the actual problem? Why would it matter that your account is some specific instance?
There are plenty of instances which forbid you from talking about specific topics, and no shortage of ones which block any kind of interaction with other instances which refuse to forbid specific topics - meaning that if you use that instance, you cannot follow users on instances which do not restrict discussion in the correct way and they cannot follow you. Some of those topics have included information that other Mastodon users would have really wanted to know about for reasons of personal safety, such as the latest alias and position of online power of someone trailed by a decade or two of rape allegations across multiple communities.
I've seen plenty of instances where if you dare to be critical of Palestine they straight up ban you for being a fascist capitalist pig. You can be as polite as possible, but if one of the rules is "fascists not welcome" they can just accuse you of being a fascist and ban you regardless of your arguments.
I'm sure there are plenty of other instances that behave the same way according other areas of the political spectrum. This has just been my experience when I wanted to sign up 5 years ago, when most people using this platform were left leaning and tech savvy
If they don't want your opinions, forget it and join a like minded instance where they value your thoughts.
You seem to be disappointed with the left-wing ideology, not Mastodon itself. Leftist will not tolerate anything other than what they think is right, so it's expected that they will ban everyone who doesn't share their mindset.
> Leftist will not tolerate anything other than what they think is right, so it's expected that they will ban everyone who doesn't share their mindset.
Not all leftists are like this. Some of us actively enjoy and even prefer discussing our political opinions with those who disagree.
That said, I know the type of people you're referring to, and they tend to be insufferable to deal with.
Let's first appreciate the parent of your comment being down-voted for saying leftists don't take critique, confirming the point.
In my experience, the insufferable ones tend to dominate communities, making the entire place unappetizing. You can see this effect on Mastodon too. A tiny group makes all the posts, and they have 100% ideological consistency.
I think that's an effect much more important than arbitrary rules of an instance, because this happens before it. People aren't banned, they are discouraged from posting at all and become the silent majority.
If I post “Linux users won’t accept any criticism of Linux” and lots of Linux users downvote it for being hyperbolic nonsense, does this confirm the point?
It's one thing to discuss political opinions with other people. However, there is a fine line that the far-right, TERFs and SWERFs easily cross - and that is denying other people their right to a self-determined existence or an existence at all.
I explicitely said I used this as an example because it was my personal experience, but I'm sure this happens for every single politically charged Mastodon servers regardless of political leaning.
I'm not disappointed with any ideology and this had nothing to do with politics. Please don't charge my opinion with ulterior motives
You should be careful about such "I'm sure" statements. "Right wing" Fediverse is very tolerant in moderation, that which results in bans, the only big issue is how much, if any pornography to allow and that gets fierce arguments. The big issue users might run into is harassment, but there are fine grained controls that allow you to trivially ignore or block such people going forward.
Other issue which may not matter so much if you're "a fascist capitalist pig" is that your instance will likely be blocked by left wing Fediverse nodes. This can get silly, there are blocklists that often cite as cause nothing more than the software "right wing" nodes use, or in one case written by a particular developer. Too much of the Fediverse is that tribal.
For a concrete example, look at how TERF spinster.xyz federates with "right wing" nodes and is blocked by many left wing ones, including all the ones I could look up just now with a Google search.
I use scare quotes for right wing because many of these sites are politically neutral or thereabouts.
This feels like a mid-November take that feels extremely out of date in mid-December. That’s the problem right now. Things are moving so fast that quick reads don’t hold up to scrutiny after seeing how things actually play out.
There is no perfect solution for social network. It will never replace real conversations.
Anything that could be written comfortable behind the screen tends to be soon or later extreme and toxic. Real conversations are less extreme on both sides, because factor of danger from others is more real.
Also anything that has man in middle that decide what is bad or good to post or anything that can be voted also change organic flow of conversation and make it unnatural and eventually selfcensored.
This concludes me to abandon social networks completely. HN is only exception for now.
There's an entire paragraph about why generalist instances are bad, but no reflection about how each of those faults exists in a worse way in any centralized social network.
- generalist instances aren't bad, there's just too few of them
- if the whole point of the article is to illustrate how Mastodon might end up being centralized-light that's a tacit admission that it would not be a good thing
I'm surprised to not yet see mentions of DIDs in the article or comments. IMO ideally users should be able to control and move parts of their identity/persona/account independent of the server they are on.
I think it's possible to come up with a great solution, but there's a lot of unexplored territory.
this doesn’t sound terribly likely to me, as an outcome.
i am seeing a whole lot of criticisms of mastodon that, to me, sound like “social networking sites have always been bad, therefore mastodon must also be bad.” surely we can muster a little more optimism than that.
A few generalist instances dominating the fediverse and dictating its policy doesn't sound likely? It's slowly happening right now and will only make Mastodon a slightly less centralized Facebook.
Most people don't want to link their online persona to instances with stupid names and very strange rules. So they all flock to the more generalist ones which are few and far between and have an established user base and reputation. Since generalist instances are not "cool" to administer, only a few dedicated people maintain them and they will keep being few and grow larger and larger
I saw a guy on Twitter expressing how he created an instance a while ago and didn't notice anything during the recent Mastodon influx. Not a single user joined his instance.
He figured this is due to not being listed properly on some of the onboarding pages. He had tried to get on it, but failed. He then continued to collect some stats on all instances (which is difficult) and came to the conclusion that 90% of Mastodon instances have < 10 users, and most are closed/private.
If true, then yes...users will flock to a small group of large instances. Which makes sense, you want to go to where the most people are, it's the entire point of a social network.
If exponential growth continues (which I doubt), it will lead to existential problems. In costs, moderation, compliance, etc.
Looks like compliance might actually solve this ? We already have laws that kick in over a certain amount of users. Seems to be a pretty big incentive for instances to limit the number of users to accept, which would result in a lot of mid-sized instances, rather than your usual power law distribution ?
i happened to find a “generalist” mastodon instance without really trying. i just read a few twitter ex-pats for awhile, to get the lay of the land, and picked one. i sent an email to the administrator, offering to donate some money, because i couldn’t find a donation link. if this one doesn’t work out, i’ll pick a different one. or run one myself!
again: your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked, therefore mastodon also can’t work.” i choose to believe that there is something beyond the status quo.
I didn't say generalist instances are difficult to find, on the contrary they are the most popular. What I'm saying is that there's too few of them.
> your criticism sounds to me like “social media has never worked"
There is an entire paragraph where I explain exactly what functionality could be added to Mastodon to at least make it possible to be better. In its current state I believe it's bound to develop this behavior with no way to fix it
i guess we will have to agree to disagree. i think it’s way to early to assume that. also, you titled your post “mastodon is not a good social network.” that is the very definition of pessimism, versus optimism.
I could have titled it "Mastodon is a terrible social network" but I didn't because it's not a lost cause. I provided an argument and a modest suggestion. I don't think I can do much more in my positiom.
i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites.
in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.
I have my own subjective opinions about social media, as does OP. OP suggested I inject positivity into mine, so I am curious to see what their subjective opinions are in an effort to perhaps shift my perspective.
Users on different instances can follow each other and see each others posts, but any given account is on a specific instance and must follow that instance's rules.
Couldn't mastodon just provide an option to logging in via OpenID? Then you would have a single authentication for multiple mastodon instances with different topics.
Depends on whether you consider fora and social media be the same thing and, even if not, whether they have to function in a similar way. Author notes that a social network has "to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine" and the thesis is Mastodon is not a good social network due to its model resulting in focused instances.
people (still) largely miss the dramatic ways in which "mastodon" is reshaping social networking - at least in principle
* its not a single platform but a constellation of federating servers based on different stacks and technologies. the specific mastodon implementation of activitypub is neither built-in nor required to participate in the fediverse. enabling different technologists/stacks to compete in a common arena will have an accelerating effect in how social networking evolves
* its not closed source: people/communities having other ideas about "the best social network" are free to fork, implement and experiment with said ideas. this augments the previous point and will further enable exploring the space of possibilities
* its not a single instance: within the confines of a specific design / implementation one can still tweak both hard configurations and soft rules to achieve specific community aims
* maybe most importantly: it enables potentially alternative business models beyond the winner-takes-all surveillance capitalism model that has come to destroy social networking (and much else as well). think of public funds, non-profit, more commercial interest-based instances etc
granted, its all still largely in the realm of potentialities and one could imagine all sorts of patches that will be required as weaknesses reveal through adoption and use, but many negative reactions at this point seem just intellectual laziness (or something worse).
in a sense it is a benign coincidence that the most mature expression of the emerging fediverse has been mastodon (and the mastodon.social instance), which is a twitter lookalike. combined with the convulsions of the bird site this creates the perfect conditions for people to get exposed to alternate realities and breaking the TINA spell. This is particularly true for all sorts of institutions, luminaries etc active on twitter that have provided the platform with a legitimacy it does not really deserve
Hasn't bothered me with email. Though, regardless, i'm not sure what the fuss is about. Is Mastodon perfect? Of course not. I just don't want to be on Twitter. What do you suggest?
>I am of the opinion that, to give the users the most freedom to let their personality shine, the social network itslef should be as boring and generic as possible.
This sounds like the Thatcherism of social networks. "There's no such thing as a community, only individual posters". The sort of desolate environment that you get as a result of this is exactly what people are increasingly shunning.
It's why people move to private chat groups, subreddits, niche twitter subcultures with memes that nobody even understands from the outside (intentionally so). This very site is strongly opinionated as well. The logical endpoint of generic platforms is the Youtube comment section.
If a social network is supposed to be social it has to be about something. There needs to be something that ties the people in it together. Any video game speedrunning community, music subculture, whatever have you is more interesting than generic sites. Even if you have to move between groups sometimes, that cost is well worth it. The real world doesn't work like this either. Does anyone ever go to the "generic people meetup, where we do generic things"? Everyone is part of social networks, plural.
So you extrapolated a single quote from the post when the rest of the article describes exactly how to have highly personalized communities without the burden of binding your personal profile to them?
no, the article itself at the end actually agrees that the proposed solution of many small, generalist instances is a pipedream:
"I personally don't think this will ever be possible, it can only serve as some nice little fantasy to keep me dreaming for better online spaces."
This can never work because generic instances have absolutely nothing that prevents them from growing. After all if a space has no strong, unique characteristics, there's nothing that stops anyone from coming in. This is the ultimate fate of every unopinionated internet community, it "Eternal September"'s itself.
The physical decentralization of Mastodon instances and the resulting tendency towards having unique instances with strict rules is the only thing stopping those instances from growing into a giant blob.
I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.