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Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin limits

Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin limits who you can federate with, and if the policy changes, it requires you to rebuild from scratch if you want to move. That's what's keeping platforms like Twitter on top even though many of its prolific users now sound more like an abused spouse than anything else. I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games.

ch4s3 9y ago
Because no one everyone received 100s of death threats or was doxed on Twitter? Harassment is ver real and hard to miss in the platform.
- mcny 9y ago
  What constitutes a death threat? What should we do with all those twelve year old kids playing call of duty and taking on chat?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    I’d advocate a spanking... ...for their parents.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    In the US, in most states, it is illegal to " knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person."[1] California Penal Code 422 PC California criminal threats. ("Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat..." [2] California law even goes on to say that even absent intent, it is a crime. Which makes sense, because otherwise anyone making such a threat could argue that they were "joking", which happens to be a favorite defense of internet troll.s [1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ [2]https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html
    - Spivak 9y ago
      Right, now write an algorithm that takes 140 characters of input and correctly identifies whether or not the intent of the author is to legitimately commit an act of violence. Right now the policy is heading toward cheating by equating anything that looks like a threat with a threat. This is not writing laws with human beings in mind. Removing the requirement for intent is literally banning certain types of speech for the sole purpose of allowing for algorithmic/lazy enforcement. And because almost all of the time it's going to be a false positive it's going to selectively enforced against certain subsets of the population or used to hang someone for a different crime that didn't stick. I don't buy the troll argument. If the message is coming from a troll it is almost by definition not a real threat and just a person trying to elicit a reaction or blowing off steam. I'm all for going after people that make legitimate death threats over the Internet but not this way.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Why is "I'm going to kill s73ver_" not ok, but "I hope someone comes over and kills s73ver_" just fine? I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact.
        mcny 9y ago
        > Why is "I'm going to kill s73ver_" not ok, but "I hope someone comes over and kills s73ver_" just fine? > I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact. I think both are OK. Context matters. It seems you guys would send someone to prison for life for something like https://i.imgur.com/w8H43aQ.png https://i.imgur.com/w8H43aQ.png No, we do not live in a world of absolutes. Remember, if it is a criminal matter, the "victim" cannot choose to not press charges. I do not trust our legal system and neither should you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    You say that like nothing ever comes of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting
- jochung 9y ago
  You might want to read what I actually said instead. I know abuse happens. In fact, it happens on all sides, but gets downplayed if it happens to politically unpopular targets. Even some of the people who've profiled themselves as anti abuse specialists are more than happy to direct their own followers to targets, share their phone numbers, address, and so on. Even without that hypocrisy, the line between legitimate use and harassment is fuzzy. Just recently for instance, there was that BuzzFeed article about Milo Yiannopoulos, and you could see the morality police mobbing and hounding anyone who was remotely in contact with the guy as being evil nazis. The same people who cry for Twitter to stop abuse. It's only bad when the out group does it, when the in group does it you're just sharing important information and leveraging the network effects of digital media. Guilty until proven super guilty. There was also the famous case of Steph Guthrie and Gregory Allen Elliot in Canada where simply denouncing a feminist witch hunt was enough to get the guy a long and arduous harassment case he eventually won, where his accuser claimed with a serious face he didn't have the right to defend himself against her. And he wasn't even the guy she was originally after. Closer to home there was recently drama in the node community where, after failing to vote out a community leader for having shared the wrong opinion on codes of conduct, the persecutors themselves were found to be harassing people and advocating violence shamelessly... Which suddenly was not grounds for a reprimand. To my knowledge, nobody is receiving hundreds of credible death threats. Rather, offhand comments like "I hope you die" or offensive memes are deliberately being spun into a moral panic because it's useful as tribal ammo. When the network effects and witch hunts go the other way, it's waved away. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and not everything is what it seems. But I know I'm not going to get an objective assessment from the people who think it's ok to fire others for disagreement, especially not when they don't just summon social media followers, but instead recruit a cabal of journalists with much larger platforms to conduct their smears. PS: Milo is an edgelord try hard, I don't like him. But all he is is the Shanley Kane of the right, with more talent.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    > The same people who cry for Twitter to stop abuse. While I think there is some overlap, I don't see that as being the whole story here. I've actually seen some of the threatening and terrifying things some friends and acquaintances have received. This has at times included specific threats and photos of where the target lives. I don't see people who complain about abuse posting photo's of Milo supporters homes and encouraging people to go there and hurt them.
- dang 9y ago
  This breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." It takes time and self-discipline to follow that rule, but discussion is much better when we do and degenerates badly when we don't. HN's goal is to be interesting. Degeneration is always the same, so isn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    I disagree with your assessment. I was responding to the following portion of the parent comment "I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games." I think I correctly inferred that the original post was dismissing very real harassment. I posted a somewhat loose counterpoint noting that many people claiming abuse are in fact the subject of death threats, which are not a "confus(ing) being corrected with persecution". Lower in the discussion I took the time to point out California penal code, where twitter is physically located, defines death threats, regardless of intent as a crime. THis builds my point further, and I believe that the original post was not in good faith, or was not well thought out.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    I think I was too indirect earlier. Your charge is that I failed to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says". But the argument I responded to was literally: >I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games. Which boils down to the poster accusing people who claim they are being abused of doing it for social status, which is in essence a criticism of the weakest form of their argument. So you seem to be applying this guideline pretty inconsistently. Are you implicitly supporting the previous claim by calling out my rebuttal and not the post I was replying to? It certainly looks that way Dang.
adbachman 9y ago
When a platform regularly allows individuals to receive thousands of personalized death threats, notifications and all, it’s fair for me to be "concerned about abuse" even though it doesn’t affect me. That’s not a fake news or partisan politics problem, it’s a human empathy problem.
- ImSkeptical 9y ago
  What's the solution to the hundreds of death threats problem though? My understanding is the death threats come from twitter eggs, or replaceable accounts where it doesn't matter so much if you ban them, and it would require a lot of work from the moderators to do the banning, and the recipient would still get the death threats in the first place.
  - daveFNbuck 9y ago
    Twitter is a multi-billion-dollar company that employs world-class data scientists and engineers. Do you really think they can't automate detecting death threats from throwaway accounts?
    - lelandbatey 9y ago
      One example of a mitigation for this kind of behavior might be to allow users to ignore messages for accounts younger than X, where X is a length of time chosen by the recipient. This is only a mitigation, and there are plenty of ways one could get around this kind of limit. However, some action would be appreciated.
      - erikpukinskis 9y ago
        Then you get a death threat from an account someone set a few months ago to save for the moment they wanted to send a death threat.
    - konschubert 9y ago
      I think if you built a piece of software that was able to reliably detect death threats, you could sell it not only to twitter. And for good money.
untog 9y ago
> People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierce Personally, I don't consider a Jewish person being spammed with images telling them to get in an oven "curated bubble piercing". Same with lynching threats against black people and rape threats against women. All of these things happen on Twitter daily. And very often, when these posts are reported, Twitter comes back and says "we found no problem". You might not experience this kind of abuse, that does not mean it does not exist.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thevtm 9y ago
  I completely agree that you should have the choice to opt out of this toxic "content". But I believe the issue that RC is talking about is that the control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual in Mastodon. It allows something like GMail admins blocking their users to send/receive messages from HotMail, and then your only solution would be to create a second account in some other provider that doesn't block HotMail.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    >control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual Control is in the hands of an admin, but not any particular admin, and that admin might be you.
  - untog 9y ago
    I think that just speaks to the way Mastodon encourages people to form smaller communities. The idea is that you'd trust your admins. A more apt comparison than Gmail/Hotmail would be if one of the e-mail providers was whitesupremacy.net. Or, we-allow-white-supremacy.net. The admin of my we-dont-like-white-supremacy.net e-mail provider might choose to block it, based on the content it sends out. Anyone on that provider is welcome to choose another one if they wish to e-mail me. But if it is important enough to them to stay where they are, then they will remain blocked. Long story short, if you don't trust the admin, don't sign up for the Mastodon instance. I agree that there needs to be some work on porting accounts from one instance to another seamlessly, though.
paulgb 9y ago
How hard would it be to start a one-user instance so that I control my identity and then using federation to communicate with other users? The willingness of other admins to federate with me would be the limiting factor, right?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Federation is opt-out. New instances are automatically federated with, it's only abusive ones that are culled.
- nolanl 9y ago
  Mastodon has a single-user instance mode: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c445573c50e4f21d690172bc0/.env.production.sample#L47-L48 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c4... Most instances would federate with you immediately since they're on a blacklist model, but some instances (such as awoo.space) operate on a whitelist, meaning they'd have to vet you first.
  - cdubzzz 9y ago
    I’m sure I can dig this up at some point, but just in case anyone knows off hand - can a single user instance run well enough on a small (1 cpu, 512mb ram) VPS running a few other lightweight services?
    - pfg 9y ago
      One CPU would be fine with just one user, but that's not enough RAM. I would consider 2GB the bare minimum, with one app server instance and one background worker process (sidekiq) running.
      - librexpr 9y ago
        hugogameiro seemed to say otherwise a month ago[0]. According to his post, it takes <1GB of RAM. Have things changed since then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203
captainmuon 9y ago
You are free to join a more "open" or a more "safe" server (whatever those words mean), depending on your tastes. I personally joined a fairly laissez faire server as far as I can see. Either the very worst is filtered, or people are decent over there, but I haven't seen anything that disturbed me - but also haven't witnesses "censorship". Of course, everybodies tastes are different when it comes to what they want to see or not. And you are not really siloed in - it helps if people with common interests are on the same instance, to find people in the beginning, but due to federation you can connect to others easily.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  I think the thing is, if the admin of your instance de-federates with another instance, you don't have much in the way of options if you want to follow someone on that instance. Or, if, due to bad luck, you originally sign up with an instance that becomes the 8chan of instances, you don't really have much in the way of options if you don't want to be there. You can't take your account elsewhere. You're pretty much limited to creating a new account on a new instance, and then you have to communicate to all your followers that you've moved.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    >>I think the thing is, if the admin of your instance de-federates with another instance, you don't have much in the way of options if you want to follow someone on that instance. This doesn't happen often in practice, especially once they added a way for users to block instances on an individual level. Early on, some instances just weren't a good mesh for a lot of the early users, and their aggressive, boisterous ways tended to push out and silence those early users. Blocking was the only way to keep the community from being overrun, but someone who enjoyed being screamed at by strangers didn't have a say in it without moving to another instance. Now that's not the case. >> You can't take your account elsewhere. You're pretty much limited to creating a new account on a new instance, and then you have to communicate to all your followers that you've moved. You can export a list of people you follow and import it on the new one. Most people will refollow you. People move to new instances all the time and don't seem to have trouble recovering their following.
sp332 9y ago
It's a lot easier to export your posts from one instance and import them to another. Your friends will have to update their contact information for you but then everything works like it did before. Contrast to Twitter where you can export your data and then... you're stuck because there is no "other instance" of Twitter.
- willvarfar 9y ago
  Is there an import tool for Twitter to masterdon?
  - sp332 9y ago
    Even if you do, people on Twitter won't be able to interact with you. But Diaspora, Appleseed, Mastodon etc users can at least send and receive status updates using OStatus federation.
s73ver_ 9y ago
"I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though." It's not. If you're not a frequent target, however, it can be difficult to empathize with those who are. "People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games." Being constantly confronted with racial slurs is just "information they don't like"? Receiving death and rape threats is just "social status games"?
- olleromam91 9y ago
  Admins having the power to ban user based on any offense, no matter how abusive or unethical they are, is not a characteristic of an open/decentralized social network. Are admins elected? Is there a democratic process where trials can happen based on users actions?
mikegerwitz 9y ago
Host your own instance. I host my own GNU Social instance (which federates with Mastodon) and it is incredibly liberating. It's a social networking site that I am in complete control over and feel safe visiting. There's also nobody tracking what I'm looking at or when I'm even online. Nobody will know whether or not I've read a particular post. Nobody can censor anything I say (not that I say anything that controversial), except maybe my server host (OVH), in which case I take all my data with me and move somewhere else. I'm not bound by any TOS. I write my own privacy policy (not literally---I don't have to worry about one). I own all of the data, and can do with it whatever I please. And it's free/libre software, so I can do with it as I please. (While it's free on other instances as well, as is Mastodon, you can't modify it; it's a SaaS issue).
- eridius 9y ago
  I hosted my own Mastodon instance for a short time after it got popular, but there was a pretty big drawback. Each Mastodon instance is basically a community, where you can see other people talking and can even see a feed of the public toots from anywhere that other people on the instance have subscribed to. But when you host your own, there's no community, which makes it really hard to find new people to follow. So I basically stopped interacting with Mastodon after a week, because my feed was bare and I didn't have any good way of finding people.
  - librexpr 9y ago
    That sucks. Mastodon tries to reduce the empty home page problem by automatically following the admin when you create an account, and by having a #followfriday hashtag where people post recommendations of who to follow, but that doesn't really help if you're hosting your own instance. My recommendation would be to follow the admins of some of the more popular instances. You can find the admin on the about/more[0] page of their instance. They're usually interesting people, and can act as a gateway to finding more people when they reply to others or boost other people's posts. @Gargron[1] from mastodon.social is always a good choice, as the creator of Mastodon and just being a pretty great person. @Curator[2] from mastodon.art is great if you like art, they boost a bunch of artist's posts. Other than those two admin recommendations, you might want to check out the admins of the instances listed at the bottom of the medium article. [0] https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more [1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron [2] https://mastodon.art/@Curator https://mastodon.art/@Curator
bababooey 9y ago
For this reason, I'd like to see the secure-scuttlebutt protocol catch on. Right now, the patchwork app[1] is really fun to play with, but still a toy, in my mind. [1] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork

ch4s3 9y ago

Because no one everyone received 100s of death threats or was doxed on Twitter? Harassment is ver real and hard to miss in the platform.

mcny 9y ago
What constitutes a death threat? What should we do with all those twelve year old kids playing call of duty and taking on chat?
- falcolas 9y ago
  I’d advocate a spanking... ...for their parents.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  In the US, in most states, it is illegal to " knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person."[1] California Penal Code 422 PC California criminal threats. ("Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement, made verbally, in writing, or by means of an electronic communication device, is to be taken as a threat..." [2] California law even goes on to say that even absent intent, it is a crime. Which makes sense, because otherwise anyone making such a threat could argue that they were "joking", which happens to be a favorite defense of internet troll.s [1]https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/death-threat/ [2]https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html https://www.shouselaw.com/criminal_threats.html
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Right, now write an algorithm that takes 140 characters of input and correctly identifies whether or not the intent of the author is to legitimately commit an act of violence. Right now the policy is heading toward cheating by equating anything that looks like a threat with a threat. This is not writing laws with human beings in mind. Removing the requirement for intent is literally banning certain types of speech for the sole purpose of allowing for algorithmic/lazy enforcement. And because almost all of the time it's going to be a false positive it's going to selectively enforced against certain subsets of the population or used to hang someone for a different crime that didn't stick. I don't buy the troll argument. If the message is coming from a troll it is almost by definition not a real threat and just a person trying to elicit a reaction or blowing off steam. I'm all for going after people that make legitimate death threats over the Internet but not this way.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Why is "I'm going to kill s73ver_" not ok, but "I hope someone comes over and kills s73ver_" just fine? I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact.
      - mcny 9y ago
        > Why is "I'm going to kill s73ver_" not ok, but "I hope someone comes over and kills s73ver_" just fine? > I think your definition is far too narrow, and makes distinctions without a difference. I don't believe it matters at all if the person legitimately intends to commit violence against me. It's going to have the same impact. I think both are OK. Context matters. It seems you guys would send someone to prison for life for something like https://i.imgur.com/w8H43aQ.png https://i.imgur.com/w8H43aQ.png No, we do not live in a world of absolutes. Remember, if it is a criminal matter, the "victim" cannot choose to not press charges. I do not trust our legal system and neither should you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  You say that like nothing ever comes of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting
jochung 9y ago
You might want to read what I actually said instead. I know abuse happens. In fact, it happens on all sides, but gets downplayed if it happens to politically unpopular targets. Even some of the people who've profiled themselves as anti abuse specialists are more than happy to direct their own followers to targets, share their phone numbers, address, and so on. Even without that hypocrisy, the line between legitimate use and harassment is fuzzy. Just recently for instance, there was that BuzzFeed article about Milo Yiannopoulos, and you could see the morality police mobbing and hounding anyone who was remotely in contact with the guy as being evil nazis. The same people who cry for Twitter to stop abuse. It's only bad when the out group does it, when the in group does it you're just sharing important information and leveraging the network effects of digital media. Guilty until proven super guilty. There was also the famous case of Steph Guthrie and Gregory Allen Elliot in Canada where simply denouncing a feminist witch hunt was enough to get the guy a long and arduous harassment case he eventually won, where his accuser claimed with a serious face he didn't have the right to defend himself against her. And he wasn't even the guy she was originally after. Closer to home there was recently drama in the node community where, after failing to vote out a community leader for having shared the wrong opinion on codes of conduct, the persecutors themselves were found to be harassing people and advocating violence shamelessly... Which suddenly was not grounds for a reprimand. To my knowledge, nobody is receiving hundreds of credible death threats. Rather, offhand comments like "I hope you die" or offensive memes are deliberately being spun into a moral panic because it's useful as tribal ammo. When the network effects and witch hunts go the other way, it's waved away. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and not everything is what it seems. But I know I'm not going to get an objective assessment from the people who think it's ok to fire others for disagreement, especially not when they don't just summon social media followers, but instead recruit a cabal of journalists with much larger platforms to conduct their smears. PS: Milo is an edgelord try hard, I don't like him. But all he is is the Shanley Kane of the right, with more talent.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  > The same people who cry for Twitter to stop abuse. While I think there is some overlap, I don't see that as being the whole story here. I've actually seen some of the threatening and terrifying things some friends and acquaintances have received. This has at times included specific threats and photos of where the target lives. I don't see people who complain about abuse posting photo's of Milo supporters homes and encouraging people to go there and hurt them.
dang 9y ago
This breaks the HN guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." It takes time and self-discipline to follow that rule, but discussion is much better when we do and degenerates badly when we don't. HN's goal is to be interesting. Degeneration is always the same, so isn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I disagree with your assessment. I was responding to the following portion of the parent comment "I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games." I think I correctly inferred that the original post was dismissing very real harassment. I posted a somewhat loose counterpoint noting that many people claiming abuse are in fact the subject of death threats, which are not a "confus(ing) being corrected with persecution". Lower in the discussion I took the time to point out California penal code, where twitter is physically located, defines death threats, regardless of intent as a crime. THis builds my point further, and I believe that the original post was not in good faith, or was not well thought out.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  I think I was too indirect earlier. Your charge is that I failed to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says". But the argument I responded to was literally: >I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games. Which boils down to the poster accusing people who claim they are being abused of doing it for social status, which is in essence a criticism of the weakest form of their argument. So you seem to be applying this guideline pretty inconsistently. Are you implicitly supporting the previous claim by calling out my rebuttal and not the post I was replying to? It certainly looks that way Dang.

adbachman 9y ago

When a platform regularly allows individuals to receive thousands of personalized death threats, notifications and all, it’s fair for me to be "concerned about abuse" even though it doesn’t affect me. That’s not a fake news or partisan politics problem, it’s a human empathy problem.

ImSkeptical 9y ago
What's the solution to the hundreds of death threats problem though? My understanding is the death threats come from twitter eggs, or replaceable accounts where it doesn't matter so much if you ban them, and it would require a lot of work from the moderators to do the banning, and the recipient would still get the death threats in the first place.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  Twitter is a multi-billion-dollar company that employs world-class data scientists and engineers. Do you really think they can't automate detecting death threats from throwaway accounts?
  - lelandbatey 9y ago
    One example of a mitigation for this kind of behavior might be to allow users to ignore messages for accounts younger than X, where X is a length of time chosen by the recipient. This is only a mitigation, and there are plenty of ways one could get around this kind of limit. However, some action would be appreciated.
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      Then you get a death threat from an account someone set a few months ago to save for the moment they wanted to send a death threat.
  - konschubert 9y ago
    I think if you built a piece of software that was able to reliably detect death threats, you could sell it not only to twitter. And for good money.

untog 9y ago

> People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierce Personally, I don't consider a Jewish person being spammed with images telling them to get in an oven "curated bubble piercing". Same with lynching threats against black people and rape threats against women. All of these things happen on Twitter daily. And very often, when these posts are reported, Twitter comes back and says "we found no problem". You might not experience this kind of abuse, that does not mean it does not exist.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thevtm 9y ago
I completely agree that you should have the choice to opt out of this toxic "content". But I believe the issue that RC is talking about is that the control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual in Mastodon. It allows something like GMail admins blocking their users to send/receive messages from HotMail, and then your only solution would be to create a second account in some other provider that doesn't block HotMail.
- glenstein 9y ago
  >control is in the hands of the admins instead of the individual Control is in the hands of an admin, but not any particular admin, and that admin might be you.
- untog 9y ago
  I think that just speaks to the way Mastodon encourages people to form smaller communities. The idea is that you'd trust your admins. A more apt comparison than Gmail/Hotmail would be if one of the e-mail providers was whitesupremacy.net. Or, we-allow-white-supremacy.net. The admin of my we-dont-like-white-supremacy.net e-mail provider might choose to block it, based on the content it sends out. Anyone on that provider is welcome to choose another one if they wish to e-mail me. But if it is important enough to them to stay where they are, then they will remain blocked. Long story short, if you don't trust the admin, don't sign up for the Mastodon instance. I agree that there needs to be some work on porting accounts from one instance to another seamlessly, though.

paulgb 9y ago

How hard would it be to start a one-user instance so that I control my identity and then using federation to communicate with other users? The willingness of other admins to federate with me would be the limiting factor, right?

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Federation is opt-out. New instances are automatically federated with, it's only abusive ones that are culled.
nolanl 9y ago
Mastodon has a single-user instance mode: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c445573c50e4f21d690172bc0/.env.production.sample#L47-L48 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c4... Most instances would federate with you immediately since they're on a blacklist model, but some instances (such as awoo.space) operate on a whitelist, meaning they'd have to vet you first.
- cdubzzz 9y ago
  I’m sure I can dig this up at some point, but just in case anyone knows off hand - can a single user instance run well enough on a small (1 cpu, 512mb ram) VPS running a few other lightweight services?
  - pfg 9y ago
    One CPU would be fine with just one user, but that's not enough RAM. I would consider 2GB the bare minimum, with one app server instance and one background worker process (sidekiq) running.
    - librexpr 9y ago
      hugogameiro seemed to say otherwise a month ago[0]. According to his post, it takes <1GB of RAM. Have things changed since then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203

captainmuon 9y ago

You are free to join a more "open" or a more "safe" server (whatever those words mean), depending on your tastes. I personally joined a fairly laissez faire server as far as I can see. Either the very worst is filtered, or people are decent over there, but I haven't seen anything that disturbed me - but also haven't witnesses "censorship". Of course, everybodies tastes are different when it comes to what they want to see or not. And you are not really siloed in - it helps if people with common interests are on the same instance, to find people in the beginning, but due to federation you can connect to others easily.

s73ver_ 9y ago
I think the thing is, if the admin of your instance de-federates with another instance, you don't have much in the way of options if you want to follow someone on that instance. Or, if, due to bad luck, you originally sign up with an instance that becomes the 8chan of instances, you don't really have much in the way of options if you don't want to be there. You can't take your account elsewhere. You're pretty much limited to creating a new account on a new instance, and then you have to communicate to all your followers that you've moved.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  >>I think the thing is, if the admin of your instance de-federates with another instance, you don't have much in the way of options if you want to follow someone on that instance. This doesn't happen often in practice, especially once they added a way for users to block instances on an individual level. Early on, some instances just weren't a good mesh for a lot of the early users, and their aggressive, boisterous ways tended to push out and silence those early users. Blocking was the only way to keep the community from being overrun, but someone who enjoyed being screamed at by strangers didn't have a say in it without moving to another instance. Now that's not the case. >> You can't take your account elsewhere. You're pretty much limited to creating a new account on a new instance, and then you have to communicate to all your followers that you've moved. You can export a list of people you follow and import it on the new one. Most people will refollow you. People move to new instances all the time and don't seem to have trouble recovering their following.

sp332 9y ago

It's a lot easier to export your posts from one instance and import them to another. Your friends will have to update their contact information for you but then everything works like it did before. Contrast to Twitter where you can export your data and then... you're stuck because there is no "other instance" of Twitter.

willvarfar 9y ago
Is there an import tool for Twitter to masterdon?
- sp332 9y ago
  Even if you do, people on Twitter won't be able to interact with you. But Diaspora, Appleseed, Mastodon etc users can at least send and receive status updates using OStatus federation.

s73ver_ 9y ago

"I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though." It's not. If you're not a frequent target, however, it can be difficult to empathize with those who are. "People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games." Being constantly confronted with racial slurs is just "information they don't like"? Receiving death and rape threats is just "social status games"?

olleromam91 9y ago
Admins having the power to ban user based on any offense, no matter how abusive or unethical they are, is not a characteristic of an open/decentralized social network. Are admins elected? Is there a democratic process where trials can happen based on users actions?

mikegerwitz 9y ago

Host your own instance. I host my own GNU Social instance (which federates with Mastodon) and it is incredibly liberating. It's a social networking site that I am in complete control over and feel safe visiting. There's also nobody tracking what I'm looking at or when I'm even online. Nobody will know whether or not I've read a particular post. Nobody can censor anything I say (not that I say anything that controversial), except maybe my server host (OVH), in which case I take all my data with me and move somewhere else. I'm not bound by any TOS. I write my own privacy policy (not literally---I don't have to worry about one). I own all of the data, and can do with it whatever I please. And it's free/libre software, so I can do with it as I please. (While it's free on other instances as well, as is Mastodon, you can't modify it; it's a SaaS issue).

eridius 9y ago
I hosted my own Mastodon instance for a short time after it got popular, but there was a pretty big drawback. Each Mastodon instance is basically a community, where you can see other people talking and can even see a feed of the public toots from anywhere that other people on the instance have subscribed to. But when you host your own, there's no community, which makes it really hard to find new people to follow. So I basically stopped interacting with Mastodon after a week, because my feed was bare and I didn't have any good way of finding people.
- librexpr 9y ago
  That sucks. Mastodon tries to reduce the empty home page problem by automatically following the admin when you create an account, and by having a #followfriday hashtag where people post recommendations of who to follow, but that doesn't really help if you're hosting your own instance. My recommendation would be to follow the admins of some of the more popular instances. You can find the admin on the about/more[0] page of their instance. They're usually interesting people, and can act as a gateway to finding more people when they reply to others or boost other people's posts. @Gargron[1] from mastodon.social is always a good choice, as the creator of Mastodon and just being a pretty great person. @Curator[2] from mastodon.art is great if you like art, they boost a bunch of artist's posts. Other than those two admin recommendations, you might want to check out the admins of the instances listed at the bottom of the medium article. [0] https://mastodon.social/about/more https://mastodon.social/about/more [1] https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron [2] https://mastodon.art/@Curator https://mastodon.art/@Curator

bababooey 9y ago

For this reason, I'd like to see the secure-scuttlebutt protocol catch on. Right now, the patchwork app[1] is really fun to play with, but still a toy, in my mind. [1] https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork