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It seems there's a lot of people working on this area, just looking at this thread. I did something similar to this in 2013 and I got to around 20k users: https
by rolleiflex 9y ago
It seems there's a lot of people working on this area, just looking at this thread. I did something similar to this in 2013 and I got to around 20k users: https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be-a-reddit-for-the-privacy-conscious https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-b...
Two things that need to be solved:
a) The structure of moderation. No moderation does not work. Been there, done that, it gets very ugly very fast. But what can be done is to make moderation more visible, and allow people to choose who they want to be moderated by.
b) Scaling. 1-100 users are fun, 100-1000 are exciting, 1000-10000 are a little nerve racking, and after 15k users, you notice the reality of how nodes and networks behave has diverged from your 'reasonable' assumptions. Around 20000 or so, I stopped maintaining it. Scaling distributed networks is much different than scaling regular networks where you can add more hardware and servers and sharding, it requires new behaviours from each node as the system grows. The software that works at the level of a million users in a decentralised system will be much different than the one that works with a billion users.
Funny enough, I've recently quit my day job and I'm focusing on the second version of it, so the memories from 2013 are pretty fresh.
- wjnc 9y agoRobert Nozicks' "Anarchy, State and Utopia" (1974) describes how a system of multiple concurring "governments" could work. Quite a stretch from social networks but first thing that came to my mind when reading your comment. Moderation is a form of social network government, right? One could subscribe to a government / moderation scheme and the governments form meta-governments to decide which content from competing governments are fit for their users. Moderation in two (or N) levels.
- rolleiflex 9y agoInteresting! I'm actually doing something pretty close to what he is proposing with v2. Meta-'governments' layered on top of each other.
- tscs37 9y agoThat's somewhat what federation solves. You pick out an instance which represents a particular way of moderating. You can still listen in on (most) of the other network. If you don't like the moderation/government of your instance, you pick another.
- gregknicholson 9y agoI like this model, but there's still a bit of unwelcome friction there, at least in Mastodon and Matrix: your identity is tied to your home server. That could be solved by a robust way of confirming that 2 identities are the same person: so all traffic for user@example.horse is also directed to user@example.golf and vice-versa. Coming at the same sort of thing from a distributed approach (I'm thinking of Scuttlebutt): you could make it possible to subscribe to another person's followers and blocklist, delegating your moderation to someone else. I suppose there would soon be well-known and popular options to delegate to, much like popular ad-blocking lists; but still, each person can choose which ones to use.
- tscs37 9y agoIIRC people on mastodon are working on making an identity independent of the home server so you can migrate elsewhere. I don't think subscribing to moderation is particularly useful, I considered such an approach at some point but the approach fragments the network too much (IMO)
- gregknicholson 9y agoScuttlebutt isn't designed to be a single network, so at least there fragmentation is not a problem. See [Against Consensus](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/principles.html https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/principles.html).
- jsilence 9y agoRed Matrix, a descendant of friendica, not to be confused with matrix, solves this with portable profiles. The account is tied to an instance, but your profile is liberated: https://redmatrix.info/help/accounts_profiles_channels_basics https://redmatrix.info/help/accounts_profiles_channels_basic...