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Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the i

Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding all non-conforming traits lest your cohabitants judge you, etc).

bhhaskin 8y ago
You are comparing apples to oranges. Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.
- froasty 8y ago
  Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses. Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1 --- 1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-the-digital-ghetto-of-myspace/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
  - prepend 8y ago
    You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.
CM30 8y ago
Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation). And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).
- froasty 8y ago
  There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet. I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines. This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities. Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure. I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").
rotexo 8y ago
Bingo. I've told this story a few times on here, and I feel the need to tell it again whenever the notion "uncensorable internet==unqualified good" comes up: Once I got doxxed by bloggers from one end of the political spectrum who thought I was a blogger from the opposite end. (We have similar names, but the doxxers put out all of my info. I generally try to avoid making extreme political statements publicly on the internet.) Even after I got my info taken down, someone archived it and the archives got passed around on Twitter, prolonging the mess. Even now all that stuff shows up if you google my name (which I could see being an issue in employment and housing searches, for instance). I'm not asking anyone to care about what happened to me, I just want people to think about the consequences of a system that can't be moderated. If some bad actors can continuously re-inject false information about normal people into the internet, it can have negative effects on the lives of those individuals. Advocate for an uncensorable internet all you want, but you should also be honest about the potential ramifications.
rablo 8y ago
It won’t fix censorship. Most users will pile up in certain servers (or even just one) and the owners of that server will censor whatever they don’t like (be it users or entire servers). In the end, it’ll be like Twitter.

bhhaskin 8y ago

You are comparing apples to oranges. Self hosting a service will of course mitigate all of the issues you listed. The control shifts from a company like Facebook into the hands of the server owner.

froasty 8y ago
Yes, and nominally so did homeownership in suburbia vs rental in overcrowded cities. What it actually meant is that instead of being beholden to "The Man's" cultural standards, they were now beholden to the Homeowner's Association's. Instead of overt racism and segregation, they got redlining, blockbusting, and racial steering. Instead of razor thin walls leading to informal surveillance, they had to Keep Up with the Joneses. Of course, the forces are now politically/socially based rather than fundamentally racially based, but the principle remains the same. It's another digital White Flight by any other name.^1 --- 1 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-the-digital-ghetto-of-myspace/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419843/did-whites-flee-th...
- prepend 8y ago
  You’re assuming that urban is always superior to suburban. There are many who prefer the problems you call out vs the problems with urban centers.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
No it won't. You might not have to see harassment directed at you, but that doesn't mitigate it. Especially if part of that harassment is doxxing.

CM30 8y ago

Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation). And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in many cases, there are groups and communities who simply physically cannot use the same platform (those on complete opposite sides of the political spectrum for example).

froasty 8y ago
There's a pretty stark difference between organic internet communities as they were and what is emerging from federated platforms on an already connected planet. I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines. This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities. Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure. I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").

rotexo 8y ago

Bingo. I've told this story a few times on here, and I feel the need to tell it again whenever the notion "uncensorable internet==unqualified good" comes up: Once I got doxxed by bloggers from one end of the political spectrum who thought I was a blogger from the opposite end. (We have similar names, but the doxxers put out all of my info. I generally try to avoid making extreme political statements publicly on the internet.) Even after I got my info taken down, someone archived it and the archives got passed around on Twitter, prolonging the mess. Even now all that stuff shows up if you google my name (which I could see being an issue in employment and housing searches, for instance). I'm not asking anyone to care about what happened to me, I just want people to think about the consequences of a system that can't be moderated. If some bad actors can continuously re-inject false information about normal people into the internet, it can have negative effects on the lives of those individuals. Advocate for an uncensorable internet all you want, but you should also be honest about the potential ramifications.

rablo 8y ago

It won’t fix censorship. Most users will pile up in certain servers (or even just one) and the owners of that server will censor whatever they don’t like (be it users or entire servers). In the end, it’ll be like Twitter.