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You're right! Gitlab is much better moderated than Facebook. Small, isolated services can be policed strictly in unscalable ways. Perhaps there's another compa

by Kalium 8y ago

You're right! Gitlab is much better moderated than Facebook. Small, isolated services can be policed strictly in unscalable ways. Perhaps there's another comparison to be made? Facebook's moderation, for all its many and myriad faults, is infinitely better than the stuff your average SMTP server sees every day. Federated decentralized systems are a hell that combines the worst of both centralization and decentralization. It's a great way to offer users the features they want, but at the cost of a set of systems where there's no practical way to stem abuse.

danShumway 8y ago
I would still disagree with this - federated decentralized services (think Mastadon, or PeerTube) are made up of smaller nodes. Each of those nodes are more tightly policed by smaller communities, and you subscribe to a subset of those communities that you care about. This is great for moderation - Mastadon instances tend to be very focused and to ban bad actors quickly. It's bad for content discovery, because not all of the content is localized in one place. It's a tradeoff, one that I'm increasingly suspecting is inherent to the debate over centralization, and one that I think might end up being a deciding factor for people choosing which direction they support. If you care about mass indexing and content discovery, maybe you just can't have moderation. If you care about moderation, maybe you just can't have content discovery or mass indexing. Granted, decentralization is worse for censorship because bad actors can go off and make their own instance, and other people can still subscribe to them. But, censorship != moderation, those are two entirely different concepts that just occasionally overlap with each other. This is assuming that you're talking about moderation that's more in-depth than just adding a captcha to defeat spammers. With the example you gave of hosting your own fileshare; Facebook has more resources to deal with a certain kind of attack - DOS, XSS, etc... but you're really only talking about a very small subset of attack patterns in that instance. I think federation makes most of those problems go away, because you can standardize purely technical defenses and for the most part they scale just fine across decentralized services. The moment you start talking about hard problems of moderation like choosing which files you're going to host in the first place, the private SMTP server wins. When I think about scaling moderation and curbing abuses, I'm not really thinking about the low hanging fruit, I'm thinking about curbing bad actors who are already actively participating on the platform, or who are coming up with novel attacks that don't have any one-size-fits-all solutions.

by Kalium 8y ago

danShumway 8y ago

I would still disagree with this - federated decentralized services (think Mastadon, or PeerTube) are made up of smaller nodes. Each of those nodes are more tightly policed by smaller communities, and you subscribe to a subset of those communities that you care about. This is great for moderation - Mastadon instances tend to be very focused and to ban bad actors quickly. It's bad for content discovery, because not all of the content is localized in one place. It's a tradeoff, one that I'm increasingly suspecting is inherent to the debate over centralization, and one that I think might end up being a deciding factor for people choosing which direction they support. If you care about mass indexing and content discovery, maybe you just can't have moderation. If you care about moderation, maybe you just can't have content discovery or mass indexing. Granted, decentralization is worse for censorship because bad actors can go off and make their own instance, and other people can still subscribe to them. But, censorship != moderation, those are two entirely different concepts that just occasionally overlap with each other. This is assuming that you're talking about moderation that's more in-depth than just adding a captcha to defeat spammers. With the example you gave of hosting your own fileshare; Facebook has more resources to deal with a certain kind of attack - DOS, XSS, etc... but you're really only talking about a very small subset of attack patterns in that instance. I think federation makes most of those problems go away, because you can standardize purely technical defenses and for the most part they scale just fine across decentralized services. The moment you start talking about hard problems of moderation like choosing which files you're going to host in the first place, the private SMTP server wins. When I think about scaling moderation and curbing abuses, I'm not really thinking about the low hanging fruit, I'm thinking about curbing bad actors who are already actively participating on the platform, or who are coming up with novel attacks that don't have any one-size-fits-all solutions.