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The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of payin

The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and harassment is: > “Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct.” The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible. As a libertarian this is really attractive to me, but in our current system, politically, it's completely infeasible and more than that just a little actively not wanted. People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass. I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. Please: CMV.

syn0byte 8y ago
The effort required to keep a federated service running is a fraction of its total user base. EG; You don't see most people running their own IRC servers. A small percentage puts in the time for everyone else.
rainbowmverse 8y ago
>> It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. Define work. By many valid metrics, it's already a resounding success.
- calimac 8y ago
  100% AGREED! @rainbowmverse . It is a success and it will seen reach critical mass to serve authentic social interaction.
AndyMcConachie 8y ago
Then why are there so many phpBB implementations still running and incredibly active? I sometimes think the same way you do, but then I google something and land on some phpBB discussion somewhere with an active community.
- wdewind 8y ago
  This is actually my exact point. Why did FB come after phpBB? And I guess I'd argue: there actually aren't that many phpBB communities, relative to the numbers of people on Twitter and FB. If Mastodon (or federation in general) was going to "work" we'd see no FB and tons more phpBB type implementations.
  - drb91 8y ago
    I’m not sure how you could conclude that given that FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible. Meanwhile, people continue to seek out communities that do represent the types of interactions people want. I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.
    - wdewind 8y ago
      > I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is. Maybe I'm defining succeeding too narrowly, and sorry to be rude, but what universe do you live in where this is even close to true? Some quick googling shows the network hadn't even cracked 100k users in Feb: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657 > FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
      - some_account 8y ago
        Facebook is like daytime TV with 100 channels and nothing interesting to watch. That may be succeeding in financial terms but there is a lot of room for other services where the aim is not to earn as much money as possible and I stead cater to intelligent people instead of the masses.
confounded 8y ago
Have you tried Mastodon? You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point? Do I need communications with my friends to be moderated? Does this effect only kick-in when finding strangers, attempting to influence millions at once, or selling ads? Moderation decisions on Facebook and Twitter make headlines at the moment, it doesn’t seem to me that people don’t care, or don’t want to be heard. I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success.
- wdewind 8y ago
  > Have you tried Mastodon? Yes. > You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. Right, you either pay with your time or your money, as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. Specialization of labor reduces costs, federation increases them. > This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point? It's never been technically feasible, though the main issue has changed from scale to security. > I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success. I can understand why that wouldn't be your criteria for success, but it is mine.
  - 40four 8y ago
    > as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. What makes you think FB is free? Oh you pay for it alright, with your precious, precious data.
    - some_account 8y ago
Crespyl 8y ago
I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". In the case of Mastodon, I can find a smaller instance with a handful of moderators who I trust, and let them curate that instance. If I later find that they have abused that trust I can disassociate with them and move to a different instance, and all of my contacts or the general public on other instances remain unaffected. If a user doesn't want to go to the effort of finding a specific instance that suits their desires for moderator activity, they can easily set up on one of the biggest instances (much the way one can easily set up a gmail account), while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so (as I can choose to set up a yahoo or fastmail account, or even run my own server). The basic experience for the average user can be just as moderated (well or poorly, by as many or as few people) as Twitter is, if a big instance chooses to do so, and the freedom of users is still preserved in a way that Twitter or Facebook cannot.
- wdewind 8y ago
  > I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. > I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than enforcing undesirable norms across it.
crmullins 8y ago
You say that it's infeasible but haven't given any reason other than "people don't want this" which is objectively untrue. Lots of people want this, and if you've been on Twitter lately you've probably heard that people are leaving the "bird site"[1] for one of the instances hosted by their community. So I guess I'd need to ask you for your specific and unconventional definition of what "works." It works for plenty of people already. [1] That's mastodon slang for Twitter.
stale2002 8y ago
Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon. All of your questions can be answered with "what does our currrent email system do?". Sure, most people don't run their own email system. But some do. And you are not forced into a singular option that everyone is required to use. Despite what people might claim, Hotmail, or numerous other email options are all almost as good as Gmail. Having competing options is good enough, as if you get banned from one, you can move to another (with some friction, obviously). On expense, well same answer, what does email do? Yes, it is probably more expensive for all these different email servers to exist, but clearly that's OK, as they exist right now. Now, seeing as tweets and social media posts don't seem like that much more of a difficult problem than email, imagine if those things were federated as well? This doesn't seem to hard to imagine happening.
- wdewind 8y ago
  Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.
  - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
    I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining). I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.
sincerely 8y ago
>I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. If the only people in my online community are people who are willing to put effort into online communities, that's fine by me. Part of why FB/twitter are so draining/unenjoyable is because literally everyone is there.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run." That actually is largely the solution on all the networks, as most are trying to automate that task, to crappy results.
- wdewind 8y ago
  This question very quickly turns into "who watches the watchmen" if you pull the thread long enough. THAT'S the moderation problem, not scale or cost.
ENZ0 8y ago
"there are more people moderating," The net effect is that you'll more likely come into contact with the kind of preferential modding that suits your own tastes. Birds of a feather. One community might mod your type with an iron fist, but jump to another server, where a diametrically opposed set of opinions prevail, and you'll feel more at home. ...or something like that.
- Kye 8y ago
  Joining an instance run by a queer furry commune was a great decision.
mychinsrmynips 8y ago
I think you are entirely correct and your view does not need to be changed. If you look at how everything is playing out on a geopolitical scale, authoritarian states are winning over democracy. At a macro scale, even in the politics of Tech you can see this. Tech platforms are put under immense pressure from their users to moderate the platform. No one wants to spend the time to filter someone from their view, block people, any of that. They want the platform to do it for them. Platforms KNOW THIS.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
some_account 8y ago
The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich. There is still room for technical alternatives for users who want something different, even if that is only 0.1%. Even with Slack being very popular, irc is not going away, because it still is better than Slack in areas that are valuable to people. No lock-in, open source protocols, and also the fact that it's still good after all these years.
egypturnash 8y ago
When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge piles of VC investment) to do the moderation. They are likely to be more interested in a constantly-rising user count and ever-longer user sessions that give them opportunities to sneak in as many ads around the edges as possible; they are probably only going to kick people off for behavior that can get the company sued. When you use Mastodon, you are trusting a handful of people who are probably running it as a hobby to do the moderation. Their only goal may be to have a nice, chill place to chat with friends; they can kick people off for whatever kind of behavior they find undesirable, whether that be "repeatedly failing to post pictures of cats on Mandatory Cat Post Day", "talking about feet on No-Feets Friday", or "using the Banned Circular Letter six times" on an instance that demands you never use the letter O.* And if an admin finds that they are getting a lot of reports of a foreign instance for behavior they forbid, they can defederate from that instance, thus slicing out a large source of undesired behavior in one go. Users can vote on moderation policies with their feet (though perhaps not on No-Feets Friday if that's the issue that's polarizing huge portions of the overall community) and move to another instance - or maintain two accounts if they want to keep a foothold on both sides of the divide. I could probably spin this into a metaphor for representative democracy if I wanted. Pick an instance whose admin (and her moderation team, if it's big enough to have one) feels likely to agree with you on moderation, report violations, let her do the dirty work and maybe say "thanks" and give her a little something now and then. ---- * Of course, you could also kick people off your instance for things like "expressing political views opposed to the instance admin" or "acting like this is 4chan". But comedy examples are more fun, and less likely to make you snap into reflexive defense of whatever your position is.
jancsika 8y ago
> I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. Users love putting enormous amounts of effort into building functional, healthy communities online. What was that Reddit spectacle where r/ThanosDidNothingWrong "banned" half the users? That's a perfect example of how sophisticated a userbase can get-- using a feature of a service in a clever and unexpected way but without causing harm to the users or the system. If it seems like users don't want to do that kind of work on a particular social network, it's probably a symptom that something fundamental isn't working in the software. Users will do creative things on services that give them the freedom to do it. But they can't and won't fix design issues to make the service usable in the first place.
hotpockets 8y ago
What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work! The tricky thing about naysaying technology is that naysayers are almost always correct. This doesn't mean that they have useful information (you could refer to Bayes theorem for instance, and look at P(Failure|Prediction), the probability of failure given that an inexpert observer has predicted failure). It's just very easy for casual observers to pick at things. Additionally: -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit? -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?
- wdewind 8y ago
  > What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work! I think you're missing the point. All of these are examples of successful centralized networks. The idea that mastodon will not fall prey to the same incentives facebook did is based on it being meaningfully decentralized. It is extremely unlikely to me that as the network scales (it has 100kish DAUs right now) meaningful decentralization will continue to exist. > -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit? It doesn't, in a meaningful way, because if the government wants to shut something down on reddit they contact reddit, not the moderator of a subreddit. > -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor? I would agree with that in most cases, depending on your goals, and would wish the twitter competitor the best of luck.
profalseidol 8y ago
> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass. People don't want to be involved? Do you have any evidence for this? If this is true then all the stuff about Agile and autonomy I hear a lot isn't true then? Richard Hendricks should've just stayed as subordinate to Gavin Belson. Why start a startup? Colonies should've stayed colonies and kiss the Queen's feet. Being able to decide for our own selves is a pain the ass huh? You may genuinely don't care what Trump decides for you. But I'm pretty sure many who can barely survive cares.
HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
>The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible. Have you thought about the possibility that this is exactly what at least some people actually want? Reddit is a great example of a platform that has moderators basically working in a federated way and has been a huge commercial success. By having that commercial success users are now subject to negative market forces that erode the character of the platform because at the end it's not actually federated but the owners simply didn't mess much with it for a while. Mastodon has taken a huge step towards making sure that these market forces can't invade and dominate the platform because Mastodon devs don't actually have the same control that the owners of Reddit do. In other words I don't see why we need to judge Mastodon's success based on it's size but based on it's viability as a platform which is already pretty decent. And each Mastodon instance is free to solve it's own funding issues so I don't see how the fact that there is no central advertising and the "cost" of moderation is higher affects it. So the usual success rating of how many users you have does not apply directly on Mastodon. >I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. There is a fairly large number of people who put considerable hours moderating fb groups for no profit. The same goes for reddit moderators. Every one of them could potentially launch or help moderate a Mastodon instance( especially a topic-specific one). So the number of people caring required is much smaller than you might think. Besides if your point is that people don't want this control, let's remove blocks/mutes and see the chaos unfold.
locopati 8y ago
As a libertarian, you want a centralized authority to manage things for you instead of distributed responsibility? What does libertarian mean to you?

syn0byte 8y ago

The effort required to keep a federated service running is a fraction of its total user base. EG; You don't see most people running their own IRC servers. A small percentage puts in the time for everyone else.

rainbowmverse 8y ago

>> It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. Define work. By many valid metrics, it's already a resounding success.

calimac 8y ago
100% AGREED! @rainbowmverse . It is a success and it will seen reach critical mass to serve authentic social interaction.

AndyMcConachie 8y ago

Then why are there so many phpBB implementations still running and incredibly active? I sometimes think the same way you do, but then I google something and land on some phpBB discussion somewhere with an active community.

wdewind 8y ago
This is actually my exact point. Why did FB come after phpBB? And I guess I'd argue: there actually aren't that many phpBB communities, relative to the numbers of people on Twitter and FB. If Mastodon (or federation in general) was going to "work" we'd see no FB and tons more phpBB type implementations.
- drb91 8y ago
  I’m not sure how you could conclude that given that FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible. Meanwhile, people continue to seek out communities that do represent the types of interactions people want. I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.
  - wdewind 8y ago
    > I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is. Maybe I'm defining succeeding too narrowly, and sorry to be rude, but what universe do you live in where this is even close to true? Some quick googling shows the network hadn't even cracked 100k users in Feb: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657 > FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
    - some_account 8y ago
      Facebook is like daytime TV with 100 channels and nothing interesting to watch. That may be succeeding in financial terms but there is a lot of room for other services where the aim is not to earn as much money as possible and I stead cater to intelligent people instead of the masses.

confounded 8y ago

Have you tried Mastodon? You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point? Do I need communications with my friends to be moderated? Does this effect only kick-in when finding strangers, attempting to influence millions at once, or selling ads? Moderation decisions on Facebook and Twitter make headlines at the moment, it doesn’t seem to me that people don’t care, or don’t want to be heard. I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success.

wdewind 8y ago
> Have you tried Mastodon? Yes. > You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. Right, you either pay with your time or your money, as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. Specialization of labor reduces costs, federation increases them. > This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point? It's never been technically feasible, though the main issue has changed from scale to security. > I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success. I can understand why that wouldn't be your criteria for success, but it is mine.
- 40four 8y ago
  > as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. What makes you think FB is free? Oh you pay for it alright, with your precious, precious data.
  - some_account 8y ago

Crespyl 8y ago

I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". In the case of Mastodon, I can find a smaller instance with a handful of moderators who I trust, and let them curate that instance. If I later find that they have abused that trust I can disassociate with them and move to a different instance, and all of my contacts or the general public on other instances remain unaffected. If a user doesn't want to go to the effort of finding a specific instance that suits their desires for moderator activity, they can easily set up on one of the biggest instances (much the way one can easily set up a gmail account), while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so (as I can choose to set up a yahoo or fastmail account, or even run my own server). The basic experience for the average user can be just as moderated (well or poorly, by as many or as few people) as Twitter is, if a big instance chooses to do so, and the freedom of users is still preserved in a way that Twitter or Facebook cannot.

wdewind 8y ago
> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. > I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than enforcing undesirable norms across it.

crmullins 8y ago

You say that it's infeasible but haven't given any reason other than "people don't want this" which is objectively untrue. Lots of people want this, and if you've been on Twitter lately you've probably heard that people are leaving the "bird site"[1] for one of the instances hosted by their community. So I guess I'd need to ask you for your specific and unconventional definition of what "works." It works for plenty of people already. [1] That's mastodon slang for Twitter.

stale2002 8y ago

Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon. All of your questions can be answered with "what does our currrent email system do?". Sure, most people don't run their own email system. But some do. And you are not forced into a singular option that everyone is required to use. Despite what people might claim, Hotmail, or numerous other email options are all almost as good as Gmail. Having competing options is good enough, as if you get banned from one, you can move to another (with some friction, obviously). On expense, well same answer, what does email do? Yes, it is probably more expensive for all these different email servers to exist, but clearly that's OK, as they exist right now. Now, seeing as tweets and social media posts don't seem like that much more of a difficult problem than email, imagine if those things were federated as well? This doesn't seem to hard to imagine happening.

wdewind 8y ago
Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining). I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one. Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.

sincerely 8y ago

>I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. If the only people in my online community are people who are willing to put effort into online communities, that's fine by me. Part of why FB/twitter are so draining/unenjoyable is because literally everyone is there.

s73v3r_ 8y ago

"The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run." That actually is largely the solution on all the networks, as most are trying to automate that task, to crappy results.

wdewind 8y ago
This question very quickly turns into "who watches the watchmen" if you pull the thread long enough. THAT'S the moderation problem, not scale or cost.

ENZ0 8y ago

"there are more people moderating," The net effect is that you'll more likely come into contact with the kind of preferential modding that suits your own tastes. Birds of a feather. One community might mod your type with an iron fist, but jump to another server, where a diametrically opposed set of opinions prevail, and you'll feel more at home. ...or something like that.

Kye 8y ago
Joining an instance run by a queer furry commune was a great decision.

mychinsrmynips 8y ago

I think you are entirely correct and your view does not need to be changed. If you look at how everything is playing out on a geopolitical scale, authoritarian states are winning over democracy. At a macro scale, even in the politics of Tech you can see this. Tech platforms are put under immense pressure from their users to moderate the platform. No one wants to spend the time to filter someone from their view, block people, any of that. They want the platform to do it for them. Platforms KNOW THIS.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

some_account 8y ago

The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich. There is still room for technical alternatives for users who want something different, even if that is only 0.1%. Even with Slack being very popular, irc is not going away, because it still is better than Slack in areas that are valuable to people. No lock-in, open source protocols, and also the fact that it's still good after all these years.

egypturnash 8y ago

When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge piles of VC investment) to do the moderation. They are likely to be more interested in a constantly-rising user count and ever-longer user sessions that give them opportunities to sneak in as many ads around the edges as possible; they are probably only going to kick people off for behavior that can get the company sued. When you use Mastodon, you are trusting a handful of people who are probably running it as a hobby to do the moderation. Their only goal may be to have a nice, chill place to chat with friends; they can kick people off for whatever kind of behavior they find undesirable, whether that be "repeatedly failing to post pictures of cats on Mandatory Cat Post Day", "talking about feet on No-Feets Friday", or "using the Banned Circular Letter six times" on an instance that demands you never use the letter O.* And if an admin finds that they are getting a lot of reports of a foreign instance for behavior they forbid, they can defederate from that instance, thus slicing out a large source of undesired behavior in one go. Users can vote on moderation policies with their feet (though perhaps not on No-Feets Friday if that's the issue that's polarizing huge portions of the overall community) and move to another instance - or maintain two accounts if they want to keep a foothold on both sides of the divide. I could probably spin this into a metaphor for representative democracy if I wanted. Pick an instance whose admin (and her moderation team, if it's big enough to have one) feels likely to agree with you on moderation, report violations, let her do the dirty work and maybe say "thanks" and give her a little something now and then. ---- * Of course, you could also kick people off your instance for things like "expressing political views opposed to the instance admin" or "acting like this is 4chan". But comedy examples are more fun, and less likely to make you snap into reflexive defense of whatever your position is.

jancsika 8y ago

> I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. Users love putting enormous amounts of effort into building functional, healthy communities online. What was that Reddit spectacle where r/ThanosDidNothingWrong "banned" half the users? That's a perfect example of how sophisticated a userbase can get-- using a feature of a service in a clever and unexpected way but without causing harm to the users or the system. If it seems like users don't want to do that kind of work on a particular social network, it's probably a symptom that something fundamental isn't working in the software. Users will do creative things on services that give them the freedom to do it. But they can't and won't fix design issues to make the service usable in the first place.

hotpockets 8y ago

What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work! The tricky thing about naysaying technology is that naysayers are almost always correct. This doesn't mean that they have useful information (you could refer to Bayes theorem for instance, and look at P(Failure|Prediction), the probability of failure given that an inexpert observer has predicted failure). It's just very easy for casual observers to pick at things. Additionally: -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit? -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?

wdewind 8y ago
> What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work! I think you're missing the point. All of these are examples of successful centralized networks. The idea that mastodon will not fall prey to the same incentives facebook did is based on it being meaningfully decentralized. It is extremely unlikely to me that as the network scales (it has 100kish DAUs right now) meaningful decentralization will continue to exist. > -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit? It doesn't, in a meaningful way, because if the government wants to shut something down on reddit they contact reddit, not the moderator of a subreddit. > -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor? I would agree with that in most cases, depending on your goals, and would wish the twitter competitor the best of luck.

profalseidol 8y ago

> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass. People don't want to be involved? Do you have any evidence for this? If this is true then all the stuff about Agile and autonomy I hear a lot isn't true then? Richard Hendricks should've just stayed as subordinate to Gavin Belson. Why start a startup? Colonies should've stayed colonies and kiss the Queen's feet. Being able to decide for our own selves is a pain the ass huh? You may genuinely don't care what Trump decides for you. But I'm pretty sure many who can barely survive cares.

HeadsUpHigh 8y ago

>The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible. Have you thought about the possibility that this is exactly what at least some people actually want? Reddit is a great example of a platform that has moderators basically working in a federated way and has been a huge commercial success. By having that commercial success users are now subject to negative market forces that erode the character of the platform because at the end it's not actually federated but the owners simply didn't mess much with it for a while. Mastodon has taken a huge step towards making sure that these market forces can't invade and dominate the platform because Mastodon devs don't actually have the same control that the owners of Reddit do. In other words I don't see why we need to judge Mastodon's success based on it's size but based on it's viability as a platform which is already pretty decent. And each Mastodon instance is free to solve it's own funding issues so I don't see how the fact that there is no central advertising and the "cost" of moderation is higher affects it. So the usual success rating of how many users you have does not apply directly on Mastodon. >I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already. There is a fairly large number of people who put considerable hours moderating fb groups for no profit. The same goes for reddit moderators. Every one of them could potentially launch or help moderate a Mastodon instance( especially a topic-specific one). So the number of people caring required is much smaller than you might think. Besides if your point is that people don't want this control, let's remove blocks/mutes and see the chaos unfold.

locopati 8y ago

As a libertarian, you want a centralized authority to manage things for you instead of distributed responsibility? What does libertarian mean to you?