7 ms·

No one controls Mastodon -- setup an instance and you're off to the races!

sneak 6y ago
The idea of preemptive banning of federating with other instances is extremely common in Mastodon-land. This means that unilateral actions by admins, invisible to their userbase, restrict what their users can read, or who can read their users. It would be fine if the users opted into this, but it happens silently and arbitrarily by admins, oftentimes based on speculation or gossip, not even real abuse. It’s all of the worst of tribalism, polarization, guilt by association, and preemptive censorship (regardless of whether or not admins are “in the right” by censoring messages between x and y flowing through their own machines). It’s also not easy or reliable to migrate your account between instances without losing your followers, and none of the server implementations yet support virtual hosting, so you can’t migrate hosts while keeping your own domain/handle. There are real problems there, and casually dismissing the major censorship issues in the ecosystem doesn’t begin to solve any of them.
- mdszy 6y ago
  Why does anyone have a requirement to talk to your instance? What if, due to your ideological stance on issues, I don't trust that your server won't decide that mine is distasteful in some way, and that you'd cause your server to disrupt mine in some way by flooding it with messages, for instance? I have legitimately had this happen and it nearly brought down my instance. Some script-kiddie decided to fuck around and spam my account on an instance I run with about 2000 followers in the course of a few seconds. This almost killed my server entirely. Why should I have been forced to interact with their server on the grounds of free speech? Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway. Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway. It prevents people on that instance who explicitly want to follow me from doing so. It also prevents me from following people on that server from my primary account on my homeserver, even if those people explicitly want the whole world to be able to read their public messages. Both of those are undesirable interference between mutually-desired communication by Alice and Bob, by Mallory.
    - mdszy 6y ago
      Then they, and you, can find another instance where you can mutually talk with each other. You are, in fact, allowed to have multiple fediverse accounts for different purposes/groups of people. This doesn't address my point at all that you cannot argue that my server is somehow obligated to process bytes from your server.
      - sneak 6y ago
        Tools that disobey their end users are unfit for purpose. They're bad tools, and should be replaced with useful ones. Your peers' routers are allowed to drop your packets, but nobody is arguing that that's good or beneficial. There is a difference between "within rights" and "good".
        mdszy 6y ago
        Oh well. Guess we won't agree on this one then. Block button go brrrrrr.
- cjslep 6y ago
  You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange. Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason. Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs. Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.
  - sneak 6y ago
    It isn't contradictory or incompatible to say that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and also simultaneously believe that censorship, especially the silent or invisible kind, is bad. Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - cjslep 6y ago
      Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here. This is a categorically different problem than MITM.
      - dependenttypes 6y ago
        > Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content). In addition most mastodon instances do not disclose their policies via AP. See for example https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation
- zbentley 6y ago
  While I don't agree with you, there is an interesting discussion to be had here about digital "commons" (something like the "public utility" concept in the US), I think. If a company with a near-monopolistic network effect (Google, FB, etc.) censors speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform, it seems that most folks agree that this is bad, whether or not they're willing to do anything about it. So, instead, we have decentralized services (and semi-decentralized ones, like Mastodon). At what point does a Mastodon community operator's decision to censor speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform become problematic? When a community achieves a large size? If new community members aren't made aware of the censorship? Is the difference between these communities and an ultra-ubiquitous one like "having a Google account" or "being connected to friends on Facebook" a difference of degree, or a qualitative one? It's simple to argue an extremist position of "all speech between any set of parties must not be suppressed for any reason, even by the parties themselves", but I don't think most people want to live in that world. Similarly, it's pretty hard to isolate a line past which an operator of a community-service should be held to a different standard of conduct because of how ubiquitous/depended-on their community is, but a lot of people seem to think that this line exists.
ApolloFortyNine 6y ago
The federated Mastodon, the one people generally are talking about, is controlled, by a 'democracy' of sorts of the server owners. The technology itself is of course open, but if your content is not approved by the main Mastodon federation, then users will have to be signed into multiple Mastodon federations (if that's what they wish), one to see the main Mastodon federation, and one to see the one that got banned. Because of this extra hurdle, a ban from the main Mastodon federation does shut out a large portion of the Mastodon users. Mastodon is often presented as this 'free speech social network', in reality it's just a decentralized social network, with all the censorship that comes with being a modern social network.
- simias 6y ago
  The definition of "free speech" many people in this thread use puzzles me greatly. If you come to my house and starts yelling things that offend me and I kick you out, I'm not infringing on your freedom of speech. Based on what principles should server owners be forced to federate with third party servers if they don't want to? How is not wanting to federate with anybody "censorship"? I've just setup a mastodon instance on a VPS to give it a try. For less than $5 per month you can have your own instance where you can invite like minded people and find people to federate with. And if you can't find anybody to join you server or federate with you... Maybe you should think about what that says about you instead of screaming that you're being censored?
  - cjslep 6y ago
    Main-instance Mastodon (run by the main dev) has made moderation choices that people disagree with. It means conversations here always brings out this same group group of people that disagreed with all these decisions and somehow believe their speech (their bytes) must physically be shipped to everyone else in some network, and must be examined by everyone on the network so that others can decide for themselves whether to listen. I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it. This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules. I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet. The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise). [0]https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool

The idea of preemptive banning of federating with other instances is extremely common in Mastodon-land. This means that unilateral actions by admins, invisible to their userbase, restrict what their users can read, or who can read their users. It would be fine if the users opted into this, but it happens silently and arbitrarily by admins, oftentimes based on speculation or gossip, not even real abuse. It’s all of the worst of tribalism, polarization, guilt by association, and preemptive censorship (regardless of whether or not admins are “in the right” by censoring messages between x and y flowing through their own machines). It’s also not easy or reliable to migrate your account between instances without losing your followers, and none of the server implementations yet support virtual hosting, so you can’t migrate hosts while keeping your own domain/handle. There are real problems there, and casually dismissing the major censorship issues in the ecosystem doesn’t begin to solve any of them.

mdszy 6y ago
Why does anyone have a requirement to talk to your instance? What if, due to your ideological stance on issues, I don't trust that your server won't decide that mine is distasteful in some way, and that you'd cause your server to disrupt mine in some way by flooding it with messages, for instance? I have legitimately had this happen and it nearly brought down my instance. Some script-kiddie decided to fuck around and spam my account on an instance I run with about 2000 followers in the course of a few seconds. This almost killed my server entirely. Why should I have been forced to interact with their server on the grounds of free speech? Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway. Forcing someone to make their server software talk to yours is just as much of a "Free Speech" infringement, if not moreso.
- sneak 6y ago
  > Why does it matter if any instance decides they don't want to associate with you? It doesn't affect your ability to use the service beyond not being able to interact with folks who probably don't want to talk to you anyway. It prevents people on that instance who explicitly want to follow me from doing so. It also prevents me from following people on that server from my primary account on my homeserver, even if those people explicitly want the whole world to be able to read their public messages. Both of those are undesirable interference between mutually-desired communication by Alice and Bob, by Mallory.
  - mdszy 6y ago
    Then they, and you, can find another instance where you can mutually talk with each other. You are, in fact, allowed to have multiple fediverse accounts for different purposes/groups of people. This doesn't address my point at all that you cannot argue that my server is somehow obligated to process bytes from your server.
    - sneak 6y ago
      Tools that disobey their end users are unfit for purpose. They're bad tools, and should be replaced with useful ones. Your peers' routers are allowed to drop your packets, but nobody is arguing that that's good or beneficial. There is a difference between "within rights" and "good".
      - mdszy 6y ago
        Oh well. Guess we won't agree on this one then. Block button go brrrrrr.
cjslep 6y ago
You can't force user's eyeballs to read the bytes you ship to their computers unless you want to go full Clockwork Orange. Some people want to exercise the rights over their computers (pick any ideology, FOSS included) and don't want certain bytes shipped to their computers. Who cares the reason. Some people don't have the time, energy, money, and technical experience to exercise their rights of byte-shipping in a competent manner, so they carefully delegate that power to someone they trust. And some want to join in a community that is purposefully run this way. To categorically paint this use case as "insidious" ("silently", "arbitrarily") is in denial of these peoples' real needs. Forcing peers to accept your bytes with the assumption that they must examine it with their own eyeballs in order to overcome a zealous interpretation of "censorship" is blatantly disregarding the humanity in a peer and their real needs.
- sneak 6y ago
  It isn't contradictory or incompatible to say that people shouldn't be forced to do anything, and also simultaneously believe that censorship, especially the silent or invisible kind, is bad. Would a web host performing MITM on an HTTP connection to alter or redact your blog posts be bad? After all, it's their hardware...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cjslep 6y ago
    Instance banning is neither silent nor invisible. Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons, anytime. I would be in agreement with you about silent/invisible censorship, but that's not what's going on here. This is a categorically different problem than MITM.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      > Every Mastodon instance has an About page (no login required) listing all instance bans and reasons There are instances which require an account in order to see the bans (cyber.space). There are instances which do not list bans at all. There are instances with made up reasons of banning made up instances (mastodon.art). Even that flagship instance lists incorrect reasons for removing instances (claims that certain instances shared illegal content when said instances do not allow any form of illegal content). In addition most mastodon instances do not disclose their policies via AP. See for example https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation https://fediverse.network/mastodon.art/federation
zbentley 6y ago
While I don't agree with you, there is an interesting discussion to be had here about digital "commons" (something like the "public utility" concept in the US), I think. If a company with a near-monopolistic network effect (Google, FB, etc.) censors speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform, it seems that most folks agree that this is bad, whether or not they're willing to do anything about it. So, instead, we have decentralized services (and semi-decentralized ones, like Mastodon). At what point does a Mastodon community operator's decision to censor speech or who-can-talk-to-who/see-what on their platform become problematic? When a community achieves a large size? If new community members aren't made aware of the censorship? Is the difference between these communities and an ultra-ubiquitous one like "having a Google account" or "being connected to friends on Facebook" a difference of degree, or a qualitative one? It's simple to argue an extremist position of "all speech between any set of parties must not be suppressed for any reason, even by the parties themselves", but I don't think most people want to live in that world. Similarly, it's pretty hard to isolate a line past which an operator of a community-service should be held to a different standard of conduct because of how ubiquitous/depended-on their community is, but a lot of people seem to think that this line exists.

ApolloFortyNine 6y ago

The federated Mastodon, the one people generally are talking about, is controlled, by a 'democracy' of sorts of the server owners. The technology itself is of course open, but if your content is not approved by the main Mastodon federation, then users will have to be signed into multiple Mastodon federations (if that's what they wish), one to see the main Mastodon federation, and one to see the one that got banned. Because of this extra hurdle, a ban from the main Mastodon federation does shut out a large portion of the Mastodon users. Mastodon is often presented as this 'free speech social network', in reality it's just a decentralized social network, with all the censorship that comes with being a modern social network.

simias 6y ago
The definition of "free speech" many people in this thread use puzzles me greatly. If you come to my house and starts yelling things that offend me and I kick you out, I'm not infringing on your freedom of speech. Based on what principles should server owners be forced to federate with third party servers if they don't want to? How is not wanting to federate with anybody "censorship"? I've just setup a mastodon instance on a VPS to give it a try. For less than $5 per month you can have your own instance where you can invite like minded people and find people to federate with. And if you can't find anybody to join you server or federate with you... Maybe you should think about what that says about you instead of screaming that you're being censored?
- cjslep 6y ago
  Main-instance Mastodon (run by the main dev) has made moderation choices that people disagree with. It means conversations here always brings out this same group group of people that disagreed with all these decisions and somehow believe their speech (their bytes) must physically be shipped to everyone else in some network, and must be examined by everyone on the network so that others can decide for themselves whether to listen. I've literally had conversations on the Fediverse where people expected and wanted blockchain-like replicas of their content onto everyone else's computer. And for everyone else to read it. This group of people have shifted to this position because they no longer have the "de-platform/systemic-censorship" argument that arises when someone is banned from a centralized service, resulting in a total loss of access to the entire platform. Conversely, on the Fediverse they're still there but simply can't talk to some % of users. And that can easily be rectified by being a part of multiple communities and abiding by their rules. I've tried to write about how ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses) is not a censorship-resistant network and that the point of Federation is to build lots of custom communities and have them politely talk to each other, or ignore the ones that violate community's expectations [0]. Feedback I literally got from here on HN was "I'm disappointed in you", when I think it's an accurate and realistic view. Especially when standing in the shadow of FreeNet. The same liberty of free-speech and free-association that lets a far-left community thrive, and a far-right community thrive, also lets them block each other (which is a good thing -- it would be ugly otherwise). [0]https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool https://cjslep.com/c/blog/censorship-is-a-tool