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"Tending and pruning are not a stranger’s duty, it is through near moderation and free listening that we improve our surroundings" https://scuttlebutt.nz/docs/p

• tao_oat 6y ago
  I believe it means handling moderation yourself rather than relying on platform providers to do it for you. You have to choose your peers that you receive content from carefully rather than rely on platform moderators to filter content.
  • bitwize 6y ago
    I get it. Remember killfiles on USENET? About the only thing considered universally intolerable and subject to administrative removal, at least on USENET's alt.* hierarchy, was spam. But spammers could spam faster than cancellers could cancel, so it eventually overwhelmed the platform.
    • konjin 6y ago
      Proof of work makes this expensive.
    • grey_earthling 6y ago
      Scuttlebutt inverts this idea of cancelling — as a new user you're just shouting into the void until you persuade someone to follow you. Essentially, each user is just writing their own diary. If you follow someone, your client periodically asks around for a copy of that person's diary. No-one's gonna ask for the spammers' diaries.
      • l33tman 6y ago
        But then you could just subscribe to some peoples RSS feeds (or .plans for the archaic people ;). At some point you want to "listen" to a group/forum where you don't have personal control over every member and as soon as a spammer joins you'd get their spam.. how does this work in scuttlebutt, or maybe this is not a use-case it tries to supply, is it just a twitter-clone? (I don't know anything about it...) I guess you could design a group so at first only a few get hit with junk from a new member and as long as nobody stop listening, others would eventually accept the new member as well. Just thinking on this use case as USENET was discussed elsewhere here as an analogy, maybe it's not relevant at all.
        • grey_earthling 6y ago
          > At some point you want to "listen" to a group/forum where you don't have personal control over every member and as soon as a spammer joins you'd get their spam.. how does this work in scuttlebutt Scuttlebutt clients typically request the feeds of anyone you follow, plus anyone _they_ follow. (This is called “2 hops”.) If you only follow Alice, and Alice follows Bob, you'll also see Bob's messages. Then if you choose to follow Bob, you may also see Charlie's messages; and so on. It builds a social network in the original sense — neither a bubble with sharply-defined edges, nor a global free-for-all. I see messages from people I don't really agree with (because I follow someone who follows them), but they're not strangers with wholly-incompatible worldviews. And because they're not strangers, and because messages tend to be slow and considered, I'm more likely to engage constructively with their different opinion (even if that's just by listening). It's anti-divisive.
    • toyg 6y ago
      Spam was not why I stopped using USENET, I expect the same techniques that worked to clean-up email would have worked with that if we’d hung around a bit longer. It’s just that the overall maintenance required too much work (and legal risk) by ISPs and clients alike, in terms of disk space, synchronisation, integrity checks, backups, etc etc.
    • perlpimp 6y ago
      on a tangent, alt.sysadmin.recovery was a great place.
  • tachyonbeam 6y ago
    I can see the appeal. I imagine this means that if none of my friends follow conspiracy theory content, I won't see any of that, and if one of them did, I could presumably block the conspiracy theory content feeds while still following my friends. The downside may be that, presumably, this puts everyone into a bubble even more than Facebook did? At least there is no algorithmic meddling or centralized content control.
    • remexre 6y ago
      On the other hand, having to take conscious action to enforce the bubble (rather than needing to take action to pop it) might be beneficial / lead to less of a bubble.
• black_puppydog 6y ago
  The idea is that moderation will be based on who you trust. First and foremost, that is yourself, i.e. you can moderate your own timeline by choosing who to follow or block. Since this happens on your device, there's nobody who can interfere with this. Further, it also means that you can trust your peers when you want. One default behaviour is that if you do NOT follow a feed A, and feeds B and C, who you do follow, each block A, your client will not by default replicate A's messages and thus you won't see them. Of course, if you unfollow B and C, or if you choose to explicitly follow A, then you'd see their content again. That's what I would understand by "close moderation" anyhow.
  • andai 6y ago
    Censorship by osmosis?
    • grey_earthling 6y ago
      Depends what you mean by “censorship”. It's free listening — you have the right to choose whom you listen to.
    • black_puppydog 6y ago
      If you follow people you don't trust to understand these mechanisms, and wield them accordingly, then maybe. But IF you understand how this works, the client will never prevent you from reading something you would want. And it's hard-if-not-impossible to prevent the client from fetching a specific feed. So in that sense, no, not censorship. It is good practice on SSB though to make a comment on why you block a feed. There are many reasons, from NSFW content to actual harassment to simply spammyness being an issue when you replicate the entire feed onto a mobile device. Of course, that practice is not enforced by technical means. But it is still quite common. And in that case you actually get a notification.