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The Fediverse is better than regular social media
- moritonal 6y agoSilly, but I've never seen an explanation of "Free as in Beer" before. Until now I equated it to the way you might get a free beer from a mate in the pub, but with the understanding that you'd get the next round. Give and take. Also now really isn't the right time to promote the Fediverse's uncensored prowess, everyone's looking for the next Parler and every time I've looked at the Fediverse it's been fringe weird already.
- mlN90 6y agoIf not now, when is the time to promote uncensored social media?
- samastur 6y agoAt this point I can't understand people for whom the answer isn't hopefully never. People never had better tools to promote their views in human history so it's odd to me to worry about that more than clearly damaging effects of that unrestricted freedom.
- natmaka 6y agoFirst they censored Something, and I did not speak out Because I was not a Something (and disliked it).
- pjc50 6y agoFinally, after years of pleading, they came for the Nazis, and I said "why didn't you do this for the first thousand TOS violations? Now the rest of us can sleep a little more easily."
- samastur 6y agoYou could make this same slippery-slope argument for any lawful restriction, but it seems mainly popular for speech and gun rights. As with many other arguments it is far less persuasive to those who were not already persuaded.
- bogantech 6y agoFreedom should be unrestricted as much as it can be to the point that it doesn't harm anyone else, and we should be able to disagree with the billionaire CEOs who happen to control every form of media and communication
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaways885 6y agoNow is as good a time as any. The fact is the media will always be looking for the next Parler because it prints a great clickbait headline like "radical alt-right underground social network {discovered/deplatformed}".
- tyfon 6y agoAlso they make great scape goats so people don't look closely at facebook et al. I'm pretty sure a lot of the posts on facebook before the 6th also involved the insurrection. Parler had 1.5 million daily users or so and I suspect a good portion of these were lurkers/observers and not users actively engaging in rebellion. Zero moderation is not the way to go though, there needs to be mechanisms to remove posts with illegal material like child porn and the like or you risk blocking the whole network or make it "unhostable"
- josteink 6y ago> Also now really isn't the right time to promote the Fediverse's uncensored prowess, everyone's looking for the next Parler Given the precedent set by Google, Apple and AWS all synchronously booting a single company and platform out of existence, I can't think of a single better time to promote open platforms you are free to own yourself.
- Zababa 6y agoI always thought "free as in free beer" was a way to make a distinction between freeware and free/libre open source software. That's how the FSF seems to use it [O] [0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- Brian_K_White 6y agoIt is. The article is a little odd. "free as in beer" vs "free as in speech" is already such a perfectly clear way to distinguish between the two meanings of the word "free", that it boggles me that people still manage to be confused by it. That IS already the simple intuitive non-academic small-vocabulary no-riddles way to illuminate it. "free as in beer" is not about "it's a way to trick you into eventually spending more so it's not really free" It just means something you don't pay for, that's it. Maybe another way to say it is "free as in money" vs "free as in permission". I hate how that washes the very last atom of color from it but I guess that's just what some people need.
- Pazzaz 6y ago"Free as in beer" means that it is something you don't have to pay for; no monetary cost; free=gratis. It does not mean whatever the article is saying and it doesn't mean that you're expected to pay back. See Urban Dictionary[0], Wikipedia[1]. [0]: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Free%20as%20in%20Beer https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Free%20as%20... [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_as_in_beer https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_as_in_beer
- indymike 6y agoUsually a free beer has an implicit cost... for instance, buying a friend a beer later, listening to a sales pitch, etc... Truly free beer is so rare, there's another joke that goes with it: "Free beer is the best kind."
- eznzt 6y agoThe Fediverse is everything but uncensored--all popular instances have a very strong left-wing set of guidelines and will refuse to federate with you if you don't have the same guidelines.
- dsr_ 6y agoThat's the right of free association: you don't have to associate with Nazis if you don't want to.
- eznzt 6y agoI'm not advocating they associate with conservatives if they don't want to, I'm replying to the comment which talked about how the Fediverse is "uncensored" when, in practice, it's even more tightly moderated than Twitter.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoNote that the mainstream Fediverse's federation isn't just refusal to "associate with Nazis". If you maintain a server and are not a Nazi yourself, but you federate with a third server where a handful of people said something offensive (and this got blown up in the media even though it was just a handful of nobodies), the mainstream Fediverse will refuse to federate with you. It gets to the point where the Fediverse ends up enforcing a pretty narrowly defined orthodoxy not reflective of even many traditional anti-Nazis. For example, the Fediverse has a conspicuous numbers of strident trans activists in influential positions, and e.g. posting the sort of views that J.K. Rowling held (shared by many intellectuals who consider themselves on the Left) may to outrage and refusal to federate.
- claudiawerner 6y ago>all popular instances have a very strong left-wing set of guidelines Can you point to those guidelines on the top instances? I'm not sure which of the most popular instances prohibit, say, expression of conservative views. Though perhaps you do have a point - they might be more tolerant of far-left views than far-right views. I also think defederation because of lax guidelines doesn't happen as often as defederation because of users of other instances behaving in ways which heavily go against the guidelines - whether it's harassment or posting porn the major instance doesn't want, etc. Fedi, moreso than Twitter, is what you make of it, and there are many (but just not as many) users on 'lax' instances (e.g. FSE or SPC or Smug or Weeaboo.space or Gameliberty... you name it) to talk to. I have an account on a major instance, a 'lax' instance, and my own instance. I have personally found I extract the least value from the local timeline 'lax' instance. I'm skeptical of the idea that defederation-by-association is as common as another commenter here suggests. I don't think it's meaningful to say a newspaper is 'censored' when there's another newspaper stand right next to it that shows every paper in full.
- egypturnash 6y agoDepends on where you go, there's a lot of places that are blocking all these right-wing instances as they pop up.
- cropcirclbureau 6y agoIs there any Fediverse member that's more akin to HN/reddit? As in, one where people post to some public wall (sub) as opposed to a personal one. They all seem to focus on microblogging. Maybe they don't find reddit broken enough to fix (nor do I really) or maybe I'm missing a point.
- tuukkao 6y ago> Regular social media platforms like Facebook have a single point of failure. If their servers go down, your content goes down with it. While I agree with the principle of this argument, I think it's far more likely that any of the publicly available Mastodon instances goes boom long before Twitter does. My different kinds of social media activities might be spread across the fediverse, but all of my toots are only on one point of failure, and technically in significantly more incompetent hands than on Twitter. I'm not disagreeing with this article per se – I want decentralized social media to succeed as much as everyone else – but it's much too brittle and technically minded for the people I mostly like to hang out with, i.e. non-techies.
- olah_1 6y agoThere are other decentralized social networks (mostly up and coming) that run on distributed networks that aren't as brittle. For example, a network of nodes that balance all traffic rather than a network of independent servers that federate.
- tuukkao 6y agoThat looks nice. Let's get back to this once any of those services has reached the kind of maturity that a non-techie is willing to sign up and start building their network. I have no idea what needs to happen for that to become the reality, though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- olah_1 6y ago> once any of those services has reached the kind of maturity that a non-techie is willing to sign up and start building their network Has the fediverse reached that level of maturity? A single distributed network is more like twitter, instagram, or telegram. A federated network necessitates teaching about home servers, blacklists, server outages, etc. I've heard from people that work on Activity Pub though that they are moving towards making things function in a more distributed way (portable accounts for example). So things seem to be converging in that direction regardless.
- nanna 6y ago> You probably heard that the Twitter-account of Donald Trump recently got compromised by the owners of the platform. I don't want to engage in any political discussions, but the main flaw with this is the violation of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is a deeply political demand. Who gets the right to speak freely and who shouldn't? Does even the US believe in freedom of speech when that speech involves a provocation to harm it? Would the US tolerate this from a foreign entity? A domestic one?
- etherwaste 6y agoCensorship-free? What are you talking about? On instances there are moderators that can do as they please and the largest federation doesn't allow instances like Gab in it.
- garritfra 6y agoThat's because every instance has their own rules. Many instances disallow for NSFW content, but that doesn't mean that that content is censored. It's just blocked on that instance. If you don't like those rules, you can switch to another instance.
- ryder9 6y agoso.. just like every social media people here whine about that is "big on censorship"? lmfao
- emptyparadise 6y agoYou may get banned from instances, but you can also host your own instance.
- jlkuester7 6y agoYou can say whatever you want on your own instance. That does not mean anyone else is forced to listen to you. IMHO this is one of the best parts of the fediverse! Moderation is decentralized, so decisions about what is acceptable can be made at much lower levels. This allows for more flexibility and nuance then trying to globally apply a one-size-fits-all set of standards.
- personlurking 6y agoIf someone deletes an instance, is your content gone? Can one join many instances and, if so, does that mean what you post in one instance is not seen on others? Or does everything you do show up on your profile? >As mentioned, the great thing about the fediverse is that all of these services are connected with each other. If I signed up for an account on a mastodon instance, I can subscribe to your posts on Pixelfed, and vice versa. This part confused me a bit. Can anyone ELI5?
- garritfra 6y ago> If someone deletes an instance, is your content gone? No. As long as another instance knew about your posts, that data is preserved on that instance. I believe you can file a deletion for those posts, but don't quote me on that. A recent example is the deletion of Drew DeVault's instance cmpwn.org. His web presence is gone, but I can still see his posts from my instance (fosstodon.org). > This part confused me a bit. Can anyone ELI5? Imagine having a twitter account and following your friend on instagram. Their posts will show up on your twitter-timeline, and you can like, comment and share them on twitter.
- Kototama 6y ago> A recent example is the deletion of Drew DeVault's instance cmpwn.org. Was there a justification?
- j-james 6y agoI'd imagine that was a personal instance with him as the only user, which seems to be a fairly common practice.
- grep_name 6y ago> A recent example is the deletion of Drew DeVault's instance cmpwn.org Interesting, what happened with this? I follow him on mastodon, but I haven't been on in a few months because even my heavily curated feed has become a political quagmire a bit too reminiscent of twitter
- 6y ago
- dmje 6y agoOrthogonal to this, but I find it terribly ironic that many of the "freedom of speech"'ers are probably the least likely to actually be able to argue their corner in a rational, sensible and polite way. Consider for example a left wing person trying to have a conversation with a pro Trump group on Parler. They'd get shouted out. That's not promotion of "free speech", it's promotion of "echo chamber of the same opinions as mine". Same goes on the left - imagine suggesting that maybe immigration should be thought about or you have an angle on the trans community that didn't quite sit well with the wokies... The point is that life is subtle and nuanced. Free speech in my humble opinion needs to be earned - which means open dialogue where ultimately you might be prepared to admit you're wrong.
- dmje 6y agoLolz downvotes
- StyloW 6y agoLooks like your opinion is not extreme enough /s On a serious note, as found in the second paragraph about Freedom of Speech on Wikipedia > The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exercise of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be subject to certain restrictions" when necessary "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals" Which I'd argue is fairly relevant when considering the Trump scenario. Seeing how "some instances still moderate their content", I think Freedom of Speech is a weak argument since the solution to moderation is moving to a different instance which is enabled by decentralization. Edit: Interesting how a (imo reasonable) comment about Freedom of Speech got censored.
- ryder9 6y agomUhBoThSyDz
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- metreo 6y agolately (2-3yrs) I've found twitter has generally become completely insufferable, I can't simply enjoyably watch a broad twitter stream, the fediverse manages to bring the joy back into this for whatever reason it is _less_ political and less full of influence(r)s shoveling trash into the shared social spaces
- doublerabbit 6y ago> Reason 2: It can't be censored Unless you own the core network, say a satellite in space with your own IP network there's nothing stopping a country blocking you or lawsuit to subpoena access. I won't mention that such mastodon services are mainly hosted by AWS/Azure et cetera; which was Parlers mistake. If they owned their own infrastructure they've wouldn't of been hit so badly.
- bjt2n3904 6y agoThe author raises Donald Trump as an example, I'll counter with Wil Wheaton's experience on Mastodon[1]. It's great that there are moderation teams that will accept inflammatory and controversial characters. But if the userbase doesn't believe in freedom of speech, it doesn't really matter if the platform does. 1 - http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-right-now-and-thats-largely-because-it-is-what-we-make-it/ http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
- tomtomtom777 6y agoIn the Fediverse, it would make sense to use government servers whose moderation rules are overseen by the legislative branch.
- honest_guy 6y agoWil had the ability to block people, mute people, mute words, mute regex, mute entire instances... If he didn't agree with the moderation of the instance he chose, he was free to find another or even start his own. Nothing about how the userbase acted restricted his ability to use the platform, publish content or engage with content in any way. He just got annoyed by it, then got banned by an instance admin.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wslh 6y agoThe article talks about the technical and political issues but not about the content quality. Can I currently find more accurate and interesting content in the decentralized network than in specialized groups in Reddit like /r/netsec?
- honest_guy 6y agoIn my experience on the fediverse, the content and people found there are definitely interesting. It is a friendly community filled with people talking about all sorts of topics. If you're seeking highly curated and specific information, I doubt it is for you (at this point in time). With that said, there are some great bots which are helping to fill the place with content from traditional social media so that you don't miss out. For example, I follow a bot which posts HN threads above a threshold of points onto the timeline. This is how I keep up with HN, and it is how I found this post. New federated apps are being developed all the time, too. A federated reddit alternative exists, which may one day satisfy your need for specialized/focused content on a given topic.
- williamtwild 6y ago>I don't want to engage in any political discussions, but the main flaw with this is the violation of freedom of speech. Someone needs to get educated on "free speech".
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- motohagiography 6y agoBetter for what? Even though I agree the Fediverse is better, it's useful to ask that question. There seems to be a gap in the understanding around what the internet is and what it's for, and the gap is a social one around the concepts of the Private and Public spheres. I use caps for them because they are ancient, named concepts (look up "polis and oikos," the private sphere wiki page has been vandalized). The 90's internet was initially an extension of, and a bridge between Private spheres of individual thought, competence, family, niche communities of interest, and preserved this with conventions around both anonymity and tribal, benevolent-dictator style governance. The Fediverse seems to replicate some of that, but to me it still seems like an anti social media reaction technology and not one that grows organically from a higher-order use case. Social media was the act of hauling out these Private sphere relationships into a Public sphere, for which they were not adapted, and to satisfy the infinite vaccuum of need for attention that defines the Public. The Public sphere has always necessarily fed on the Private, and the Private used the Public for its civilizing social benefits. I'd go so far as to say that the insanity of the Public sphere right now is the direct result of scarcity of Private sphere culture to sustain it and it's cannibalizing itself. Viewed through this broader lens, the Fediverse doesn't need social media features, it needs a Private sphere purpose for people to create and build things together, and then it can be more careful in adding bridges to the Public sphere. Anyway, abstract comment, but the question shouldn't be whether the Fediverse is an adequate social media replacement, it should be, "what are we going to make?"
- jlkuester7 6y agoSome very good points here! I host a Mastodon server whose users are a small group of close family. We mostly post with the semi-private "Followers-only" visibility since our goal is to share things with each other and not publicly. However, I do enjoy being able to also follow a ton of other open source projects/enthusiasts on my Mastodon feed too! The fediverse has become a very interesting place, but there are some features I think it needs to help it more successfully support its "Private sphere purpose" (e.g. private groups: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/139 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/139).
- egypturnash 6y ago
- astridpeth 6y agoIs there real content?
- jlkuester7 6y agoLike other platforms, if you want to be able to socialize on the Fediverse with your friends and family, then they will need to be convinced to join! (I was lucky (strategic) enough to spin up a Mastodon instance and invite my family to join just as Google+ went dark. (Yeah, yeah, we were still using it)). As far as "real" public content goes, my only real interests there currently are the news feeds for various open source projects/contributors and I can say that there are tons of those on the Fediverse! - darktable: https://mastodon.social/@darktable https://mastodon.social/@darktable - ubports: https://framapiaf.org/@ubports https://framapiaf.org/@ubports - Elementary OS: https://mastodon.social/@elementary https://mastodon.social/@elementary - Endeavour OS: https://mastodon.social/@EndeavourOS https://mastodon.social/@EndeavourOS - Blender: https://mastodon.social/@Blender https://mastodon.social/@Blender - Krita: https://mastodon.art/@Krita https://mastodon.art/@Krita - K9 Mail: https://fosstodon.org/@k9mail https://fosstodon.org/@k9mail - 0 A.D.: https://mastodon.social/@play0ad https://mastodon.social/@play0ad - Kodi: https://mastodon.cloud/@Kodi https://mastodon.cloud/@Kodi - ProtonMail: https://mastodon.social/@protonmail https://mastodon.social/@protonmail - Fdroid: https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg https://mastodon.technology/@fdroidorg - Matrix: https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix - NextCloud: https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud https://mastodon.xyz/@nextcloud And last but not least, sometimes you find random cool stuff to check out like the banjo music from the Capharnaum Counter Magicians Society (https://banjo.town/@magicians https://banjo.town/@magicians)
- proactivesvcs 6y ago> Reason 1: It's decentralized. Regular social media platforms like Facebook have a single point of failure. If their servers go down, your content goes down with it. Recently had a discussion broken into nonsensical fragments because one of the participants was banned. > Reason 2: It can't be censored. Even if everything someone says is controversial nonsense, it is still in his good right to express his thoughts. Only the admins have rights on their servers, as it should be. And if you run an instance which doesn't publicly state that it blocks right-wing servers, you'll be blocked by some of the big players, a move which is another step that the wider Fediverse is taking towards silencing a lot of speech. Granted, I don't want to hear most /any of it, but the author has conveniently omitted mention of this emergent behaviour. > Reason 4: It respects your privacy Admins can read everything you post on their instance, including DMs. >Reason 5: It's all about the community Until you say the wrong thing in the earshot of the wrong user and find yourself banned, with no idea why and silence when you try to follow the procedure to regain access. I've never tiptoed around a service like I do the Fediverse. I like the Fediverse. It's full of interesting people and discussions, art and humour and folk exchanging ideas but it's the utopia demonstrated by the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Justice". One wrong move and there may be no discussion about what you may have done wrong, no questions as to what your speech meant, the justice is simply executed. At least there's always another instance, until user reputation is added.
- elgfare 6y agoFrom the title, I was hoping for more "tangible" reasons. Most of the reasons given have to do with mitigating potential problems. Bad privacy, single point of failure, closed, censorship are purely theoretical problems for most people. Moreover, these are points that are harped over everytime mastodon is mentioned. It's not that they are not important, it's just not going to convince many people. I'm really curious: what are some user experience reasons to join?
- brianstorms 6y agoPro-tip in terms of naming: Calling it "Fediverse" is going to strike a lot of people as meaning "The Feds" not, I dunno, "federated". Gotta pick another name.
- jgerrish 6y agoPretending the Fediverse can't be censored is naive. New Internet protocols plus secure boot chains plus legislation will make it all moot. The past decade I learned to lose hope in these ideas of freedom, thanks to my friends. Just like copying VHS and cassette tapes (easy) led to copying DVDs (more difficult) and HDMI (difficult). Every tech makes it more difficult. The same will happen with distributed systems. More work for the users of those systems. And the discussion over the past decade shows that public support will be lost too.