7 ms·

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hnarn 4y ago
I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
- csande17 4y ago
  I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.
- seydor 4y ago
  > it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy
  - davisoneee 4y ago
    If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join. With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. That's the part that interests me the most. Which is why I (when I get around to it) will self-host my own ActivityPub instance (Mastodon? Pleroma? WriteFreely?). That way, I decide what gets blocked and what doesn't. And since it's federated (assuming other sites will federate with me), I can still access the benefits of using fediverse resources, without being beholden to someone else to make such decisions for me. From a longer-term perspective, ISTM that an ActiviyPub (AP) "user agent server" (UAS) which allowed individual users to federate with the resources of their choosing without having to "join" an extant instance, makes a lot of sense. Rather the UAS would utilize your local (i.e., generated and managed/federated from your AP UAS instance) fediverse credentials and act as a proxy for you, communicating with the instances containing the resources you're interacting with and acting as storage/cache/server for the user's client apps. This would make the fediverse even more decentralized and under user control. However, it would also make discoverability even harder. Perhaps that's ActivityPub's killer app? A discovery app. Perhaps a protocol change to require a cryptographically signed summary/intro for each instance, along with with a searchable index?
    - supermatt 4y ago
      If you migrate to another server, don’t you lose all your followers, who will still be following @you@oldserver ?
      - ekidd 4y ago
        Nope! That part is pretty neat. It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically. Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to use a well-run server with a good track record and a reasonable funding model, I guess.
        csande17 4y ago
  - throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
    there's no globally enforced blacklist. servers decide their own peering policy. cringe servers wall themselves off with much zeal, while based servers don't even care about cringe servers' existence. it's great
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy This is absurd. Mastodon is a network of severs run by volunteers. Admins have every right choose what servers to federate with. Besides, if you don't like "the whims of democracy", try freedom of speech under a dictatorship.
  - homarp 4y ago
    except a Mastodon instance is a private property... so no freedom of speech protection there https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individuals-have-first-amendment-rights-on-others-private-property/ https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...
    - seydor 4y ago
      There is also no legal requirement for democracy. We re talking about the principle
      - mftrhu 4y ago
        Does this principle trump the freedom of association of the person who is actually hosting, and paying for, for each instance?
  - lupire 4y ago
    "Democratic" means "people rule" not "majority vote". By giving you the choice of which server to use, you choose your moderation. If other people choose (or choose to delegate the choice) to block you, that's still democracy.
dustedcodes 4y ago
I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.
- JonathonW 4y ago
  There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers. There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.
  - lstodd 4y ago
    Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then. It's actually a nice solution.
  - nells 4y ago
    That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores. Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.
      - ilyt 4y ago
        It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to". That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers. Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech
mlindner 4y ago
As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.
- TylerE 4y ago
  It’s almost as if it’s a people problem and not a technical problem.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Way back in the mists of ancient times, about 1970, a myth arose in minds of primitive men and women; The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to anybody. This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending to the death. However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the limit - that is to say the idea that; "occasionally anyone could talk to anyone" silently transformed into the idea that "everyone should talk to everyone all the time" whereas in fact "most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time". That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for. It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of resilience through diversity in the OP.
haunter 4y ago
This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not. That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.
- bawolff 4y ago
  Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess. I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      More mastodon and mastodon-like hosts should allow for custom domain names. Then it would allow you to own your AP identity similarly to email.
      - elsjaako 4y ago
        That's just hosting your own, basically. You can pay someone to do that for you.
    - dsr_ 4y ago
      Banning a server because it won't shut down a spammer is effective. A server that doesn't take responsibility for its users will soon find itself shouting into the void... as long as enough admins react. Gmail is the largest source of spam because other mail systems won't ban it because it's too big.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hnarn 4y ago

I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.

csande17 4y ago
I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.
seydor 4y ago
> it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy
- davisoneee 4y ago
  If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join. With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. That's the part that interests me the most. Which is why I (when I get around to it) will self-host my own ActivityPub instance (Mastodon? Pleroma? WriteFreely?). That way, I decide what gets blocked and what doesn't. And since it's federated (assuming other sites will federate with me), I can still access the benefits of using fediverse resources, without being beholden to someone else to make such decisions for me. From a longer-term perspective, ISTM that an ActiviyPub (AP) "user agent server" (UAS) which allowed individual users to federate with the resources of their choosing without having to "join" an extant instance, makes a lot of sense. Rather the UAS would utilize your local (i.e., generated and managed/federated from your AP UAS instance) fediverse credentials and act as a proxy for you, communicating with the instances containing the resources you're interacting with and acting as storage/cache/server for the user's client apps. This would make the fediverse even more decentralized and under user control. However, it would also make discoverability even harder. Perhaps that's ActivityPub's killer app? A discovery app. Perhaps a protocol change to require a cryptographically signed summary/intro for each instance, along with with a searchable index?
  - supermatt 4y ago
    If you migrate to another server, don’t you lose all your followers, who will still be following @you@oldserver ?
    - ekidd 4y ago
      Nope! That part is pretty neat. It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically. Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to use a well-run server with a good track record and a reasonable funding model, I guess.
      - csande17 4y ago
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  there's no globally enforced blacklist. servers decide their own peering policy. cringe servers wall themselves off with much zeal, while based servers don't even care about cringe servers' existence. it's great
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy This is absurd. Mastodon is a network of severs run by volunteers. Admins have every right choose what servers to federate with. Besides, if you don't like "the whims of democracy", try freedom of speech under a dictatorship.
- homarp 4y ago
  except a Mastodon instance is a private property... so no freedom of speech protection there https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individuals-have-first-amendment-rights-on-others-private-property/ https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua...
  - seydor 4y ago
    There is also no legal requirement for democracy. We re talking about the principle
    - mftrhu 4y ago
      Does this principle trump the freedom of association of the person who is actually hosting, and paying for, for each instance?
- lupire 4y ago
  "Democratic" means "people rule" not "majority vote". By giving you the choice of which server to use, you choose your moderation. If other people choose (or choose to delegate the choice) to block you, that's still democracy.

dustedcodes 4y ago

I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.

JonathonW 4y ago
There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers. There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.
- lstodd 4y ago
  Reminds me of the FidoNet nodelist. And the proliferation of alternate FTN networks back then. It's actually a nice solution.
- nells 4y ago
  That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores. Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to". That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers. Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech

mlindner 4y ago

As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.

TylerE 4y ago
It’s almost as if it’s a people problem and not a technical problem.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Way back in the mists of ancient times, about 1970, a myth arose in minds of primitive men and women; The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to anybody. This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending to the death. However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the limit - that is to say the idea that; "occasionally anyone could talk to anyone" silently transformed into the idea that "everyone should talk to everyone all the time" whereas in fact "most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time". That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for. It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of resilience through diversity in the OP.

haunter 4y ago

This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not. That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.

bawolff 4y ago
Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess. I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    More mastodon and mastodon-like hosts should allow for custom domain names. Then it would allow you to own your AP identity similarly to email.
    - elsjaako 4y ago
      That's just hosting your own, basically. You can pay someone to do that for you.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    Banning a server because it won't shut down a spammer is effective. A server that doesn't take responsibility for its users will soon find itself shouting into the void... as long as enough admins react. Gmail is the largest source of spam because other mail systems won't ban it because it's too big.