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A worrying trend in the fedi lately is de-federation of entire servers because of misunderstandings, or arguments between admins. It really sucks. This is not

A worrying trend in the fedi lately is de-federation of entire servers because of misunderstandings, or arguments between admins. It really sucks. This is not what I wanted for the fedi when I started back in 2017. It has lead to some admins forming "federations", silos, inside the fediverse. Like I can see technical solutions for some problems, like DNSSEC verification similar to that of E-mail. But there is no technical solution to snowflakes acting butthurt.

phailhaus 4y ago
There is no technical solution to humans. These decentralized platforms just keep re-learning what the rest of the industry already knows.
OctopusLupid 4y ago
I'm an admin and I've noticed this issue as well, INTPenis. I've just resolved to taking the fediblock tag with a huge grain of salt. Stick to your values and do your own investigations instead of caving to social pressure. Of course, that didn't work when people started doing that whole "block X or we'll block you" guilt-by-association thing. But I just hope that's a minority. I believe a solution to this may be more decentralisation, so a small number of admins with old and bitter feuds aren't able to control the experience for the majority of users on large servers. Admins should be friends, not celebrities. That's why I'm not part of the whole UFoI thing, but I'm sympathetic to its existence.
- dack 4y ago
  What do you think about giving individual users more power to moderate amongst themselves rather than having server admins do it? For example, a much more powerful "blocklist" type feature that you can share with others? So a could spend a bunch of time doing moderation, and publish a "blocklist" that other users could then install on their account so they don't see some set of people / content.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  What we need is some universal moderation guidelines. Like for example; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me. As long as people follow the server rules, aggressively presented arguments, anger, fear, rude words said to famous accounts, should not lead to de-federation. Our rules already disallow all forms of xenophobia, transphobia, attacks, doxing and all that stuff. End users need to take more responsibility for moderation in the fedi. That's why we have the Mute button. But people would rather take "action" with the Report button, than the Mute button. Because they get so angry at some stranger online. You don't know anything about that person, or what they're going through. I have experience meeting reformed nazis, previously violent people who are trying to reform. So people go through stages in life, and maybe sometimes they're a bit off, but some day that person is going to wake up and then we should be able to help them out of their daze. De-federation makes this impossible.
PeterisP 4y ago
A nonnegotiable feature most people want from a social network is the ability to keep certain other people out, or at least fully disconnect from all people like them - at scale, as opposed to manually blocking/ignoring specific accounts. Motivations vary, simple spam and fraud is an obvious one, prohibited material (with CSAM at the extreme end) being another obvious one, but of course at some point politics also comes into play. You can't have a technical solution to that, it's a design choice/tradeoff. You can have a highly permissionless social network, but then it's not useful for the average person because it doesn't exclude the "undesirable" content; and you can have a highly regulated social network but then it's obviously not useful for people who do want to make the excluded content; but you can't have a single social network (even if federated) for everyone, splits are inevitable.
- dack 4y ago
  I agree with you that some users don't want to have to manually block specific accounts, but I don't agree that the network needs to decide. People already shared around "blocklists" for Twitter, and I understand there were even apps/browser extensions that helped with it. So yeah, you could say "I trust X person to make decisions about which accounts I see", without someone else also having to agree to that same set. If such a feature was more robustly built into a platform like Twitter then the company themselves would have a lot less pressure in making a universal decision (which guarantees some disagree with)
  - manfre 4y ago
    The feature of delegating content control is no different than defederating. The mechanism of choosing who the user delegates the decisions to are more clunky because that requires a server migration to change.
hanniabu 4y ago
One day HN will learn that blockchain resolves this, and everyone will still probably say there's no use case
anigbrowl 4y ago
'if you don't like incoming traffic, just de-federate' 'snowflakes acting butthurt' ('_')

phailhaus 4y ago

There is no technical solution to humans. These decentralized platforms just keep re-learning what the rest of the industry already knows.

OctopusLupid 4y ago

I'm an admin and I've noticed this issue as well, INTPenis. I've just resolved to taking the fediblock tag with a huge grain of salt. Stick to your values and do your own investigations instead of caving to social pressure. Of course, that didn't work when people started doing that whole "block X or we'll block you" guilt-by-association thing. But I just hope that's a minority. I believe a solution to this may be more decentralisation, so a small number of admins with old and bitter feuds aren't able to control the experience for the majority of users on large servers. Admins should be friends, not celebrities. That's why I'm not part of the whole UFoI thing, but I'm sympathetic to its existence.

dack 4y ago
What do you think about giving individual users more power to moderate amongst themselves rather than having server admins do it? For example, a much more powerful "blocklist" type feature that you can share with others? So a could spend a bunch of time doing moderation, and publish a "blocklist" that other users could then install on their account so they don't see some set of people / content.
INTPenis 4y ago
What we need is some universal moderation guidelines. Like for example; sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me. As long as people follow the server rules, aggressively presented arguments, anger, fear, rude words said to famous accounts, should not lead to de-federation. Our rules already disallow all forms of xenophobia, transphobia, attacks, doxing and all that stuff. End users need to take more responsibility for moderation in the fedi. That's why we have the Mute button. But people would rather take "action" with the Report button, than the Mute button. Because they get so angry at some stranger online. You don't know anything about that person, or what they're going through. I have experience meeting reformed nazis, previously violent people who are trying to reform. So people go through stages in life, and maybe sometimes they're a bit off, but some day that person is going to wake up and then we should be able to help them out of their daze. De-federation makes this impossible.

PeterisP 4y ago

A nonnegotiable feature most people want from a social network is the ability to keep certain other people out, or at least fully disconnect from all people like them - at scale, as opposed to manually blocking/ignoring specific accounts. Motivations vary, simple spam and fraud is an obvious one, prohibited material (with CSAM at the extreme end) being another obvious one, but of course at some point politics also comes into play. You can't have a technical solution to that, it's a design choice/tradeoff. You can have a highly permissionless social network, but then it's not useful for the average person because it doesn't exclude the "undesirable" content; and you can have a highly regulated social network but then it's obviously not useful for people who do want to make the excluded content; but you can't have a single social network (even if federated) for everyone, splits are inevitable.

dack 4y ago
I agree with you that some users don't want to have to manually block specific accounts, but I don't agree that the network needs to decide. People already shared around "blocklists" for Twitter, and I understand there were even apps/browser extensions that helped with it. So yeah, you could say "I trust X person to make decisions about which accounts I see", without someone else also having to agree to that same set. If such a feature was more robustly built into a platform like Twitter then the company themselves would have a lot less pressure in making a universal decision (which guarantees some disagree with)
- manfre 4y ago
  The feature of delegating content control is no different than defederating. The mechanism of choosing who the user delegates the decisions to are more clunky because that requires a server migration to change.

hanniabu 4y ago

One day HN will learn that blockchain resolves this, and everyone will still probably say there's no use case

anigbrowl 4y ago

'if you don't like incoming traffic, just de-federate' 'snowflakes acting butthurt' ('_')