3 ms·
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 lik
by 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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.