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This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with commu

by madrox 4y ago

This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement. I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.

alkonaut 4y ago
How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?
- ezfe 4y ago
  The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well. If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action. If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.
Justsignedup 4y ago
I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit. Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity Twitter is about personal popularity
- madrox 4y ago
  I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.
- lanstin 4y ago
  True, but personal popularity is for me at least based on a useful property of people. When I was trying to explain why I enjoy Twitter so much, I would say, it is like Reddit but you only see people on your allow list, or vetted by your allow list. Reddit has too much junk and people I do not enjoy reading, but with twitter even if someone I follow doesn’t know that much about something, I think they are intelligent, funny, and reasonable, and that outweighs the dilution of expertise. Sure, if I want to buy some audiophile equipment, then I might follow reddit links in the search, but for conversation, I like people of a certain wit and style.
- fluidcruft 4y ago
  > Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.
  - Justsignedup 4y ago
    that's a problem, yes. BUT. Reddit is popularity of the subreddit centric. So your own personal popularity doesn't really matter. Its why people make throw-away accounts all the darn time. Twitter is about personal popularity. This is why it is so important on twitter to have personal recognition. Mastodon is reddit style moderation, with twitter style identity/popularity.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    This only happens on hyper political subreddits you don't want to be in anyway.
    - Sebb767 4y ago
      Last I checked, the ban bots exist in default subreddits (like /r/TwoXChromosomes) and there are reason you might want to comment in one of the shunned subs - not that you will usually know a sub is on that list until the bots get you. This kind of guilt by association is horrible.
      - yucky 4y ago
        [flagged]
        Gigachad 4y ago
        As far as I can tell, default subs haven't been a thing for many years now. The new reddit UI will ask you to pick topics you are interested in and show you subs related to those. And that UI shows an absolutely huge number number of subs so if you pick your country as an interest, it will show you quite small local related subs for example.
- smeagull 4y ago
  I don't want the streams to cross. I don't want to get my politics into my LEGO. But I also don't want to track multiple accounts.
  - Justsignedup 4y ago
    exactly!!!! i want to be able to go to a geopolitical mastodon and enjoy posting/reading there, and ignore the rest of the federation, but sometimes I want to see all like reddit's /r/all or the front page.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Yeah I'd rather a client that can transparently create new accounts for each community. You can't interact honestly or freely on places like reddit because nut cases will read every one of your comments to piece together enough info to dox you. You have to be hyper vigilant and post enough fake or in accurate info to throw them off but it's just not as good as a private community you can trust.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      That's just because Reddit lets people see where someone posts. On Matrix and Discord, you can use the same identity to join two different rooms, and only people that are in the same two rooms will know that you're there. It's always cute serendipity when I join a different Matrix room or Discord guild and find someone I know from one of the others. Quite charming. Reddit's public-timeline-by-default is what encourages the crazy stalking and cross-sub banning behavior, but its norms come from a time when Reddit and the web was a lot smaller.
  - madrox 4y ago
    This is arguably a client issue and not a federation issue. In the days of instant messaging we had no problem managing our AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc all in Trillian. We manage lots of accounts all the time anyway. The alternative is we revive OpenID, but good luck with that
    - 4y ago
KnobbleMcKnees 4y ago
It does feel like the author has somewhat missed the fact that Twitter has become a space in which, while you can technically say whatever you want, is driven overwhelmingly by opinions on topic-du-jour social issues. Further, the communities on Twitter that aren't part of this are largely segregated from the hive by virtue of consisting of users that are explicitly trying to avoid it. And there's a perpetual risk that the forerunners of those communites are eventually sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate regardless - we've all seen this happen in our feeds, and there's a good chance you've unfollowed or muted at least one person for abruptly and loudly picking up on some political or social topic. This is pretty much exactly what Mastodon is trying to avoid. Having over-subscribed political debate forums hang a sign over their door is definitely fine by me.
- holler 4y ago
  Twitter wasn't built as a community platform. It's always had the user-centric model, which works well for the types of people who helped it gain popularity to begin with, namely journalists, celebrities, politicians, brands, gov agencies etc.
  - hosh 4y ago
    No wonder I never really got the point of Twitter. This makes a lot more sense, or why there is a concern for making sure identity -- or brand -- is cohesive. I prefer visiting among different communities and affinity groups.
    - hnews_account_1 4y ago
      In a lot of cases, twitter’s model is better. In topic oriented websites (reddit is a good example), it becomes a shithole if you happen to share any interest that hits closer to 100k people. So a math or programming oriented topic is effectively able to moderate by pushing the memes and shitposts to mathmemes or programminghumor, but science gets overrun with shitty bots because of how wide the topic is. In many other cases, reddit’s model works better too. It just isn’t definitively one or the other.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
>Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement. quoting DIRECTLY from the post > the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.
DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
anytime de/centralization comes up I'm reminded about Taleb's take on the decentralzation of Switzerland's. It has messy federalized politics compared to the rest of the world that is obsessed with centralized governance. And Mastodon is like Switzerland quite literally how Taleb describes it in Antifragile ... Boring and full of small town drama (when it comes to moderation). It also seems not appealing to the many accounts who are only about influence or optimizing their follower count. Mastodon is like a reset button which is either a nightmare or a boon depending on what your original strategy was on twitter.
jarjoura 4y ago
Twitter has communities just like the other platforms, however, it's follow/follower model is a fatal flaw that encourages toxicity. Every single community that flourishes on Twitter eventually devolves into a set of people who spend all their energy complaining about something. You can choose to ignore the complaints, but after a while it just becomes too much. Once you've followed enough people to be part of a Twitter community, it's annoyingly difficult to undo that. People will be people and the same toxic crap happens on Reddit and Discord. These other platforms just provide an easy way to leave an entire community if you unhappy with the moderation policies and/or general group dynamics.
Nican 4y ago
I have a friend that insists that "Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs", but I do not agree with it. I am writing my own blog post about Mastodon: https://bristle-tachometer-5db.notion.site/Yet-another-Mastodon-post-d9604ad405a44741aa10afd7a12b9512 https://bristle-tachometer-5db.notion.site/Yet-another-Masto... I personally enjoy being part of a community, getting to know the people around it, and get to chat about it in small discussion groups. I hope the Fediverse continues to evolve, and helps to build communities. Twitter has become too much about building an audience.
- int_19h 4y ago
  > Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs I think it's a very apt analogy that's broadly correct. The crucial difference is that Mastodon servers are not a scarce resource (unlike land & buildings), so you can shop around until you find an HOA that you like, or just start your own.
spankalee 4y ago
Mastodon servers are very different from subreddits. I could participate in 100s of subreddits and follow each of their rules just fine. I'm not going to make even 10s of accounts on various Mastodon servers and create bespoke networks for each. If Mastodon wants to have communities, it should have a first class concept of communities where people can participate in as many of them as interests that they have. Servers aren't that.
nemothekid 4y ago
>This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it The problem is for people who are looking for a Twitter replacement, Mastodon isn't it.
satellites 4y ago
That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work). It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).
- hosh 4y ago
  We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).
  - pietervdvn 4y ago
    Lemmy does this: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
    - wmichelin 4y ago
      I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name
      - zwily 4y ago
        More awful than “toots”?
        hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
      - apetresc 4y ago
lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
Reddit and Discord are absolutely awful on this. Hundreds of the most valuable subreddits have been destroyed by corrupt mods, lifetime appointments, and absolute power over the subreddit. We should find better solutions and in no way seek to replicate their flaws.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  This problem was 'fixed' before Reddit even became a massive platform. Discoverability means people can easily leave draconian instances/sites in the dust, as is the case with almost all of the community splits back in the 2000s. Unfortunately, anti-discoverability is the norm now.
ummonk 4y ago
Now imagine how inconvenient it would be if you needed to create a new account for each subreddit or discord server. That's how Mastodon works because accounts are tied to communities.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Hardly ? It's way more inconvenient to create a new account for each forum (including this one), which is hardly inconvenient. And it's even easier on Mastodon because you don't enven need one account per server !
romwell 4y ago
>This is not a bug. It's a feature. [...] I'm one of those people that ...that didn't read the article fully, because it addresses this point exactly. Small communities aren't a problem. Having your account linked with just one of them is. Imagine what reddit was like if you had to pick a subreddit and stick with it for the entire history of the account. You'd only be allowed to post on other subreddits if you are following the rules of That One Subreddit. This is what Mastodon federation is like.
- toofy 4y ago
  forgive me if i’m wrong, but this comes across as if you’ve never used mastodon. i’ve been on there for a few years and i can’t for the life of me see how any of this is even a concern for using it. if you’re upset that some servers are more lenient than others, or that some servers have more active moderation, then just move servers. i’ve done it twice and it took like five minutes—you don’t lose followers or anything, they come right along with you as move…
onion2k 4y ago
There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. You must have joined Twitter quite late then. In the early days people complained that Twitter was silly because people tweeted things like what they were having for breakfast. Those complaints were a form of social control - peer pressure really - that drove people to use Twitter for Serious Things instead.
_8j50 4y ago
Reddit has r/All though.

by madrox 4y ago

alkonaut 4y ago

How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?

ezfe 4y ago
The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well. If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action. If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.

Justsignedup 4y ago

I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit. Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity Twitter is about personal popularity

madrox 4y ago
I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.
lanstin 4y ago
True, but personal popularity is for me at least based on a useful property of people. When I was trying to explain why I enjoy Twitter so much, I would say, it is like Reddit but you only see people on your allow list, or vetted by your allow list. Reddit has too much junk and people I do not enjoy reading, but with twitter even if someone I follow doesn’t know that much about something, I think they are intelligent, funny, and reasonable, and that outweighs the dilution of expertise. Sure, if I want to buy some audiophile equipment, then I might follow reddit links in the search, but for conversation, I like people of a certain wit and style.
fluidcruft 4y ago
> Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account. Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.
- Justsignedup 4y ago
  that's a problem, yes. BUT. Reddit is popularity of the subreddit centric. So your own personal popularity doesn't really matter. Its why people make throw-away accounts all the darn time. Twitter is about personal popularity. This is why it is so important on twitter to have personal recognition. Mastodon is reddit style moderation, with twitter style identity/popularity.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  This only happens on hyper political subreddits you don't want to be in anyway.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Last I checked, the ban bots exist in default subreddits (like /r/TwoXChromosomes) and there are reason you might want to comment in one of the shunned subs - not that you will usually know a sub is on that list until the bots get you. This kind of guilt by association is horrible.
    - yucky 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        As far as I can tell, default subs haven't been a thing for many years now. The new reddit UI will ask you to pick topics you are interested in and show you subs related to those. And that UI shows an absolutely huge number number of subs so if you pick your country as an interest, it will show you quite small local related subs for example.
smeagull 4y ago
I don't want the streams to cross. I don't want to get my politics into my LEGO. But I also don't want to track multiple accounts.
- Justsignedup 4y ago
  exactly!!!! i want to be able to go to a geopolitical mastodon and enjoy posting/reading there, and ignore the rest of the federation, but sometimes I want to see all like reddit's /r/all or the front page.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yeah I'd rather a client that can transparently create new accounts for each community. You can't interact honestly or freely on places like reddit because nut cases will read every one of your comments to piece together enough info to dox you. You have to be hyper vigilant and post enough fake or in accurate info to throw them off but it's just not as good as a private community you can trust.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    That's just because Reddit lets people see where someone posts. On Matrix and Discord, you can use the same identity to join two different rooms, and only people that are in the same two rooms will know that you're there. It's always cute serendipity when I join a different Matrix room or Discord guild and find someone I know from one of the others. Quite charming. Reddit's public-timeline-by-default is what encourages the crazy stalking and cross-sub banning behavior, but its norms come from a time when Reddit and the web was a lot smaller.
- madrox 4y ago
  This is arguably a client issue and not a federation issue. In the days of instant messaging we had no problem managing our AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc all in Trillian. We manage lots of accounts all the time anyway. The alternative is we revive OpenID, but good luck with that
  - 4y ago

KnobbleMcKnees 4y ago

It does feel like the author has somewhat missed the fact that Twitter has become a space in which, while you can technically say whatever you want, is driven overwhelmingly by opinions on topic-du-jour social issues. Further, the communities on Twitter that aren't part of this are largely segregated from the hive by virtue of consisting of users that are explicitly trying to avoid it. And there's a perpetual risk that the forerunners of those communites are eventually sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate regardless - we've all seen this happen in our feeds, and there's a good chance you've unfollowed or muted at least one person for abruptly and loudly picking up on some political or social topic. This is pretty much exactly what Mastodon is trying to avoid. Having over-subscribed political debate forums hang a sign over their door is definitely fine by me.

holler 4y ago
Twitter wasn't built as a community platform. It's always had the user-centric model, which works well for the types of people who helped it gain popularity to begin with, namely journalists, celebrities, politicians, brands, gov agencies etc.
- hosh 4y ago
  No wonder I never really got the point of Twitter. This makes a lot more sense, or why there is a concern for making sure identity -- or brand -- is cohesive. I prefer visiting among different communities and affinity groups.
  - hnews_account_1 4y ago
    In a lot of cases, twitter’s model is better. In topic oriented websites (reddit is a good example), it becomes a shithole if you happen to share any interest that hits closer to 100k people. So a math or programming oriented topic is effectively able to moderate by pushing the memes and shitposts to mathmemes or programminghumor, but science gets overrun with shitty bots because of how wide the topic is. In many other cases, reddit’s model works better too. It just isn’t definitively one or the other.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

>Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement. quoting DIRECTLY from the post > the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago

anytime de/centralization comes up I'm reminded about Taleb's take on the decentralzation of Switzerland's. It has messy federalized politics compared to the rest of the world that is obsessed with centralized governance. And Mastodon is like Switzerland quite literally how Taleb describes it in Antifragile ... Boring and full of small town drama (when it comes to moderation). It also seems not appealing to the many accounts who are only about influence or optimizing their follower count. Mastodon is like a reset button which is either a nightmare or a boon depending on what your original strategy was on twitter.

jarjoura 4y ago

Twitter has communities just like the other platforms, however, it's follow/follower model is a fatal flaw that encourages toxicity. Every single community that flourishes on Twitter eventually devolves into a set of people who spend all their energy complaining about something. You can choose to ignore the complaints, but after a while it just becomes too much. Once you've followed enough people to be part of a Twitter community, it's annoyingly difficult to undo that. People will be people and the same toxic crap happens on Reddit and Discord. These other platforms just provide an easy way to leave an entire community if you unhappy with the moderation policies and/or general group dynamics.

Nican 4y ago

I have a friend that insists that "Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs", but I do not agree with it. I am writing my own blog post about Mastodon: https://bristle-tachometer-5db.notion.site/Yet-another-Mastodon-post-d9604ad405a44741aa10afd7a12b9512 https://bristle-tachometer-5db.notion.site/Yet-another-Masto... I personally enjoy being part of a community, getting to know the people around it, and get to chat about it in small discussion groups. I hope the Fediverse continues to evolve, and helps to build communities. Twitter has become too much about building an audience.

int_19h 4y ago
> Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs I think it's a very apt analogy that's broadly correct. The crucial difference is that Mastodon servers are not a scarce resource (unlike land & buildings), so you can shop around until you find an HOA that you like, or just start your own.

spankalee 4y ago

Mastodon servers are very different from subreddits. I could participate in 100s of subreddits and follow each of their rules just fine. I'm not going to make even 10s of accounts on various Mastodon servers and create bespoke networks for each. If Mastodon wants to have communities, it should have a first class concept of communities where people can participate in as many of them as interests that they have. Servers aren't that.

nemothekid 4y ago

>This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it The problem is for people who are looking for a Twitter replacement, Mastodon isn't it.

satellites 4y ago

That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work). It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).

hosh 4y ago
We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  Lemmy does this: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
  - wmichelin 4y ago
    I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name
    - zwily 4y ago
      More awful than “toots”?
      - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
    - apetresc 4y ago

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago

Reddit and Discord are absolutely awful on this. Hundreds of the most valuable subreddits have been destroyed by corrupt mods, lifetime appointments, and absolute power over the subreddit. We should find better solutions and in no way seek to replicate their flaws.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DoItToMe81 4y ago
This problem was 'fixed' before Reddit even became a massive platform. Discoverability means people can easily leave draconian instances/sites in the dust, as is the case with almost all of the community splits back in the 2000s. Unfortunately, anti-discoverability is the norm now.

ummonk 4y ago

Now imagine how inconvenient it would be if you needed to create a new account for each subreddit or discord server. That's how Mastodon works because accounts are tied to communities.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Hardly ? It's way more inconvenient to create a new account for each forum (including this one), which is hardly inconvenient. And it's even easier on Mastodon because you don't enven need one account per server !

romwell 4y ago

>This is not a bug. It's a feature. [...] I'm one of those people that ...that didn't read the article fully, because it addresses this point exactly. Small communities aren't a problem. Having your account linked with just one of them is. Imagine what reddit was like if you had to pick a subreddit and stick with it for the entire history of the account. You'd only be allowed to post on other subreddits if you are following the rules of That One Subreddit. This is what Mastodon federation is like.

toofy 4y ago
forgive me if i’m wrong, but this comes across as if you’ve never used mastodon. i’ve been on there for a few years and i can’t for the life of me see how any of this is even a concern for using it. if you’re upset that some servers are more lenient than others, or that some servers have more active moderation, then just move servers. i’ve done it twice and it took like five minutes—you don’t lose followers or anything, they come right along with you as move…

onion2k 4y ago

There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. You must have joined Twitter quite late then. In the early days people complained that Twitter was silly because people tweeted things like what they were having for breakfast. Those complaints were a form of social control - peer pressure really - that drove people to use Twitter for Serious Things instead.

_8j50 4y ago

Reddit has r/All though.