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Individual Mastodon instances have already begun exhibiting insane behavior, and relying on someone else's fiefdom isn't for me. Social media should give full c

Individual Mastodon instances have already begun exhibiting insane behavior, and relying on someone else's fiefdom isn't for me. Social media should give full control to the user on top of a credibly neutral layer.

berkes 4y ago
> Social media should give full control to the user Are you implying this isn't possible with Mastodon/ActivityPub?
- KoftaBob 4y ago
  It's possible if users host their own Mastodon instance, which for the vast majority of users is way too much of a hassle to do. This is one of the reasons I think the nostr protocol is a better way of building a decentralized + censorship resistant social network. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mastodon-and-similar-programs https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
  - berkes 4y ago
    Activitypub > Mastodon. While it currently indeed is rather impractical and even unattainable to run your own instance, it's by no means impossible. The protocol has no opinion on it¹. ActivityPub is more complex than nostr (I've built software for both) but not fundamentally different. Neither nostr nor activityPub have fundamental properties that make it possible or impossible to be fully P2P or fully centralized. Nostr can easily become centralized. AP too. But ActivityPub can operate in a P2P nature - where every user == a server just as well as nostr can. Practically, Mastodon is the default for AP, and thus dictates the use and shape. But I run my own gotosocial AP server, which is both simple, lean and clean. So already it's practically possible to run an AP server on tiny hardware with hardly any maintenance overhead. ¹EDIT: AP just describes an "inbox/outbox" with a PUB-SUB mechanism over HTTP. HTTP requires some discovery (dns), but that does not require fixed servers/domains. One could theoretically have an "inbox" (http-endpoint) on their mobile phone, bypassing the need for a server alltogether. Nostr is much simpler, it has that going for it, certainly! But when people say that nostr is "p2p" and AP isn't, that only describes the current state, not their fundamentals.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    There are services which will host your server for you for $6/mo. Your domain, your moderation/rules, can talk to anyone else. But if you want to hang out for free on someone else's dime, you have to play by their rules.
    - berkes 4y ago
      You can even boot a "gotosocial" on a raspberri-pi at home for almost free (it'll cost a pi, and some electricity). Or on a €2/month VPS. And while gotosocial is still a multitier server (it resembles mastodon in much), there's nothing fundamental stopping the development of an even simpler rust/go/x activitypub server that acts for one actor only - a single-user server, which could be far, far simpler and leaner even.
bronikowski 4y ago
Agreed. That's why I run one-person instance of gotosocial. Works perfectly for me. I follow 30-40 people I know for many years, my client filters boosts (retweets) so I don't see outside noise. I hop on it, reply, maybe post something and then not think about it for many hours. A perfect social network experience IMHO.
jeroenhd 4y ago
The neutral layer approach which some decentralised alternatives seem to favour isn't all that great in my opinion. Browsing the commonly blacklisted Mastodon instances has given me more than enough reason to not want to moderate that crap. From AI generated child porn to calls for various genocides, there's plenty of disgusting material posted online that I'm not willing to sift through. When a server's front page is full of swastikas (and not as the religious, peaceful symbol they once were) then I'm not going to vet every single account on there; the people who flock to such servers are of no interest to me. My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech. I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to. However, your freedom of speech does not give you any freedom of consequences, and if others don't want to hear what you have to say they're as free to ignore and block you or your server as you are to speak your mind. This includes some incredibly toxic behaviour from popular "safe" Mastodon servers as well.
- ilyt 4y ago
  > My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech. Well, they are the loud and annoying ones but it's easy to miss others for the noise the unreasonable people are causing > I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to. The moderation of instance feed is just fine and required, that's how instance gets its own identity. What I disagree with is mods having rights to block what people can subscribe to. That forces making own instances just not to be on whim on the admins's political views which is far too high barrier to entry for most. There is also lack of any identity transfer, if server goes to shit you can move out sure, but none of your subscribers will automatically follow. I'd like something like "here is my DNS entry with public key, this redirects to whichever current server I'm on" so you don't need to host your own instance if you just want to have alias that's not tied to, again, admin's whims.
neogodless 4y ago
What's an example of social media where the user has full control? Does that not equate to all forms of spam, harassment, flooding, etc. having to be dealt with on an individual basis by every user?
- mxuribe 4y ago
  Running your own single-user instance comes the closest to that. (Also, it needs not be exactly the Mastodon tech stack. Can be other tech stacks like pleroma, GoToSocial, PixelFed, etc.)
Pxtl 4y ago
Why? Why isn't it okay the person who is taking on the risk and effort and cost of running the instance is setting the tone? At least on Mastodon you can move to a competing server and maintain your connection with the fediverse. If I dislike how Twitter or Facebook is being run, my choices are to suck it up or to leave the entire network. If I dislike how a Mastodon instance is run, I can move to another instance and keep my relationships from my old account. I mean if this is a dealbreaker for you why are you on HN? HN has opinionated moderation. That's part of the deal of being here.
turnsout 4y ago
Do you have a proposal, or is this just a blanket denunciation of all social media?
- lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
  How do you create an actually provably neutral system for computation that resists centralization? It exists but you may not like the answer.
rchaud 4y ago
> Social media should give full control to the user on top of a credibly neutral layer. The whole point of Mastodon is unbundling this concept of 'social media' as an opaque entity of some kind. You already have full control with Mastodon. Don't like how your instance is doing moderation? Start your own instance and set your own rules.

berkes 4y ago

> Social media should give full control to the user Are you implying this isn't possible with Mastodon/ActivityPub?

KoftaBob 4y ago
It's possible if users host their own Mastodon instance, which for the vast majority of users is way too much of a hassle to do. This is one of the reasons I think the nostr protocol is a better way of building a decentralized + censorship resistant social network. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mastodon-and-similar-programs https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#the-problem-with-mas...
- berkes 4y ago
  Activitypub > Mastodon. While it currently indeed is rather impractical and even unattainable to run your own instance, it's by no means impossible. The protocol has no opinion on it¹. ActivityPub is more complex than nostr (I've built software for both) but not fundamentally different. Neither nostr nor activityPub have fundamental properties that make it possible or impossible to be fully P2P or fully centralized. Nostr can easily become centralized. AP too. But ActivityPub can operate in a P2P nature - where every user == a server just as well as nostr can. Practically, Mastodon is the default for AP, and thus dictates the use and shape. But I run my own gotosocial AP server, which is both simple, lean and clean. So already it's practically possible to run an AP server on tiny hardware with hardly any maintenance overhead. ¹EDIT: AP just describes an "inbox/outbox" with a PUB-SUB mechanism over HTTP. HTTP requires some discovery (dns), but that does not require fixed servers/domains. One could theoretically have an "inbox" (http-endpoint) on their mobile phone, bypassing the need for a server alltogether. Nostr is much simpler, it has that going for it, certainly! But when people say that nostr is "p2p" and AP isn't, that only describes the current state, not their fundamentals.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  There are services which will host your server for you for $6/mo. Your domain, your moderation/rules, can talk to anyone else. But if you want to hang out for free on someone else's dime, you have to play by their rules.
  - berkes 4y ago
    You can even boot a "gotosocial" on a raspberri-pi at home for almost free (it'll cost a pi, and some electricity). Or on a €2/month VPS. And while gotosocial is still a multitier server (it resembles mastodon in much), there's nothing fundamental stopping the development of an even simpler rust/go/x activitypub server that acts for one actor only - a single-user server, which could be far, far simpler and leaner even.

bronikowski 4y ago

Agreed. That's why I run one-person instance of gotosocial. Works perfectly for me. I follow 30-40 people I know for many years, my client filters boosts (retweets) so I don't see outside noise. I hop on it, reply, maybe post something and then not think about it for many hours. A perfect social network experience IMHO.

jeroenhd 4y ago

The neutral layer approach which some decentralised alternatives seem to favour isn't all that great in my opinion. Browsing the commonly blacklisted Mastodon instances has given me more than enough reason to not want to moderate that crap. From AI generated child porn to calls for various genocides, there's plenty of disgusting material posted online that I'm not willing to sift through. When a server's front page is full of swastikas (and not as the religious, peaceful symbol they once were) then I'm not going to vet every single account on there; the people who flock to such servers are of no interest to me. My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech. I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to. However, your freedom of speech does not give you any freedom of consequences, and if others don't want to hear what you have to say they're as free to ignore and block you or your server as you are to speak your mind. This includes some incredibly toxic behaviour from popular "safe" Mastodon servers as well.

ilyt 4y ago
> My experience is that most digital free speech absolutionists just seem to be upset that they were banned from Twitter for promoting some kind of QAnon conspiracy or for hate speech. Well, they are the loud and annoying ones but it's easy to miss others for the noise the unreasonable people are causing > I personally think the ActivityPub/Mastodon approach of "let server moderators decide which servers can't interact with their servers anymore" approach is very reasonable. If Gab and Truth Social want to federate, they can, and if you want to set up your own server without blacklists you're completely free to. The moderation of instance feed is just fine and required, that's how instance gets its own identity. What I disagree with is mods having rights to block what people can subscribe to. That forces making own instances just not to be on whim on the admins's political views which is far too high barrier to entry for most. There is also lack of any identity transfer, if server goes to shit you can move out sure, but none of your subscribers will automatically follow. I'd like something like "here is my DNS entry with public key, this redirects to whichever current server I'm on" so you don't need to host your own instance if you just want to have alias that's not tied to, again, admin's whims.

neogodless 4y ago

What's an example of social media where the user has full control? Does that not equate to all forms of spam, harassment, flooding, etc. having to be dealt with on an individual basis by every user?

mxuribe 4y ago
Running your own single-user instance comes the closest to that. (Also, it needs not be exactly the Mastodon tech stack. Can be other tech stacks like pleroma, GoToSocial, PixelFed, etc.)

Pxtl 4y ago

Why? Why isn't it okay the person who is taking on the risk and effort and cost of running the instance is setting the tone? At least on Mastodon you can move to a competing server and maintain your connection with the fediverse. If I dislike how Twitter or Facebook is being run, my choices are to suck it up or to leave the entire network. If I dislike how a Mastodon instance is run, I can move to another instance and keep my relationships from my old account. I mean if this is a dealbreaker for you why are you on HN? HN has opinionated moderation. That's part of the deal of being here.

turnsout 4y ago

Do you have a proposal, or is this just a blanket denunciation of all social media?

lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
How do you create an actually provably neutral system for computation that resists centralization? It exists but you may not like the answer.

rchaud 4y ago

> Social media should give full control to the user on top of a credibly neutral layer. The whole point of Mastodon is unbundling this concept of 'social media' as an opaque entity of some kind. You already have full control with Mastodon. Don't like how your instance is doing moderation? Start your own instance and set your own rules.