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While it's far from over, the Facebook-Twitter-Reddit consensus does seem a lot shakier right now. I'm excited to see what the more fractured/federated social s

While it's far from over, the Facebook-Twitter-Reddit consensus does seem a lot shakier right now. I'm excited to see what the more fractured/federated social space of tomorrow will look like but I also feel like we'll come to miss some of the more contentious features of the current megaplatforms (e.g. centralized moderation).

trostaft 3y ago
I agree, particularly because I think smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems that have plagued traditional megaplatforms. That or developing better NLP tools that are able to better understand human nuance in a comment. The latter could be a dangerous tool...
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  The smaller you are the less it matters. One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance. Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me. My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear. An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 but https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515
  - paholg 3y ago
    So what do you call white supremacists who adorn themselves with swastikas?
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      “Clowns” or “Dumbasses who want to get attention.” That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)
      - dvngnt_ 3y ago
        you can be a clown and a nazi at the same time https://cbs12.com/news/local/orlando-nazi-demonstration-florida-hate-problem-racist-white-supremist https://cbs12.com/news/local/orlando-nazi-demonstration-flor...
        lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        This seems to miss the point of their comment. They're "clowns" or "dumbasses who want to get attention" because they're pretending to be nazis. (I clicked on that thinking I'd see someone with a big red nose, rainbow wig, and a swastika tattooed on their forehead; closed that tab in disappointment.)
    - the_third_wave 3y ago
      A rare sight, not worth giving them the attention they obviously crave. The problem does not lie there, it lies in the abuse of terms like nazi/fascist/racist which get applied to people who simply don't hold with the labeller's narrative. It has gone so far as to make these labels meaningless - this is not the boy who cried 'wolf' but the girl who cried 'racist'.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems Once I started to consider (because it's been pointed out) that Reddit outsourced their moderation to community volunteers this "fediverse" thing started to make more sense in principle. To use analogy phrasing I learned in school: "federations" is to "subreddits" as "fediverse" is to "reddit". I've heard of, e.g., Mastodon having performance issues, even in a way that could be maliciously exploited, but that's in the implementation details. The theory seems rather sound for future internet communities. It's exciting in a certain way; it feels like the birth of a new internet.
basch 3y ago
reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory. what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders. how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers. (i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there_any_plans_to_introduce_nomadic_identity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)

trostaft 3y ago

I agree, particularly because I think smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems that have plagued traditional megaplatforms. That or developing better NLP tools that are able to better understand human nuance in a comment. The latter could be a dangerous tool...

PaulHoule 3y ago
The smaller you are the less it matters. One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance. Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me. My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear. An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257 but https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110527273094994515
- paholg 3y ago
  So what do you call white supremacists who adorn themselves with swastikas?
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    “Clowns” or “Dumbasses who want to get attention.” That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)
    - dvngnt_ 3y ago
      you can be a clown and a nazi at the same time https://cbs12.com/news/local/orlando-nazi-demonstration-florida-hate-problem-racist-white-supremist https://cbs12.com/news/local/orlando-nazi-demonstration-flor...
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        This seems to miss the point of their comment. They're "clowns" or "dumbasses who want to get attention" because they're pretending to be nazis. (I clicked on that thinking I'd see someone with a big red nose, rainbow wig, and a swastika tattooed on their forehead; closed that tab in disappointment.)
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    A rare sight, not worth giving them the attention they obviously crave. The problem does not lie there, it lies in the abuse of terms like nazi/fascist/racist which get applied to people who simply don't hold with the labeller's narrative. It has gone so far as to make these labels meaningless - this is not the boy who cried 'wolf' but the girl who cried 'racist'.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> smaller communities are a solution to the moderation problems Once I started to consider (because it's been pointed out) that Reddit outsourced their moderation to community volunteers this "fediverse" thing started to make more sense in principle. To use analogy phrasing I learned in school: "federations" is to "subreddits" as "fediverse" is to "reddit". I've heard of, e.g., Mastodon having performance issues, even in a way that could be maliciously exploited, but that's in the implementation details. The theory seems rather sound for future internet communities. It's exciting in a certain way; it feels like the birth of a new internet.

basch 3y ago

reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory. what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders. how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers. (i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there_any_plans_to_introduce_nomadic_identity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)