13 ms·

Call it the fediverse please. And it had a censorship problem.

by lakomen 3y ago

erlend_sh 3y ago
I refer to the fediverse plenty in the article, but Mastodon is the safest, simplest default for anyone starting out.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
NoraCodes 3y ago
I'm curious what you mean by that. It seems hard to censor people when anyone can run an ActivityPub-compatible server on a $5 VPS.
- memefrog 3y ago
  Because if you refuse to censor any WrongThinkers you'll get defederated, and as a result all WrongThinkers have to sit in the same couple of isolated instances. The one nice thing about Twitter was that people with very different viewpoints shared the same platform. C didn't get blocked by A just because C wanted to be able to see tweets by B, just because B blocked A for a different reason. Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    There are lots of instances which largely don’t defederate. They’re generally, well, pretty unpleasant places, but they’re there. > Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers Define ‘should’. Instances have freedom of association. If an instance decides that it, say, doesn’t want to federate with the instance with all the Nazis, why should should it? Anyone using the instance who doesn’t agree can just go to an instance which suits their preferences better. Personally, if my instance decided “okay, we’re federating with the Nazis now because not doing that is censorship (? still baffled by the logic there)” I would simply move to an instance with a view more in line with mine on how much oxygen of publicity Nazis should be given.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - rsynnott 3y ago
        Nazis was just an example. There are also various other stupid arseholes who I would prefer the instance I use not inflict upon me, of course. Though the instance I use isn’t _particularly_ far left; not much revolutionary seizing of the means of production going on. (Semi-joking here; I assume you have some absurd definition of ‘far left’ which no Marxist would recognise.)
        memefrog 3y ago
        Far left is pretty obvious in its meaning: outside of the Overton window, to the left. People on the far left seem to refuse to understand that their views are rejected by 95% of the population. Nazis were not "just an example". They are literally always the example that is brought up, because they are a particularly emotive topic. The reality is that actual Nazis are extremely rare, and justifying defederation on the basis of their existence is equivalent to justifying child sex reassignment surgery in general because of the tiny percentage of intersex people. It is that absurd.
        maxbond 3y ago
        Nazis are rare in general, but pretty common on, yanno, Nazi forums. Just like not many people engage in the expensive sport of racing hotrods, but there are a lot of them on hotrod forums. They get kicked off of mainstream platforms so they often end up in the fediverse. So yeah, if you start up a Mastodon server and federate with everyone - you're gunnuh federate with Nazis. They might be a minority, but trolls always in the minority, that doesn't mean they can't cause trouble. If you haven't encountered Nazis on the internet, I don't know what to say, you must be hanging out in some pretty chill communities. I see someone promoting Nazi adjacent conspiracy theories on HN every few months, and a couple times I've seen literal Nazis here. You know why I don't see them more often? Because their posts get flagged and their accounts get banned. "Free speech advocates" plug their ears when you bring this up, at which point everyone else ("far left" or not - and there are about as many literal leftist radicals as there are Nazis) is forced to stop taking them seriously because they refuse to have a productive conversation. It's also a bit of an oxymoron to intimate that "far left" politics, where it's defined by you as being "outside the Overton window" as being common and influential enough to engage in widespread censorship. If they're so powerful and widespread - then clearly they aren't outside the Overton window? Clearly we're talking about something pretty mainstream?
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    You don't get to tell other people what they should and should not put in what may as well be an iptables entry. If your problem is that there aren't enough instances for people who believe what you believe, congratulations! The Fediverse empowers you to solve that problem.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      You've rather misunderstood the issue. The issue is not that "there aren't enough instances for people who believe what [I] believe". The problem is that people defederate in order to block A not because A has any "wrong" opinions but merely because A is is tolerant of B's very existence. Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted. For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway. The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks. The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together. Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.
- cbeach 3y ago
  Fediblock is a co-ordinated scheme for ostracising people from the Fediverse if they hold certain views. Generally it works by announcing blocks via the hashtag #fediblock, but there are also catalogues of instances to be blocked en masse, and automation available. One example of a list: https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock Some examples of reasons stated for blocking individual instances from the Fediverse: * “libertarianism” * “TERFism” (feminists that oppose modern trans ideology) * “Trumpism” (blocking nearly half the American electorate based on their political views?) * “free speech” * “federate with evil instances” Sounds sketchy, right? At least Twitter 1.0 had concrete guidelines that it could use to justify its censorship. As can be seen from the list above, Fediblock is highly partisan and arbitrary. An ideal tool for political weaponisation of the Fediverse.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Surely, you don't want to be associated with those instances anyway, right? I'm not seeing the problem here. You aren't being excluded from the fediverse, just from that group of instances.
    - cbeach 3y ago
      So if I express a liking for “free speech,” for example, my entire instance might be de-federated by Fediblock activists. And if I join another instance and discuss “free speech” I will be swiftly booted out, lest Fediblock comes for their instance, too. Can you see the issue with that? Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”? Am I the asshole?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > Can you see the issue with that? Not really, no. I understand maybe being a little irritated, but not being upset about it. Just associate with instances where you're welcomed instead. There are many groups who wouldn't want me to be around, in real life and otherwise. That's just life. > Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”? I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly. Your comments here don't make that very clear-cut. But it doesn't matter for this point. The point is that it's a matter of freedom of association. Do you really want to hang around where you're not welcome, for whatever reason? I know I wouldn't. Life is too short.
rsynnott 3y ago
How could it possibly have a censorship problem? It has no central control. I think perhaps your concern is actually that it has _freedom of association_; instances are not obliged to federate with instances which they don’t want to federate with. Fortunately, there’s a solution; you’re perfectly free to make your own defederated protocol without freedom of association, if you can figure out how to do that.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  That is a cheap excuse, some instances put up walls quicker than Trump on an overdose of Adderall. Granted, you are correct that the best approach is to just look for different instances. edit: There are a lot of users they lost because Mastodon got known for their strict content curation. This damaged all activity pub instances.

Call it the fediverse please. And it had a censorship problem.

erlend_sh 3y ago

I refer to the fediverse plenty in the article, but Mastodon is the safest, simplest default for anyone starting out.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

NoraCodes 3y ago

I'm curious what you mean by that. It seems hard to censor people when anyone can run an ActivityPub-compatible server on a $5 VPS.

memefrog 3y ago
Because if you refuse to censor any WrongThinkers you'll get defederated, and as a result all WrongThinkers have to sit in the same couple of isolated instances. The one nice thing about Twitter was that people with very different viewpoints shared the same platform. C didn't get blocked by A just because C wanted to be able to see tweets by B, just because B blocked A for a different reason. Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers
- rsynnott 3y ago
  There are lots of instances which largely don’t defederate. They’re generally, well, pretty unpleasant places, but they’re there. > Fediverse people use defederation for viewpoint moderation (censorship) when it should be used for blocking spammers Define ‘should’. Instances have freedom of association. If an instance decides that it, say, doesn’t want to federate with the instance with all the Nazis, why should should it? Anyone using the instance who doesn’t agree can just go to an instance which suits their preferences better. Personally, if my instance decided “okay, we’re federating with the Nazis now because not doing that is censorship (? still baffled by the logic there)” I would simply move to an instance with a view more in line with mine on how much oxygen of publicity Nazis should be given.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      Nazis was just an example. There are also various other stupid arseholes who I would prefer the instance I use not inflict upon me, of course. Though the instance I use isn’t _particularly_ far left; not much revolutionary seizing of the means of production going on. (Semi-joking here; I assume you have some absurd definition of ‘far left’ which no Marxist would recognise.)
      - memefrog 3y ago
        Far left is pretty obvious in its meaning: outside of the Overton window, to the left. People on the far left seem to refuse to understand that their views are rejected by 95% of the population. Nazis were not "just an example". They are literally always the example that is brought up, because they are a particularly emotive topic. The reality is that actual Nazis are extremely rare, and justifying defederation on the basis of their existence is equivalent to justifying child sex reassignment surgery in general because of the tiny percentage of intersex people. It is that absurd.
        maxbond 3y ago
        Nazis are rare in general, but pretty common on, yanno, Nazi forums. Just like not many people engage in the expensive sport of racing hotrods, but there are a lot of them on hotrod forums. They get kicked off of mainstream platforms so they often end up in the fediverse. So yeah, if you start up a Mastodon server and federate with everyone - you're gunnuh federate with Nazis. They might be a minority, but trolls always in the minority, that doesn't mean they can't cause trouble. If you haven't encountered Nazis on the internet, I don't know what to say, you must be hanging out in some pretty chill communities. I see someone promoting Nazi adjacent conspiracy theories on HN every few months, and a couple times I've seen literal Nazis here. You know why I don't see them more often? Because their posts get flagged and their accounts get banned. "Free speech advocates" plug their ears when you bring this up, at which point everyone else ("far left" or not - and there are about as many literal leftist radicals as there are Nazis) is forced to stop taking them seriously because they refuse to have a productive conversation. It's also a bit of an oxymoron to intimate that "far left" politics, where it's defined by you as being "outside the Overton window" as being common and influential enough to engage in widespread censorship. If they're so powerful and widespread - then clearly they aren't outside the Overton window? Clearly we're talking about something pretty mainstream?
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  You don't get to tell other people what they should and should not put in what may as well be an iptables entry. If your problem is that there aren't enough instances for people who believe what you believe, congratulations! The Fediverse empowers you to solve that problem.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    You've rather misunderstood the issue. The issue is not that "there aren't enough instances for people who believe what [I] believe". The problem is that people defederate in order to block A not because A has any "wrong" opinions but merely because A is is tolerant of B's very existence. Instead of having a decent moderation and filtering system whereby people could block and filter the messages of people they dislike, the structure, design and culture of the fediverse encourages server operators to block entire swathes of people who have done nothing wrong. That in turn encourages them to censor people proactively in order to avoid getting their instance blacklisted. For example if someone merely indicates that they're supportive of freedom of expression as a concept, they are likely to get banned from a lot of instances, not because the owners of those instances disagree, or think there's anything wrong with expressing that view, but because having someone express that sort of view (which, remember, is completely mainstream) on your instance means that your instance has a reasonably high chance of being blacklisted, which means that now your users can't really participate in the fediverse. Your users haven't done anything wrong, and the average user on the instances controlled by the thought police wouldn't be offended by seeing that (entirely mainstream) sentiment expressed anyway. The solution is for people to migrate away from instances controlled by thought police. The problem is that, just like the fediverse suffers from the network effects of much larger social networks, any instances that aren't federated with the main fediverse instances suffer too. And if you do set up an instance that allows people to express those sorts of views, you will very quickly become associated in their minds with Gab/Truth Social sorts of networks. The actual solution is not to have defederation at all. The actual solution is to embrace one of the great ideas of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. Individuals should maintain their own blacklists. They can subscribe to others' blacklists, of course, but it shouldn't a binary property of two instances whether the users using them should be able to be connected together. Compare ActivityPub to email. You don't get Google saying "we are going to block everyone with a Hotmail account from sending emails to Gmail users or receiving emails from Gmail users, because there are a couple of Hotmail users who have opinions we find distasteful". That would be clearly ridiculous.
cbeach 3y ago
Fediblock is a co-ordinated scheme for ostracising people from the Fediverse if they hold certain views. Generally it works by announcing blocks via the hashtag #fediblock, but there are also catalogues of instances to be blocked en masse, and automation available. One example of a list: https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock https://joinfediverse.wiki/FediBlock Some examples of reasons stated for blocking individual instances from the Fediverse: * “libertarianism” * “TERFism” (feminists that oppose modern trans ideology) * “Trumpism” (blocking nearly half the American electorate based on their political views?) * “free speech” * “federate with evil instances” Sounds sketchy, right? At least Twitter 1.0 had concrete guidelines that it could use to justify its censorship. As can be seen from the list above, Fediblock is highly partisan and arbitrary. An ideal tool for political weaponisation of the Fediverse.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Surely, you don't want to be associated with those instances anyway, right? I'm not seeing the problem here. You aren't being excluded from the fediverse, just from that group of instances.
  - cbeach 3y ago
    So if I express a liking for “free speech,” for example, my entire instance might be de-federated by Fediblock activists. And if I join another instance and discuss “free speech” I will be swiftly booted out, lest Fediblock comes for their instance, too. Can you see the issue with that? Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”? Am I the asshole?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > Can you see the issue with that? Not really, no. I understand maybe being a little irritated, but not being upset about it. Just associate with instances where you're welcomed instead. There are many groups who wouldn't want me to be around, in real life and otherwise. That's just life. > Do I represent a subversive niche group when I advocate for dangerous ideas like “free speech”? I have no idea what you advocate for, honestly. Your comments here don't make that very clear-cut. But it doesn't matter for this point. The point is that it's a matter of freedom of association. Do you really want to hang around where you're not welcome, for whatever reason? I know I wouldn't. Life is too short.

rsynnott 3y ago

How could it possibly have a censorship problem? It has no central control. I think perhaps your concern is actually that it has _freedom of association_; instances are not obliged to federate with instances which they don’t want to federate with. Fortunately, there’s a solution; you’re perfectly free to make your own defederated protocol without freedom of association, if you can figure out how to do that.

raxxorraxor 3y ago
That is a cheap excuse, some instances put up walls quicker than Trump on an overdose of Adderall. Granted, you are correct that the best approach is to just look for different instances. edit: There are a lot of users they lost because Mastodon got known for their strict content curation. This damaged all activity pub instances.