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I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be s

I think world scale social networks as in an open "town square" are borderline impossible. Which is not that surprising as it's quite unnatural to talk and be seen by the entire world. However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own. With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues, it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer effort and the track record in keeping content online is far better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to consider. The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and how they are gamed. Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the federation part that sucks. It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync up content, likes and replies. Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of a social network, which is to find people and content. Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking down your content. Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is, you're not getting it. The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme safetyism. The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a solution. Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies, news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse. Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media. Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb.... Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back control.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Decentralized social media sounds better in theory, but in practice is less effective. People are voting with their feet. Or phones, I suppose. It's like all the FOSS types who yelled about how IRC is superior as millions migrated to Slack and Discord. Your bullet point list is nothing in the face of usability.
  - lorean_victor 3y ago
    its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce. as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce. now I (personally), as a consumer, hate the fact that I need to follow people at least on 3 platforms to get their content proper. as a publisher, I (again, personally) hate the fact that I am forced to at least partition the discussion on my content. but I'd tolerate these pain points for content / audience, because the main role of a social media is to give me content / audience. being nice and not having all these pain points is secondary.
    - bsder 3y ago
      > its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? Um, apparently, yes? Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted down. The content was super discoverable and searchable. Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse) is laughably bad on that front. People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phone apps--apparently searchability and discoverability isn't that important. I'm one of the olds, so don't get why the fuck people want phone apps to pester them all the time, but apparently the youngs want this very, very badly. So, yeah, apparently twitter and reddit were really quite usable for the vast majority of users. I'm a big fan of the fact that reddit's meltdown caused a bunch of people to set up forums again. However, that's a lot of duplicated work for every single forum administrator.
lorean_victor 3y ago
I see your points (though I don't fully agree). Most of these relate to a "central search and discovery service". this doesn't need to be coupled with the rest of the network functionalities (posting content or interacting with content), which I personally believe is better fully distributed (for similar reasons to what you mentioned). We've done this for the internet as a whole (anyone can bring up a website on their own, search engines will discover and index it, but the search engine space is as centralised as it gets), so I believe we can do it for more "social" content as well.

myaccountonhn 3y ago

I think there is a huge issue with centralized social media. Why are unelected tycoons in the US dictating what the rest of the world should be allowed to see? What happens when they neglect languages and regions? It can go horribly wrong: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb.... Decentralized social media gives us a chance to take back control.

TulliusCicero 3y ago
Decentralized social media sounds better in theory, but in practice is less effective. People are voting with their feet. Or phones, I suppose. It's like all the FOSS types who yelled about how IRC is superior as millions migrated to Slack and Discord. Your bullet point list is nothing in the face of usability.
- lorean_victor 3y ago
  its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? as a content consumer I would love to be somewhere where there is engaging content and content discovery. I go to mastodon, my feed is empty and the search doesn't work. I bounce. as a content publisher, I would go wherever the audience is. I go to mastodon, users have a hard time finding me, no one gets my stuff. I bounce. now I (personally), as a consumer, hate the fact that I need to follow people at least on 3 platforms to get their content proper. as a publisher, I (again, personally) hate the fact that I am forced to at least partition the discussion on my content. but I'd tolerate these pain points for content / audience, because the main role of a social media is to give me content / audience. being nice and not having all these pain points is secondary.
  - bsder 3y ago
    > its not about "usability", in general, though. do you think reddit is truly usable? Um, apparently, yes? Google searches were doing "+reddit" before reddit melted down. The content was super discoverable and searchable. Everything (including discord, slack, and the fediverse) is laughably bad on that front. People switched from twitter and reddit to ... discord and slack. Mostly beause they handle identity and phone apps--apparently searchability and discoverability isn't that important. I'm one of the olds, so don't get why the fuck people want phone apps to pester them all the time, but apparently the youngs want this very, very badly. So, yeah, apparently twitter and reddit were really quite usable for the vast majority of users. I'm a big fan of the fact that reddit's meltdown caused a bunch of people to set up forums again. However, that's a lot of duplicated work for every single forum administrator.

lorean_victor 3y ago

I see your points (though I don't fully agree). Most of these relate to a "central search and discovery service". this doesn't need to be coupled with the rest of the network functionalities (posting content or interacting with content), which I personally believe is better fully distributed (for similar reasons to what you mentioned). We've done this for the internet as a whole (anyone can bring up a website on their own, search engines will discover and index it, but the search engine space is as centralised as it gets), so I believe we can do it for more "social" content as well.