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Maybe this was more of an intro/pitch to something I already support, so I wasn't quite the audience here. But I feel that talking about the open social web wi

Maybe this was more of an intro/pitch to something I already support, so I wasn't quite the audience here. But I feel that talking about the open social web without addressing the reasons current ones aren't popular/get blocked doesn't lead to much progress. Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: - moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency These are all hard problems and it seems to make me believe the future of a proper community lies more in charging a small premium. Even charging one dollar for life takes out 99% of spam and gives a cost to bad faith actors should they be banned and need another dollar to re-enter. Thus, easing moderation needs. But charging money for anything online these days can cause a lot of friction.

echelon 1y ago
It'd be cool if you had to pay a certain amount of money to publish any message. And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion. I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention. I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.
- Groxx 1y ago
  it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
  - echelon 1y ago
    Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      Imagine a world where every City Hall has a vending machine you can use to donate a couple bucks to to a charity of your choice, and receive an anonymous one-time use "some real human physically present donated real money to make this" token. You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
      - echelon 1y ago
        I like that idea a lot.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  The people willing to pay money to post messages are not a desirable demographic. It is one that includes people like spammers.
numpy-thagoras 1y ago
"- moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency" And we have to think about how to hit these targets while: - respecting individual sovereignty - respecting privacy - meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use. It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.
emseetech 1y ago
Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable. I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.
- krapp 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - emseetech 1y ago
    I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself. If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model. Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again. I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
    - krapp 1y ago
      >Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult. I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so? You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media. There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit. This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.
BrenBarn 1y ago
Those are important reasons, but there are other reasons as well, such as concentration of market power in a few companies, which allows those companies to erect barriers to entry and shape law in ways that benefit themselves, as well as simply creating network effects that make it hard for new social-web projects to establish a foothold.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  That's an even harder problem to solve. I do agree we should make sure that policy isn't manipulated by vested powers and make things even harder to compete with. But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless. I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.
  - BrenBarn 1y ago
    > I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. For now. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until it wasn't. > I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. I'm not so sure. I mean, yes, you can create a "good" community on a small scale. But when the system is geared towards larger entities, those communities are always at risk because they don't have a seat at the table, so to speak. An example that's relevant recently is these laws about age verification. For small communities, things like age verification requirements can be an existential threat. One crazy person with a vendetta can sue them into oblivion for some technical violation, and unlike the big players, they don't have the resources to fight back. They also don't have the resources to lobby for verification mechanisms that are realistic at a small scale. When the rules of the game are set by the big players, small players are always at risk of being declared in violation, or just having the rules changed in a way that ensures they can't win. I'm coming to think that small communities are not safe unless large networks are either destroyed or severely restricted in a way that involves ongoing monitoring and enforcement. (I hesitate to use the word "community" for these large networks because I don't think something like Facebook is really a community, although there are communities within it.)
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: These two seem like the same problem: > moderation > spam You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like. Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that? > which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans. > good faith verification > posting transparency It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus. The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users. >This is a completely independent problem from spam. Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function. >It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these) - Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation. It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies. - good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do. >they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches. That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information. We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.
Seattle3503 1y ago
A lot of tech folks hate government ID schemes, but I think MDL with some sort of pairwise pseudonyms could help with spam and verification. It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID." If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you. The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.
- isodev 1y ago
  The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.
  - Seattle3503 1y ago
    That's awesome. Hopefully the US can get something similar.
  - DrScientist 1y ago
    I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns. However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society. So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.
_heimdall 1y ago
In my opinion, both spam and moderation are only really a problem when content is curated (usually algorithmically). I don't need a moderator and don't worry about spam in my RSS reader, for example. A simple chronological feed of content from feeds I chose to follow is enough. I do have to take on the challenge of finding new content sources, but at least fore that's a worthwhile tradeoff to not be inundated with spam and to not feel dependent on someone else to moderate what I see.
- kimixa 1y ago
  That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist. It's just your own direct curation of sources. And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.
  - _heimdall 1y ago
    > That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist Agreed, though when you are your own moderator that really is more about informed consent or free will than moderation. Moderation, at least in my opinion, implies a third party. > And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? The same way I make new friends. Recommendations from those I already trust, or "friend of a friend" type situations. I don't need an outside matchmaker to introduce me to people they think I would be friends with.
    - jryle70 1y ago
      Well, then the risk is that you build your own bubbles of likeminded people. Maybe that's all you need, may be not.
AaronAPU 1y ago
It is interesting how it became a norm to just blindly assume the more decentralized something is the better it is. There isn’t any evidence this is true. Reality isn’t so reducible.
- byryan 1y ago
  I haven’t really seen anyone make that assumption. I don’t think the article blindly assumes anything, they provided some pretty concrete examples of why a decentralized platform may solve some of the issues with centralized social media.
koolala 1y ago
#1 problem is server hosting
guerrilla 1y ago
Why are none of these a problem with Mastodon then? Some instabces do charge but most don't.
isodev 1y ago
I think moderation only works when individuals have the agency to choose for themselves what content/posts they see. Mastodon/fediverse sets a good example here - there is “general safety and theme” guards at instance level but whether you see “uspol” in your timeline or just posts of cat pics is entirely up to you. Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Somehow everyone feels compelled to “correct someone who is wrong” or voice an opinion even when the context does not invite one. This is just a recipe for “perpetual engagement”, not actual platform for social interaction (networking).
- liotier 1y ago
  > Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !
  - immibis 1y ago
    I had two accounts banned from BlueSky and they didn't say why. One was parodying Donald Trump so fair enough if they don't want content like that, and they told me it was banned for impersonating Donald Trump. The other, no idea at all because I don't think I even tweeted anything very controversial, and the email was just a very generic "you violated terms of service". My third account was not banned, but I don't use BlueSky any more. It's not a ban-evasion ban, since they're logged in together in the same web browser, with the menu to switch accounts active, and yet my third account was not banned. My point of sharing this info is that BlueSky is not a user-driven moderation system. It arbitrarily and centrally bans accounts, just like Twitter.
    - johnecheck 1y ago
      You're right, Bluesky moderation is centralized. Unless content is served p2p, some moderation has to be centralized. At the end of the day, there's a server serving content and that server operator is legally obligated to remove illegal material. Hopefully, atproto + community will provide alternatives for moderation services. Work is being done on this, we'll see what we end up getting. I feel that a competitive ecosystem of moderation services is probably the best answer we can hope for to that inherently messy problem.
Moru 1y ago
A small cost to enter just means the capital still controls the narrative. As long as we can't even stop bullying physically in schools, we will not be able to have a civil social media. Start in the kindergarten and fix the problems with next generation or it will just get worse.
XorNot 1y ago
Charging money I suspect feels like more of a solution to people who would otherwise prefer something be free, then an actual solution though. The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market. And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions? People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks. I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?

echelon 1y ago

It'd be cool if you had to pay a certain amount of money to publish any message. And then if you could verify you'd paid it in a completely P2P decentralized fashion. I'm not a crypto fan, but I'd appreciate a message graph where high signal messages "burned" or "donated money" to be flagged for attention. I'd also like it if my attention were paid for by those wishing to have it, but that's a separate problem.

Groxx 1y ago
it's pure waste-generation, but hashcash is a fairly old strategy for this, and it's one of the foundations of Bitcoin. there's no "proof of payment to any beneficial recipient", sadly, but it does throttle high-volume spammers pretty effectively.
- echelon 1y ago
  Maybe if you could prove you sent a payment to a charity node and then signed your message in the receipt for verification...
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Imagine a world where every City Hall has a vending machine you can use to donate a couple bucks to to a charity of your choice, and receive an anonymous one-time use "some real human physically present donated real money to make this" token. You could then spend the token with a forum, to gain and basic trust for an otherwise anonymous account.
    - echelon 1y ago
      I like that idea a lot.
charcircuit 1y ago
The people willing to pay money to post messages are not a desirable demographic. It is one that includes people like spammers.

numpy-thagoras 1y ago

"- moderation - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl - good faith verification - posting transparency" And we have to think about how to hit these targets while: - respecting individual sovereignty - respecting privacy - meeting any other obligations or responsibilities within reason and of course, it must be EASY and dead simple to use. It's doable, we've done far more impossible-seeming things just in the last 30 years, so it's just a matter of willpower now.

emseetech 1y ago

Having worked on the problem for years, decentralized social networking is such as tar pit of privacy and security and social problems that I can't find myself excited by it anymore. We are clear what the problems with mainstream social networking at scale are now, and decentralization only seems to make them worse and more intractable. I've also come to the conclusion that a tightly designed subscription service is the way to go. Cheap really can be better than "free" if done right.

krapp 1y ago
[flagged]
- emseetech 1y ago
  I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself. If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model. Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again. I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.
  - krapp 1y ago
    >Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult. I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so? You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media. There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit. This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.

BrenBarn 1y ago

Those are important reasons, but there are other reasons as well, such as concentration of market power in a few companies, which allows those companies to erect barriers to entry and shape law in ways that benefit themselves, as well as simply creating network effects that make it hard for new social-web projects to establish a foothold.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
That's an even harder problem to solve. I do agree we should make sure that policy isn't manipulated by vested powers and make things even harder to compete with. But network effects seems to be a natural phenomenon of people wanting to establish a familiar routine. I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. But it still creates a strong network effect nonetheless. I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. You need to focus instead on getting above a certain critical mass, where you keep a healthy stream of posting and participation that can sustain itself. Social media should ultimately be about establishing a space for a community to flourish, and small communities are just as valid.
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  > I look at Steam as an example here, where while it has its own shady schemes behind the scenes (which I hope are addressed), it otherwise doesn't engage in the same dark patterns as other monopolies. For now. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until it wasn't. > I think the main solace here is that you don't need to be dominant to create a good community. I'm not so sure. I mean, yes, you can create a "good" community on a small scale. But when the system is geared towards larger entities, those communities are always at risk because they don't have a seat at the table, so to speak. An example that's relevant recently is these laws about age verification. For small communities, things like age verification requirements can be an existential threat. One crazy person with a vendetta can sue them into oblivion for some technical violation, and unlike the big players, they don't have the resources to fight back. They also don't have the resources to lobby for verification mechanisms that are realistic at a small scale. When the rules of the game are set by the big players, small players are always at risk of being declared in violation, or just having the rules changed in a way that ensures they can't win. I'm coming to think that small communities are not safe unless large networks are either destroyed or severely restricted in a way that involves ongoing monitoring and enforcement. (I hesitate to use the word "community" for these large networks because I don't think something like Facebook is really a community, although there are communities within it.)

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> Ultimately, big problems with an open social web include: These two seem like the same problem: > moderation > spam You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. But we kind of already have that. Make likes public (what else are they even for?). Then show people posts from the people they follow or that the people they follow liked. Have a dislike button so that if you follow someone but always dislike the things they like, your client learns you don't want to see the things they like. Now you don't see trash unless you follow people who like trash, and then whose fault is that? > which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl This is a completely independent problem from spam. It's also something decentralized networks are actually good at. If more devices are requesting some data then there are more sources of it. Let the bots get the data from each other. Track share ratios so high traffic nodes with bad ratios get banned for leeching and it's cheaper for them to get a cloud node somewhere with cheap bandwidth and actually upload than to buy residential proxies to fight bans. > good faith verification > posting transparency It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again and in particular they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see instead of a bunch of spam from anons that nobody they follow likes.

johnnyanmac 1y ago
>You need some way of distinguishing high quality from low quality posts. Yes. But I see curation more as a 2nd order problems to solve once the bases are taken care of. Moderation focuses on addressing the low quality, while curation makes sure tye high quality posts receive focus. The tools needed for curation, stuff like filtering, finding similar posts/comments, popularity, following, are different from those needed to moderate, or self moderate (ignore, down voting, reporting). The latter poisons a site before it can really start to curate to its users. >This is a completely independent problem from spam. Yeah, thinking more about it, it probably is a distinct category. It simply has a similar result of making a site unable to function. >It's not clear what these are but they sound like kind of the same thing again I can clarify. In short, posting transparency focused more on the user and good faith verification focuses more on the content. (I'm also horrible with naming, so I welcome better terms to describe these) - Posting transparency at this point has one big goal: ensure you know when a human or a bot is posting. But it extends to ensuring there's no impersonation, that there's no abuse of alt accounts, and no voting manipulation. It can even extend in some domains to making sure e.g. That a person who says they worked at Google actually worked at Google. But this is definitely a step that can overstep privacies. - good faith verification refers more towards a duty to properly vet and fact check information that is posted. It may include addressing misinformation and hate, or removing non-transparent intimate advice like legal/medical claims without sources or proper licensing. It essentially boils down to making ensuring that "bad but popular" advice doesn't proliferate, as it it ought to do. >they sound like elements in the authoritarian censorship toolbox which you don't actually need or want once you start showing people the posts they actually want to see Yes, they are. I think we've seen enough examples of how dangerous "showing people what they actually want to see" can be if left unchecked. And the incentives to keep them up are equally dangerous in an ad-driven platform. Being able to address that naturally requires some more authorian approaches. That's why "good faith" is an important factor here. Any authoritarian act you introduce can only work on trust, and is easily broken by abuse. If we want incentives to change from "maximizing engagement" to "maximizing quality and community", we need to cull out malicious information. We already give some authoritarianism by having moderators we trust to remove spam and illegal content, so I don't see it as a giant overstep to make sure they can also do this.

Seattle3503 1y ago

A lot of tech folks hate government ID schemes, but I think MDL with some sort of pairwise pseudonyms could help with spam and verification. It would let you identify users uniquely, but without revealing too much sensitive information. It would let you verify things like "This user has a Michigan driver's license, and they have an ID 1234, which is unique to my system and not linkable to any other place they use that ID." If you ban that user, they wouldn't be able to use that ID again with you. The alternative is that we continue to let unelected private operators like Cloudflare "solve" this problem.

isodev 1y ago
The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 specification for their digital wallet identity explicitly supports the use of pseudonyms for this exact purpose of “Anonymous authentication”.
- Seattle3503 1y ago
  That's awesome. Hopefully the US can get something similar.
- DrScientist 1y ago
  I tend to agree that linking content to real people is a key mechanism that will help fight spam, hidden ads and influencing campaigns. However, if everything is linked to your ID - those that control that will be able to cancel you all at once. A bit like the consequences of being de-banked in an cash-less society. So if you bring in laws that require digital ID"s they have to be implemented with a very robust set of safeguards in my view.
Gigachad 1y ago
Telegram added a feature where if someone cold dms you, it shows their phone number country and account age. When I see a 2 month old account with a Nigeria phone number I know it's a bot and I can ignore it.

_heimdall 1y ago

In my opinion, both spam and moderation are only really a problem when content is curated (usually algorithmically). I don't need a moderator and don't worry about spam in my RSS reader, for example. A simple chronological feed of content from feeds I chose to follow is enough. I do have to take on the challenge of finding new content sources, but at least fore that's a worthwhile tradeoff to not be inundated with spam and to not feel dependent on someone else to moderate what I see.

kimixa 1y ago
That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist. It's just your own direct curation of sources. And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? I know people have tried to have a relatively closed mesh-of-trust, but you still need people to moderate new applicants, otherwise you'll never get any new idea of fresh discussion. And if it keeps growing, scale means that group will slowly gather bad actors. Maybe directly by putting up whatever front they need to get into the mesh or existing in-mesh accounts. Maybe existing accounts get hacked. Maybe previously-'good' account-owning people have changed, be it in opinion or situation, to take advantage of their in-mesh position. It feels like a speedrun of the internet itself growing.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  > That's just means you're effectively acting as a moderator yourself, only with a whitelist Agreed, though when you are your own moderator that really is more about informed consent or free will than moderation. Moderation, at least in my opinion, implies a third party. > And how did you discover those feeds in the first place? Or find new ones? The same way I make new friends. Recommendations from those I already trust, or "friend of a friend" type situations. I don't need an outside matchmaker to introduce me to people they think I would be friends with.
  - jryle70 1y ago
    Well, then the risk is that you build your own bubbles of likeminded people. Maybe that's all you need, may be not.

AaronAPU 1y ago

It is interesting how it became a norm to just blindly assume the more decentralized something is the better it is. There isn’t any evidence this is true. Reality isn’t so reducible.

byryan 1y ago
I haven’t really seen anyone make that assumption. I don’t think the article blindly assumes anything, they provided some pretty concrete examples of why a decentralized platform may solve some of the issues with centralized social media.

koolala 1y ago

#1 problem is server hosting

guerrilla 1y ago

Why are none of these a problem with Mastodon then? Some instabces do charge but most don't.

isodev 1y ago

I think moderation only works when individuals have the agency to choose for themselves what content/posts they see. Mastodon/fediverse sets a good example here - there is “general safety and theme” guards at instance level but whether you see “uspol” in your timeline or just posts of cat pics is entirely up to you. Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Somehow everyone feels compelled to “correct someone who is wrong” or voice an opinion even when the context does not invite one. This is just a recipe for “perpetual engagement”, not actual platform for social interaction (networking).

liotier 1y ago
> Contrast this to the “medias” like Threads, Bluesky, etc - moderation becomes impossible just because of the sheer scale of it all. Wut ? Moderation at Bluesky is fantastic: users build their block lists and share them for others to subscribe to - moderation à la carte... Power to the users !
- immibis 1y ago
  I had two accounts banned from BlueSky and they didn't say why. One was parodying Donald Trump so fair enough if they don't want content like that, and they told me it was banned for impersonating Donald Trump. The other, no idea at all because I don't think I even tweeted anything very controversial, and the email was just a very generic "you violated terms of service". My third account was not banned, but I don't use BlueSky any more. It's not a ban-evasion ban, since they're logged in together in the same web browser, with the menu to switch accounts active, and yet my third account was not banned. My point of sharing this info is that BlueSky is not a user-driven moderation system. It arbitrarily and centrally bans accounts, just like Twitter.
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    You're right, Bluesky moderation is centralized. Unless content is served p2p, some moderation has to be centralized. At the end of the day, there's a server serving content and that server operator is legally obligated to remove illegal material. Hopefully, atproto + community will provide alternatives for moderation services. Work is being done on this, we'll see what we end up getting. I feel that a competitive ecosystem of moderation services is probably the best answer we can hope for to that inherently messy problem.

Moru 1y ago

A small cost to enter just means the capital still controls the narrative. As long as we can't even stop bullying physically in schools, we will not be able to have a civil social media. Start in the kindergarten and fix the problems with next generation or it will just get worse.

XorNot 1y ago

Charging money I suspect feels like more of a solution to people who would otherwise prefer something be free, then an actual solution though. The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market. And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions? People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> - spam, which now includes scrapers bringing your site to a crawl What do you mean with "now"? If you've ever been in a competitive industry before, you're already used to the random DDoS, and if you've published a moderately successful website, you've dealt with misbehaving scrapers/user-agents too, like the ones that get stuck and get requesting random 100 URLs per second for weeks. I'm guessing you're alluding to AI scrapers, but are they really that different from what we've already learnt to deal with on the public internet?