[S-E-P]

I would argue that what is described in this post is inherent in all social networks.

The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different.

It’s given me some of the most enjoyable interactions I’ve ever had online in the last ten years.

You need to have a thick skin, take the time to use filters, block certain keywords.

And use Pleroma, Mastadon is crap, Pleroma let’s you type for DAYS, “limited character cap” is really only a mastadon thing and it’s crap.

[crocodiletears]

The wonderful part is also its Achilles heel. Mastodon is advertised as an alternative to social networks, but since your identity is tied to your node, its much closer to joining a web forum structured like twitter with the possibility (but not guarantee) of interacting with similar forums. From that perspective it's great. When people offer it as an alternative to conventional social media, it comes up massively short for anyone not trying to live in a bubble.

Contrasted with facebook (or a twitter with groups), if you join a group of motorcyclists, there's little to no risk that you'll be excluded from the Scooter group of-which you're already a member because a few bikers got into a spat with scoot-gang, nor will you be excluded from any of the groups that get along well with scoot-gang.

[gargron]

> Contrasted with facebook (or a twitter with groups), if you join a group of motorcyclists, there's little to no risk that you'll be excluded from the Scooter group of-which you're already a member because a few bikers got into a spat with scoot-gang, nor will you be excluded from any of the groups that get along well with scoot-gang.

Are you sure? On Reddit, membership of one subreddit often results in bans from others, and Reddit is centralized.

[crocodiletears]

I consider those kinds of bans petty, but hardly a platform issue.

Reddit exposes group affiliation by default through public post histories. One can lurk in any public subreddit without consequence. Even banned, you can still consume public subs, though you can't interact with them.

The simple act of account creation (choosing the wrong node) is enough to exclude you from otherwise public content in the fediverse.

Joining Mastodon is often described as joining 'mastodon the network', when in reality there is no cohesive network (though there may be a canonical network). You're joining your instance + an opaque number of unknown nodes, with much of the content arbitrarily disappeared for any number of historical reasons to-which you may not be privy.

[cbozeman]

> You need to have a thick skin

Actually we need the rest of social media to have this, and then we don't need these alternative platforms.

There are simply too many people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives - without having someone challenge their ideas and values and making them defend said ideas and values, and they simply do. not. know. how to cope with it.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Why is grinning-and-bearing harrassment by people who want you dead virtuous? “people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives” always feels like a dogwhistle to me, because the people saying this tend to have far more privileged backgrounds than the people being harassed.

[didericis]

The entire world has been forced to act as diplomats. When coming from vastly different world views and experiences, being charitable in your interpretation of others is essential; it is important to distinguish disagreement, harassment, and true threat so as to avoid false positives and further degradation of the conversation. That charity requires having a very thick skin, and yes, it’s unfair when it’s not reciprocated and you are being targeted.

I think social media has taught us that most people are terrible diplomats. Which is to expected when a person’s threat response is engaged. Having a thick skinned and measured reaction to threat is still the best way to reduce that threat. And it requires a level of discomfort unprivileged people are generally much better at dealing with; the people who need to hear that advice most are those advantaged enough to be unfamiliar with dealing with discomfort.

I think a better solution than forcing everyone to become diplomatic or banning those who violate the norms of others is to have somewhat siloed social groups that are represented by open minded thick skinned diplomatic types that permeate the borders. That’s part of what’s appealing about a federated model; I think it better mirrors our social tendencies and historically successful political systems with diverse constituents (representative republics seem to be the only proven systems capable of dealing with lots of different peoples long term).

I’m of the opinion that the most virulent partisanship is actually due to the lack of silos rather than the echo chamber narrative. Before the internet, in group conversations stayed behind closed doors. That privacy allowed people who would be outraged at the contents of those conversations to get along in a diplomatic middle.

Now those conversations are public, and people seem to be fighting over control of one big room where all the walls have been removed.

[finiteseries]

I think a better solution than forcing everyone to become diplomatic or banning those who violate the norms of others is to have somewhat siloed social groups that are represented by open minded thick skinned diplomatic types that permeate the borders.

This is a genuinely fascinating idea that I haven’t seen before in discussion around Mastodon & co.

Not convinced it’s an actual possibility because of a lack of scarce resources & the like to actually cause diplomacy to happen over in a familiar way, but I have 0 idea of what the fediverse is like from within the fediverse, so perhaps there is something there I’m just not aware of.

Would upvote and read an insider’s “Diplomacy in the Age of Federation” esque article in a heartbeat.

[didericis]

Thank you, will consider writing one/fleshing this out.

[lmm]

> Why is grinning-and-bearing harrassment by people who want you dead virtuous?

Because it's what makes society possible.

[etripe]

The operative part is "want you dead". Ignoring murderous intent is decidedly not what makes society possible.

[cbozeman]

"It offends people, but good. They should be offended." - Paul Mooney, from Know Your History: Jesus Is Black; So Was Cleopatra

[throwaway45349]

Is this purely a US phenomenon? I don't see this much at all from people who live here t(the UK), but we're really starting to feel the effects of social media censorship hit hard, and I know a lot of people are really angry about Big Tech pushing their own moralistic world view on our country.

[cbozeman]

America has a long tradition of being vocal and offensive in its communications. At the very founding of our nation, you could find political cartoons of George Washington on a donkey, with the caption, "An ass being led to Washington."

In general Americans seem to be more thick-skinned than others. Or at least we used to be.

EDIT: Here you go buddy... this is almost a word-for-word of the argument that was used in the actual Supreme Court case, and should illustrate why we're at such a dangerous time in history - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeTuNES82O0

[cutemonster]

> America has a long tradition of being vocal and offensive in its communications

Selection bias. I'd think that's how people you happen to hang out with, or talk with on the internet, might be.

But not people in general, at least not the ones I've met from the US (lots of people).

[cbozeman]

> Selection bias.

Check out the book Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.

> I'd think that's how people you happen to hang out with, or talk with on the internet, might be.

You literally have no data to support that comment, whereas I'm referencing existing documents throughout American history that show just how vitriolic communications were.

You realize that our politicians used to get into fistfights on the floor of Congress, right?

> But not people in general, at least not the ones I've met from the US (lots of people).

What you've just described is selection bias, but I understand why would you feel that way. You're likely not exposed to a diverse selection of Americans. Do you know many corn farmers from the Midwest states? Do you know any deep sea welders from Mississippi? Do you know many club promoters from California? Do you know many book editors from New York?

[cutemonster]

Yes a bit selection bias in my case.

> referencing existing documents throughout American history that show just how vitriolic communications were.

> Do you know many corn farmers from the Midwest states? Do you know any deep sea welders from ...

Maybe you're right that those groups of people more often communicate in the ways you say.

At the same time, maybe they do also in Mexico or Italy or Kongo and in lots of other countries too.

So the examples doesn't really mean anything to me. Thanks anyway for explaining how you were thinking.

The US is a large country and by cherry picking examples one can "prove" anything one wants.

[glenstein]

>I would argue that what is described in this post is inherent in all social networks.

This is just what I was thinking. I can't imagine any platform that would meet some of the criteria demanded in this writeup. In what universe would you expect to close your account on twitter, move over to a new account, and migrate your history into a newly opened Twitter account? You can't do that on any private social platform. You also can't update posts on Twitter at all, let alone update and keep comments + replies. You can't know how many of your Twitter followers are "real" either; another thing not unique to Mastodon.

You actually can go past 500 characters on various instances. I'm on one that goes to 1024. As for character limits on "the fediverse" there are non-mastodon projects that let you go beyond 500 characters.

The larger project of federation is just so much more important than all these bizarre little idiosyncratic preferences. It's so maddening to listen to people who think the project of decentralized alternative to private social networks should live or die on whether it includes some new added feature that they can't even get on the private platforms.

[8bitsrule]

>inherent in all social networks

Yep. I've been using Fosstodon for a couple months. It's not much different from the others, except that the typical Fosster is at least as tech-focused as HN. Without room for 10-paragraph expositions.

My daily surf starts with topical sites I know will pay off for me from experience. Later I'll quickly scan HN and various subReddit headlines for items of interest. Finally (time allowing) do I drop into xtodon to walk the seashore and see what the waves left.

Some nice days I like to sit and people-watch. Social media's more like mind-watch. Like BBS's did, sometimes the waves leave some useful flotsam. Mostly it's kelp.

[lifthrasiir]

> The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different.

The same argument works with Twitter, and I genuinely believed so a decade ago (Twitter has been the only social network I still continuously use). I don't buy it at all after the decade-long experience. Your favorite followers will fight to each other no matter you've carefully chosen them. No amount of filter solves your timeline being messed.

All social networks do not work, federated or not. I'm going back to the good ol' IRC or whatever it follows.

[Barrin92]

Moderation alleviates those issues and the difference between Mastodon instances and Twitter is that the former can moderate content according to local community standards.

It's wrong to think of Mastodon as a 'social network', it's literally what the name suggests a federation of 'micro nations' with their own rules, more like subreddits than Twitter.

[lifthrasiir]

If your instance is large enough or your instance is small but peering to other instances, there would be enough interactions that will bother you eventually. Otherwise there is no point using them at all, a small IRC or Matrix or Slack or Discord server would work better.

[FalconSensei]

> If your instance is large enough or your instance is small but peering to other instances, there would be enough interactions that will bother you eventually.

I had this problem. And unless you are the moderator/host, there's nothing to do. I was having problems with some other instances, but as a user there was nothing I could do. I thought Mastodon would do a better job on allowing me to block or limit my viewers based on their instance, but no luck.

So I went back to Twitter. If I can't do anything about instances I don't like, better use Twitter and get rid of that extra layer of complexity.

[josteink]

Pleroma-link for those too lazy to search:

https://pleroma.social/

[kowlo]

Is that the only benefit of Pleroma over Mastodon? Have you checked Misskey before https://join.misskey.page/en/? It looks interesting too...

[LibertyBeta]

But does it have a flagship instance like Mastodon.social.

[WClayFerguson]

I have developed a solution that solves all problems described in the OP:

https://quanta.wiki/n/screencast