[blacklight]

I think that the shift towards open protocols is just inevitable at some point. The ads-funded and surveillance-based business model is getting backlash both from users and regulators.

The EU's DMA is forcing giants to open up their platforms and APIs, which means opening up the walled gardens, which means that Twitter and Meta will no longer hold a monopoly on how their information is presented (i.e. there will be a blossoming of apps that deliver the content without all the spyware, which kicks surveillance capitalism directly in its bollocks).

Users are also becoming more sensitive about who stores their data and how it's used. As platforms become more aggressive about defending their profit margins, and start shovelling more ads down people's throats, more sponsored results and deploy more trackers, people are actually starting to quit those platforms and move somewhere else - a reversal of the network effects that made these platforms' popularity about 10-15 years ago.

I really believe that within 5-10 years the idea of using a closed, proprietary and surveillance-based piece of software to stay in contact with your friends will sound as dumb as using proprietary and paid protocols for computer networking instead of TCP/IP, or some proprietary implementation of messaging instead of emails.

[archontes]

How does an open protocol ever deal with the content moderation tech tree [1]?

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

[blacklight]

Every instance is run by different people.

And every instance admin decides which relays they want their instance to participate to - therefore the content of which instances gets forwarded by default to the federated inbox.

Moderation tools are available on all three levels of the hierarchy: user-level, moderator-level and admin-level.

As a user, you can mute reposts from certain users, report content to the mods (both of your own instance or of the instance of the offending user), mute or block users, hashtags, or entire instances.

As a mod, you have all the tools above, plus the ability to mute/block content on an instance level.

As an admin, you have all the tools above, plus the ability to block content from entire instances (what is called "defederate"), as well as control which relays forward content to the federated timeline.

And there's also an additional (often underestimated) layer of control through federation relays, whose job is to accept or reject requests of federation from other instances.

So you have much more granular and scalable tools for moderation when compared to a centralized platforms. Individual instances can also decide to target a certain type of users or topics, and therefore can be more restrictive on what content gets forwarded to them, while others can be more general-purpose, and users can decide which ones they want to join on the basis of what experience they want by default, while not losing the ability to follow whoever they like on any instance.

And, since individual instances are usually much smaller than a centralized social network, admins and mods have a much easier task moderating them. And it's also in their interest to do so: if things go too rogue on an instance and mods don't intervene, then other instances may decide to defederate the rogue node - with the consequence that the content generated by that instance will not reach other instances.

To me this sounds like a much more granular and scalable way of moderating a social network.