I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.
>You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse
>Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore
But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.
Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation.
> Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents
Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?
There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much.
Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.
Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is).
My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon).
It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.
It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble".
Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.
I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp)
But I disagree with some of your other comments
> The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter
The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon.
> it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices
For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting.
> It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.
The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site.
> will not make a community
If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.
Mastodon doesn't need to "make" it or "happen". Mastodon is not out there trying to become _the thing_. It works exactly as expected for a segment of people. It may not be your cup of tea and that's fine! Good thing we can have both.
This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time.
But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter).
Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.
Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed.
I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.
There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.
> I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.
100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software.
Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.)
It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists.
Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.
> It would be great if that could become public, too
Absolutely, that would be awesome
> Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model.
My only thought here is that something like the Hacker News model works pretty well (at least in theory). You would focus on norms of communication rather than on the content being expressed.
You'd still get bias for things like one community may prefer things very deferential. Another might value frank communication. But presumably nobody likes screaming or brigading. I think you're less likely to get left/right style biases if you focus on the quality of the communication rather than its content.
An approach like this would still miss important things. For example, you can say very toxic things in a civil voice. So you'd likely have to combine different orthogonal signals to have any sort of guarantee that your site isn't slowly drifting into a place where people know how to consistently violate the rules while evading detection.
At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services.
The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.
Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.