[OfSanguineFire]

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows.

Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.

[afavour]

I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today.

Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet):

> I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show"

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695

[OfSanguineFire]

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the world's diversity of societies and views.

Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?

[2devnull]

It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.

[shadowgovt]

I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?

[RationalDino]

The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you.

To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things.

Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.)

I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.

[soundnote]

Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.

[2devnull]

Like San Francisco used to be more diverse, that’s what I’m getting at. People will argue that point, because the word diversity has taken on different meanings. I’d say there is diverse-diversity and less-diverse-diversity. I prefer one thing, other people are more tribal and prefer that other structure. Both types are needed, but I think we could use a bit more diverse-diversity at the moment, to increase dynamism. Mix things up a bit. At least with respect to the internet.

[shadowgovt]

Interesting. If I'm understanding the analogy to San Fran's past diversity, you mean like it used to be far more multicultural-but-overlapping and now it's a bit more homogeneous-techbro even though a lot of people from different backgrounds still live there?

If I've understood correctly... Yeah, I don't know if it's for good or ill but I think we see less of that kind of diversity as the enlargement of the Internet allows people to build virtual communities that are more like-minded and have less need to tolerate uncomfortable differences (in that you have the option of going somewhere else instead of "putting up with the asshole next door" because this is the only online space that caters to the thing you like).

On the other hand, I have no strategy to force people to coexist in the same virtual space when they don't want to, nor do I have concrete evidence that's even a desired outcome.

[pastage]

> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people

Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know.

There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.

[EricE]

Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.

[pastage]

It is quite hard to understand short comments. What are the relevant disasters you are talking about in this instance?

[KittenInABox]

How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female?

No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.

[shadowgovt]

There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content.

You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives).

The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that.

(I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).

[extraduder_ire]

Somewhat unrelated: a few months ago, before most mastodon instances started censoring their list of servers they blocked from federating, you could just look at the rules page of almost any popular server and see a server URL and why they were blocked.

To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.

[jmbwell]

> Mastodon's federation policies

Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know.

I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.

[t-3]

You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!

[soundnote]

The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.

[kelseyfrog]

This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.

[seti0Cha]

Sure, and the result of which is an echo chamber, which was OPs point. I didn't see anyone complaining that their own speech was being suppressed. Does anyone question that it's ideologically homogeneous? It seems to me the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing.

[shadowgovt]

An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence.

It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.

[t-3]

What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.

[wwweston]

If you literally can’t find a space where your views are palatable, then it’s possible there’s something wrong with them.

And if what you’re seeking is the privilege to compel other people who take responsibility for setting up and administering such spaces to carry / broadcast your unmoderated views regardless of their own, what we’re talking about isn’t really any principled kind of liberty.

[throwaway14356]

possibly, but we could also be wrong. Tell me the solution is to not talk about it but do it without the talking?

[carapace]

Nothing prevents Nigerians from setting up Mastodon servers.

The point of federation is not to force people to talk to people they don't like (for whatever reasons).

[afavour]

I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed.

> they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse

I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.

[soundnote]

You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.

[shadowgovt]

There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea.

Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.

[soundnote]

The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea.

Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.

[marcusverus]

Lefties always rationalize their embrace of illiberal tactics like censorship by citing extreme cases (“we just want to filter out people who want us dead”), only to turn around and apply the tactic very broadly (wrongthink = permanban). This Motte-and-Bailey fallacy is the rhetorical lever which has allowed the left to crybully millions of erstwhile liberals into becoming so many cheerleaders for censorship.

[afavour]

You’re putting words in peoples mouths here. I’m not LGBT but it’s my understanding that many LGBT folks are open about wanting to block beyond just extreme cases. They wish to participate in a community of shared values, which is hardly a new notion. What is new is that the blurred lines of public vs private spaces has confused everyone’s concept of “free speech”.

An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter, the fact that many of these communities are on public platforms doesn’t guarantee your access. Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.

[gvurrdon]

Your comment reminds me of a time I was a member of a sports club. One other member was thrown out as they were revealed in a newspaper article to also be an active member of a neo-Nazi organisation. But, they'd never said or done anything that gave the slightest hint of it and appeared to be quite pleasant and liked within the club.

I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.

[ekianjo]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time.

As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.

[RationalDino]

> As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say.

I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here.

When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons.

Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority.

On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.

[sph]

The Early Internet was white and middle class because they could afford it. But there were no recommendation algorithms or content siloes, so even if it was less diverse, it was potentially much more diverse and free than whatever we have today.

Today we have most of the world online, but they live on 5 websites, so even though it feels like there's more diversity and breadth, it has become a much more homogeneous culture.

There must be a name for this scientific phenomenon (variable increases between two spans of time, but the relative effect of it on the entire system has decreased)

[elpocko]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

What did you expect? It was invented and operated by "white nerds".

[cameronh90]

I suspect GP was referring to the diversity of thought as well as the diversity of race. However, I would also expect the average isn't a useful metric in this context.

The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be.

The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.

[throw555chip]

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

Many of us in the world chatted and conversed (VoIP was a thing already) with people around the world in the mid-1990's.

[ToValueFunfetti]

It took a bit of digging, but the page 'Hip hop' was created in June 2001. 'Hip Hop (Music)' was mostly a retitle of that page in April 2003, and what was left eventually became 'Hip Hop (culture)' by way of 'Hip hop culture'. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_culture&o...

[lisper]

> It was extremely white and nerdy

and male.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

diversity doesn't imply race and anyone who thinks so is a racist.

Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.

[seattle_spring]

I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

As I'm fond of saying, I'll always defend your right to make such statements, but that never implies it's valid or true.

[NoboruWataya]

My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture.

I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse. It is in fact modern social media that has sucked in people of all walks of life and dumped them onto the same platform. An internet of small, open communities sounds more like the internet I grew up with.

[gorbachev]

"My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused"

So was mine, but that was because I was living in a western country.

I bet the experience of people not living in western countries was quite different.

[ekianjo]

> I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse

Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.

[Jcowell]

Wasn’t there but I find it hard to believe that webmasters were kicking off people with views they found toxic. That Forms don’t have ban wars. There’s nothing about the internet or social media in regards to “cancel culture” or anything like it. Humanity has been doing it since we formed communities.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I've read people cannot actually fathom large numbers, and by extension I have to conclude they also cannot fathom scale or how that changes things.

There's a difference between your neighbor rejecting your belief in green jesus (thrall from World of Warcraft) and the entire world doing it.

That's the difference between your bog standard PHPBB forum from the 90's and FB today. We have _precedence_ for this, people have literally been booted off all major platforms at the same time.

[RGamma]

Depends on the community. Some were very quick to ban you. But there'd ~always be other ones.

[OfSanguineFire]

The early internet had both people interested in Communism in its myriad splinter groups (Marxists.org was one of the first big websites) and people advocating libertarianism in its myriad strands. Compare Mastodon where there was discussion that sites failing to mod out libertarianism might be considered beyond the pale, and ineligible for federation. (I'm not defending libertarian rhetoric, which I find tiresome, but it has been present in internet nerd culture since forever).

The early internet had a huge Buddhist scene (which produced a massive boom in IRL communities). Plus every other "alternative religion" in a Western context, from Hare Krishna to Eckankar. It was where New Atheism started, and at the same time, you could see the occasional figure advocating for American evangelicalism of precisely the sort that most riled New Atheists. People post-internet who know anything about the religions of the world outside the ones in their own area, almost certainly gained that knowledge from the internet.

The rather limited nationalities and races then using the internet did not mean little diversity of views, because you had just enough curious people around that, in aggregate, they could be curious about everything.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

as if any gathering of people doesn't have their own culture.

Where did this idea come from that people are cardboard cutouts that you can write on to perfection?

Having said that, I don't agree with your second paragraph at all. Individuals would get into shouting matches when they disagreed, but if you think for a second it's more diverse in todays cancel-culture I can only conclude you're not thinking well.

flame wars have been a thing since almost the beginning, and contrary to what you may think, politics and differences were a _major_ driver of that.

[yuck39]

Clearly you haven't seen the entire fediverse. There are tons of "free speech" instances along with a garden variety of other "alt" instances that are as active as the mastodon affiliated ones.

They tend to all be mutually blacklisted by each other, meaning that you won't see their posts appear in your federated timeline, however you can still individually follow and interact with accounts across the blacklist line.

What I personally do is host my own Pleroma instance where I can manually configure which instances I chose to associate with. Sure, I don't show up on anyone else's federated timeline but I mostly lurk anyways so I don't care and I get a large degree of control over what kind of content I see.

[oceanplexian]

“Fediverse” tools are a bait and Switch. I don’t need a glorified Wordpress blog that has elaborate censorship tools built into it. Networks like Mastodon also won’t implement E2E encryption because it would throw a wrench into their ideological crusade. Sounds like exactly the kinds of people I don’t want to associate with.

I can run my own web server, serve millions of users, and provide an RSS feed with technology from 10+ years ago. The Internet is Federated by design and it works fine for me.

[isodev]

> Just look at mastodon.social/explore

.social is but one of hundreds of instances. That's also what the parent comment was trying to say - we don't have to be drones, all unified under the same social server.

You're welcome to find an instance that aligns with your mindset or create one and shape it the way you like.

[someuser2345]

Isn't that how the first internet started? I assume most early adopters were also based in NA and Europe.

[bloqs]

The fediverse is an echo chamber for many groups, including notably hard left gen Z. It's integrity is similar to that of early days 4chans /b/, in that it wholly rejects reality around it, and it serves not as a discussion forum, but a self-fed enshittification engine racing to the most extreme take.

It couldn't look any more different from the intellectually curious people that largely constituted the beautiful artificial frontier of the early net, sprinkled with little webpages, and optimistic exchanges of early explorers.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I've never interacted or understood /b/ much but my impression of 4chan in general is that you kind of get a slice of humanity because of their rules + anonymity. Both the good and the bad.

But I've never seen anyone describe it as rejecting reality, nor have I ever got that impression from much that I've seen from there. It's mostly people fucking around, whereas the hard left you're referring to seem to be taking it a lot more seriously than most on /b/ (that I've seen, not much personal experience with it).

[parasti]

What you see on mastodon.social is the result of Elon Musk buying Twitter. One and a half years ago it looked very different from the current mix of US politics and social issues, with more European-oriented, non-English content. As a European, it lost a lot of relevance to me, personally.

[iteratethis]

Fully agree. It's a far-left Gen-Z ex-Twitter doom cult depression network.

[1over137]

>representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing... Just look at mastodon.social/explore

Wow, I've never used Twitter or Mastodon, but I just visited that link, and it's all American politics, abortion, trans, and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

[4ggr0]

> and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

if not even computer nerd stuff©™ interests you, I wonder what you're doing on HN :)