[echelon]

ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're the only ones developing and implementing AT protocol.

Social media should be more P2P and learn from the 2000's era before the platform giants stole away the dream. Bittorrent, RSS, Atom, semantic web (FOAF, microformats) were the way to complete digital freedom.

[mariusor]

> moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

If you're not welcome in a community, join one that would hear you. Why would that be against your "freedom"?

[bouncing]

I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether alt text is “required” for images.

Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.

It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.

[M2Ys4U]

>I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques.

It's social networking. Of course there are going to be cliques. That's what happens when you put a non-trivial number of humans in one space (be it virtual or physical).

[vidarh]

So is Twitter, and every other social network. They just don't give you the tools to clearly delineate boundaries.

[bouncing]

There are debates and groups on other networks.

But there aren’t schisms over alt text or content warnings for food on Threads.

[prmoustache]

I haven't observed any debates on these topics from my fediverse account so I guess you see them only if you are looking for them.

[vidarh]

Is it a feature to you that whole sections of society are absent from it? Because otherwise those views would be there.

[sharperguy]

I think it's more of an arcitectural issue. If you were a node operator, would you peer with a dedicated racial hatred AP node? What if a small minority of your users complained that you blocked it.

With something like nostr, you are free as a relay operator to block whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, while users can just get that content from some other relay without having to create a new account and move their entire social graph over.

[vidarh]

This, to me, is an argument against Nostr.

To elaborate, I prefer that the barrier is greater.

[echelon]

Why should minds be put in jails? Why should we segregate into like-minded and undesirables?

We're better than this.

I grew up with [x views, y political party], but because the early internet was open and accepting and not at all like this, I was able to see the broader world and wholly new perspectives. Now the bias is to shit on, shame, and block everyone. That's not going to build a better society.

The internet pioneers would be aghast at all of the "happy little" censorship happening today.

I've been banned from several subreddits for leaving comments in subreddits the moderators dislike. Removed completely by automation. They don't even realize my comments weren't in support of their favorite issue to hate on.

Censorship is wrong. Put blinders on your own feed all day long if you so choose, but stop trying to put cages on other people's minds and voices.

[vidarh]

No minds are "put in jails".

But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.

I'm free to choose to set standards, and the standard of requiring them to have a second account if they both want access to me and to content I find deplorable is a really low barrier.

And others are free to choose to commune with me in the spaces I want to spend time in, and communities are free to set their standards.

I've not argued for censorship. I've argued for my right to shield myself very mildly from people I want nothing to do with, and for others to choose to do so with me.

You're free to say what you want on your instance or those of people who believe as you do or are fine with your speech.

Nobody is stopping your speech, just your ability to impose it on those of us who does not want it near us.

[echelon]

> No minds are "put in jails".

I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly troubling.

I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me on sight, which figures. From that moment, I've been auto-banned from several trans and liberal spaces for posting in /r/conservative. I'm LGBT and my partner is trans.

This authoritarian censorship is toxic and pervasive. It's just not right. Stopping the flow of ideas is how the pressure valves stop working. It's how polarization deepens and is how our democracy ends and authoritarians arise.

> But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me.

You can block me all you want. You can subscribe to a list of HN contrarians to filter forever. But you have no right to filter me from other people that don't willfully subscribe to your banlist.

Lock yourself in your house all you want. You can't keep me from enjoying the outside public [1], from meeting people in the public, or from me seeing and meeting other people you've locked out of your house. Or even going as far as to say you can't lock people inside your house without their consent or knowledge.

You do what you want in your house. But don't desire to make your house rules the default for all humanity.

[1] "the public" is an allusion to a P2P, non-federated, user-first social media protocol. Something like email.

[prmoustache]

You are pretty naive if you think there are barriers on networks that allows you to publish publicly.

Someone blocks you? Fine you can still access in incognito/private mode anyway. This is true on twitter, activitypub, AT too.

If you really want barriers, you should use networks that work on encrypted private groups.

[rsingel]

I see lots of folks I disagree with on Mastodon. But thankfully I'm now not seeing the Nazis, the fascist tech folks like Balaji S, or the Tankies.

I still hear about their awfulness, I just don't have to see it in my microblog timeline.

I'm not missing anything, make much better connections with people, have respectful disagreements.

Ain't nobody being censored. I'm just no longer wasting oxygen on the outrage mongers.

Oh and being banned from a bunch of subreddits says more about you, than about moderation.

Pretty sure I'm happy to have a feed that doesn't include you in it.

[vidarh]

> Oh and being banned from a bunch of subreddits says more about you, than about moderation.

While it is tempting to conclude that, and my initial reaction was similar, anyone would be banned from a lot of subreddits if they were to seek out controversy by going into spaces they disagree with and state their opinions. It can say a lot about someone, but doesn't have to.

I agree with you overall, though. There are outright Nazi instances - nobody is being censored. But they have no right to force their way into communities that do not want to interact with them, and on Mastodon we have the power to enforce that, or we can choose to delegate it to people we trust.

[saurik]

Because... you are terrified that you might manage to figure out how to access such content, and need to make it extremely difficult for you to do so, even on purpose? (I clearly don't understand.)

[vidarh]

No, because I want to be able to choose to interact with people who are fine with there being barriers to similar types of content.

If some feel they have a compelling reason to straddle both, they still can, so it denies them nothing, but sometimes even small extra barriers helps set a tone for communities.

[echelon]

> I can't understand the toxicity of mind that makes people think it's OK to impose others view their own, unwanted points of view.

You're using words like toxic to describe me and you don't even know me. This goes to show the incredibly rotten and highly polarized the status quo has become. Systems that behave the way you're describing are the current norm, and they're broken.

You can choose for yourself to ignore me. You can advertise to the world that you ignore me and people can opt into that if they choose. But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone. Nobody should have that power.

Imagine if [opposite viewpoint] could technologically shut you down for everyone else? The systems we design today could enable that tomorrow. Just because you're in a comfortable spot today doesn't mean that eroding rights and freedoms won't ensnare you tomorrow or that the zeitgeist won't change.

> If you're not welcome in a community

This is also frankly a disturbing trend. Creating little fiefdoms of unacceptance. Who makes you the judge of that? You don't even know what my views and values are, and you're seeking to shun me already.

We're all the same. We just sample the world differently. We all need to be more accepting and loving and stop playing petty team sports.

In the meantime, you're free to keep on tooting. Nobody is taking Mastodon away from you. It's just not a system I want to spend time or energy advocating for.

[mariusor]

> But you shouldn't ever have the right to unilaterally make that call for everyone.

In this hypothetical I'm only making the call for the people of my instance, not for everyone. Like I said, you'd be free to join other instances where people are willing to entertain your point of view.

The audacity of assuming that the server that I pay and care for should be a vehicle for content that I don't agree with is baffling to me. It's my house, my rules, simple as.

[echelon]

Sure, that's absolutely your right.

I just want spaces for me and others where this isn't the default imposed upon everyone. I don't want to subscribe to [x filtering] unless I choose.

House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons.

The legislators are going to make rules that enforce these technological straddles, and the defaults will slowly change in directions you neither anticipate nor enjoy.

We shouldn't accept ActivityPub as the end state solution to these problems. If anything, large instances (and thus their owners) will win out, and this just entrenches the status quo of tiny cabals in power censoring things that displease them.

[vidarh]

My Mastodon instance is not a public commons. If I choose to let you join it, it is on my terms. If you don't like that, there are others, or you can run your own. The "public commons" is the system of federation, not the instances.

[mariusor]

> House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons.

I can't understand how you can think that fediverse instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under the rules of the people that keep them running and not everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on their servers.

The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the many software that you can just pick up and run yourself.

[echelon]

Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media", when in reality it's not much different than Reddit without central corporate control and profit.

Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power dynamics and the end users are not powerful.

My concern is that we stop here and this becomes "distributed social networking". What we need more than anything -- more than Mastodon and ActivityPub -- are protocols that enable peer to peer communication where no node can impose its will upon others and the barrier to participation in the broad community doesn't demand fielty to powerful moderators.

[yborg]

They mean the freedom to impose their views on others, because if the ignorant can just be made to hear the 'truth' they will believe it too. Having the ability to remove such toxicity from the much larger community of people who genuinely want share ideas is a strength of the platform, not a weakness.

[systemz]

The larger instances, the larger moderation issues.

People are only people so fierce moderation will happen. With smaller instances "blast radius" is smaller and it shouldn't be problematic like in centralized social media.

[kstrauser]

> It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom.

That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology? Yep. Aggressive blocking of anti-science woo? Sure.

Moderation decisions are made at the instance level, not the network level. There are instances that take a laissez-faire approach. Others are quite heavy handed. Most are somewhere in the middle. Users can pick which sounds best to them and find servers that align with their wishes.

[saurik]

What you are describing -- a system where I have to maintain accounts on a number of separate networks that don't interoperate due to content control disagreements -- is an ecosystem of competing centralized systems, not a decentralized one, and that people who run their own servers are reportedly presumed evil and defederated either by default or at the drop of a hat is a visceral demonstration that this setup undermines most of the benefit you think you are getting by calling it "decentralized". The reality is that many of the people using Mastadon would be not just "happy enough" but "actively happier" (per all the clearly ridiculous controversy surrounding people doing the supposedly-evil work of building search engines or, heaven forbid, being able to quote-tweet without permission, lol... if you are going out of your way to prevent hyperlinks, something seriously wrong has happened) using a centralized competitor to Twitter that was merely run by someone they liked.

[vidarh]

The number of people who have to maintain more than one account is minuscule, and most of the time they ought to reflect over why they are part of communities with such mutual animosity that they can't find one home that accepts both/all.

I run my own, and have seen no trace of this being "presumed evil" you speak of.

[irusensei]

Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The impression I got is that the normie side instance admins apparently cooperate on blocking instances.

What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.

[krapp]

Two accounts are trivial to manage, especially with a third party client. I managed more than that through a bookmarks folder. Many people have multiple accounts on various platforms anyway.

Also you could always host your own instance and be your own admin. I started doing that a couple of weeks ago. It's easy to find a host plan, if you don't want to do all of the work yourself. But you could still do that if you wanted to.

[kstrauser]

Then get 2. They’re generally free.

That schism is inevitable. To pick an extreme case, imagine a server for LGBTQ people and another for self-declared neo-Nazis. The people on the 1st might have very strong feelings that they want no contact whatsoever with people on the 2nd. There’s no world where it’s reasonable to say they have to keep their servers connected.

Now suppose you want to follow people on the 2nd server for journalism purposes. It’s unreasonable to have an account on the 1st server and then complain that they’re not talking to the 2nd. Even if you have legitimate purposes that aren’t creepy, they’re not going to go along with it. So instead, you get another account to follow the 2nd server and everyone’s happy.

The Mastodon server I own turned 7 years old today. We’ve blocked probably a couple dozen servers over the years. In every case I can tell you exactly why we blocked that instance. Most of them involve, literally, their users sending mine swastika imagery, death threats, or other utterly indefensible content, and the moderators of those instances being OK with it. My users stick around because they trust my explanations for the moderation actions I take. They don’t want to manually filter actual Nazi content from their timelines. Those that do can pick any number of servers that wouldn’t block that content.

[grumbel]

What if I want something that isn't an echo-chamber?

[kstrauser]

Join one of the instances with looser moderation.

[xigoi]

Suhh instances tend to be put on shared blocklists, effectively making them echo-chambers too.

[kstrauser]

I think that says more about the content of those instances being blocked. If you're transmitting content bad enough to get blocked by a large portion of the fediverse, the problem has more to do with what you're saying than their decision not to hear it.

[xigoi]

The problem is the assumption that if you allow someone to say something on yur instance, then you necessarily agree with it.