[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.

[krapp]

The status quo is that most people don't want pure anarchy, they want communities, and communities have boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only results in the most aggressively toxic elements and effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy who runs Gab recently found that out.

If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certainly isn't what's needed "more than anything."

[echelon]

Why would you think I want anarchy? I want a public park. A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent.

Gab attracted its group because it was the anti-Reddit. People banned from Reddit went there. Of course it was filled with anarchy and racism.

I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode. That's inequitable, and that's what Masto is today. And Reddit. And HN. And every other centralized platform.

I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them. And often times it's not about silencing harm, but rather power tripping. People get off on that.

More than anything, I'm deeply afraid of censorship. It's a real and very slippery slope. You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.

[krapp]

>I want a public park. A protocol as free as the old web and BitTorrent.

Public parks have rules, and police. Every forum on the old web had administrators and moderators, which you seem to be against. You said you wanted a system where "no node can impose its will upon others." In other words with no hierarchy, and that's definitionally anarchist.

Which again, is fine if that's what you want, but not everyone does. And I believe any platform run that way will inevitably devolve into a cesspool. Show me an example to the contrary.

>I don't want all of our protocols and platforms to have a higher class of user with God mode.

Different platforms and instances are owned by different people and operate under different rules, but there is nothing in the protocols of either the web or any federated system that imposes any specific political or ideological view on anyone. If you don't like Hacker News, you can make your own Hacker News with blackjack and hookers if you want. You just can't force everyone to care. But then, you don't have the right to force anyone to care.

>I'm a moderate centrist and I get censored by everybody. The right, the left. People want to shut you up unless you agree with them.

Please... you're acting like you're trapped in a dystopian nightmare, being censored like some radical political dissident. But scrolling through some your comment history I see the vast majority of your comments are untouched, or have at worst a couple of downvotes. And even in those, you seem capable of having conversations. You don't seem to be the victim of egregious censorship, so much as having opinions that some people disagree with slightly.

>You might think you're the one getting to pick and choose the topics today, but very quickly that will escape you.

I doubt anyone is going to come after me or my gamedev Mastodon instance anytime soon but if they do I'll say you told me so. And then just spin up another one.