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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Wait a second, I thought the selling point of the whole fediverse thing was that it was all decentralised, no one entity in charge, anyone can start up their own instance, etc.

So it turns out that there is a Thought Police patrolling after all?

On part of the promise surely works: You can still run your own instance and federate with those instances that want federate with you and build your own social net. However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that decentralization is not sufficient for freedom. Imagine a school cafeteria where you have freedom of association -- but the ruling clique can also say that loser nerds are not welcome to sit in their table.

However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

And we've seen this play out since the dawn of the Internet. The vast majority of online spaces were rich in cliques, flamewars, relentless trolling, and corrupt moderation that never shied from using the banhammer for personal gain. It's why such a high number of online communities follow a predictable path of eventually becoming echo chambers and later imploding. Perhaps it would even be fair to say that the vast majority of people who take on the mission of establishing and running a community have little or no knowledge of basic coordination mechanisms, some dating as far back as ancient Greece.

Themotte and some rat-adjacent spaces are the only ones I know that have avoided imploding while maintaining the ability to generate novel, interesting discussion. I can see no other reason than the fact that these places have not only enshrined rules that encourage civilized argument, what Karl Popper labeled "the rational unity of mankind", but also ensured that moderation is done in the spirit of those rules.

As evidenced by the broader culture war, the majority of people are fine with tribal warfare, whether it's online or offline.

However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.

This is starting to sound to me like folks that try to run their own mail servers. In theory, it's a federated protocol. In practice, newcomers and small fish are very difficult to operate because automated spam filtering pretty universally rejects them, and a mail server blocked by Gmail or Microsoft isn't terribly useful.

There have been some proposed ways to improve email federation, but the big players have a lot of inertia and no real reason to change anything.

It's interesting because spam filtering isn't particularly politicized to my knowledge, but the outcomes are similar.

Many new users have flocked to a couple large flagship servers running Mastodon because having content curated for them by ideologically similar moderators is more important to them than principles of decentralization or being burdened with having to choose what content they wish to see. The rest of the fediverse is completely unaffected by all this since they've been defederated by mastodon.social long ago in the gamer wars of 2014.

Since the beginning Mastodon is all about censorship. That the tools they are using are really difficult to use for that is just them playing on hard mode. Fortunately for them, they've got enough power to do the censorship anyway. For instance, to ban Gab's instance they had to hardcode the ban into the client. They then got Apple and Google app stores to ban any client which didn't have this ban hardcoded.

Since the beginning Mastodon is all about censorship. That the tools they are using are really difficult to use for that is just them playing on hard mode.

I'm aware that the creators are hardcore leftists, but I'm curious about this claim that it was always about censorship. If they were consciously thinking about this as you imply, why make something federated in the first place?

Iirc the system was stolen by that one German guy from a gnu actually-free-speech project. So they're in a "squatting in master's house while trying to tear it down with his tools" situation.

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