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This is so fucking stupid, though twitter does almost the same thing in not allowing you to reply to posts by people who have blocked you or even view their timeline.
I think that blocking can be a useful feature for some users, trading some accuracy of your view of the community for some peace of mind. It is not a substitute for moderation though, because it scales very badly -- if you have N offenders and K offendees for a particular topic, then it will take N*K blocks to settle.
Sure, it sucks if someone were to make a scathing reply to a popular post you made and you were not even aware of it because you had previously blocked the replier. But that is your problem because you opted for a less accurate map of reality.
Filtering the perception of what others see is totally unacceptable. Filtering what others can interact with is acceptable in the context of moderation, provided it is done in the open. Nobody expects the facebook pages of PETA or Tasty Sausages to be havens of free speech. But for an open discussion board this would be utterly ridiculous. If the Motte worked so that you could not reply to anyone who felt you had previously offended them (or had strategically blocked you to make it harder for you to spread your ideas through replies), it would be pretty useless indeed.
The only steelman I can think of in this regard is in the context of non-public, whitelist only discussions. If I have a group "Serious Discussions" with four other people on Signal (or whatever), then obviously nothing is stopping the four of them to also form a group "Serious Discussions Without quiet_NaN". Not particularly nice, and certainly a good reason to find different friends, but also not necessarily evil, because I can reasonably be expected to anticipate the possibility of communications which I know nothing about happening. At least everyone who can read a given message has common knowledge about who can read (and reply to) that message. The latter is not the case with that Reddit/Twitter thing, because nobody can be expected to keep track of who is blocking whom currently.
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Having gotten that out of my system, I found the rest of your post interesting as well.
I very much like the "host your own option" idea. What is fundamentally wrong (IMO) with most social media platforms is that they are very much designed as walled gardens, which makes a lot of sense if the goal is to create shareholder value, but is actively unhelpful if you care about communities or freedom of speech.
One technical drawback is that an open system requires well-defined protocols and backwards compatibility. If discord wants to
push their next step of enshittification on an unsuspecting publicroll out a new feature, they can simply deploy their update on their servers and make the clients update. If you want to do the same with E-mail, that will involve industry meetings, and RFCs describing standards which Microsoft then ignores (or not, I stopped paying attention to them in the early 2000s).Another more specific thing is poster authentication. When the motte moved from reddit, it would have been very convenient to take a copy of the user database along, but that was very much not technically feasible. It would certainly be possible to create a protocol where all the information on how you id individual users was common knowledge, but the downside is that this would limit your userbase to the people who feel comfortable creating and using client-side certificates, which is approximately a null set in the space of all possible users. Relying on OAuth only moves the problem. Google will obviously be willing to authenticate users for well-regarded websites such as the motte, but once the Wet Sock Appreciators get kicked out and have to self-host, they may find that Google is unwilling to deal with them, so they could not take their userbase along. (Also, if I had a google account, I would want it nowhere near my quiet_NaN persona for reasons related to opsec.)
Edit: as far as namespaces are concerned, DNS seems to be the obvious solution. submottes get a real name as in xcpe76yl.sub.themotte.org. Because nobody wants to use that, people can set up CNAMEs (plus the bells and whistles to make it work with https), e.g. culturwar.themotte.org if they want to stay in the namespace you control, or wetsocknews.com if they anticipate that they might need to self-host. (This obviously makes auth a bit harder due to browser's cross site scripting policies, but seems solvable for per-hoster auth.)
While this is kind of true, there's also a lot of room for protocols with a well-defined core and constantly mutating fringes. Google, for example, is constantly trying out little HTML extensions, the bad ones of which die on the vine and the good ones eventually get subsumed into the standard. There's a linux desktop called KDE, running on a protocol called Wayland, and KDE is always adding its own little tests to it with the same result; most of them die unceremoniously and are removed, some of them get nicely polished and turn into official Wayland features.
I've got no problem with that here also. It looks like Lemmy is already using ActivityPub, and I think there are some questionable decisions in this but nothing that prevents us from implementing ActivityPub as core functionality and then layering our own stuff on top of that. Much of which will end up dying and being removed, some of which might become a de-facto or even a true standard eventually.
This feels honestly pretty solvable; remember, we can always host our own OAuth if we like! We can even use Google's OAuth and then provide a subsidiary of that.
"Export the database" is fraught in many complicated ways but they feel roughly solvable if you're willing to devote the
developer timeClaude time to it.More options
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