Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

The problem with Twitter/"microblogging" is also lack of hierarchical structure. A BBS has a series of subboards, those subboard have posts and the posts have comments. Sure, things can degenerate to just a series of "mega-threads" but if it's done, everyone the topic and the subtopic and so you can good contextual discussion. Facebook has a three level structure; post, comment and reply. Some of the oldest boards had full tree-structure as does HN, here. Multilevel comment and reply can be confusing but can be really useful to drill down to the detail of discussion wants.

Party A says something on the Internet that offends party B.

Party B says something on the Internet that offends party A.

Party A complains that they’re being asked to self-censor.

I see it as both parties using the service as designed to speak their minds. Party A also has the tools to mute Party B if they don’t like what they have to say.

I have designed some solutions around this, but haven't found the right product/ecosystem in which to implement it yet.

The basic idea is that you need multiple independent publishers of append-only "credit rating" feeds, publishing their own views/opinions of the reputations of different servers, users, or hashtags across the whole of the network. Services can aggregate all of these moderation/rating feeds in realtime, and provide to their users a list of all of the different "social credit rating agencies", or moderation feed publishers. You as a user could then choose your moderators from across the internet, then their own moderation decisions are applied to your feeds. It's sort of like outsourcing the management of your block/mute list. You could, of course, disable all of the moderation feeds and see the firehose of slurs and spam, or switch to different ones.

We solved this with email (poorly, and over a long period of time), and RBLs were part of that process. We'll eventually see the same for federated/p2p systems as well.

I think the main problem is that the idea and implications of decentralisation are hard to fully grasp. It does not imply privacy or security. It does imply decentralisation of power, decentralisation of rules & code of conduct and decentralisation of financing.

My own experience:

Mastodon has provided me a first step in more digital sovereignty. It is very refreshing to have a timeline that you can fully control.

Moving to Mastodon felt like moving into a new village. You start with an empty timeline, and you have to actively work on your first connections.

After some initial effort, you are rewarded with meeting interesting people. They welcome you in their communities, and you can keep on discovering amazing people through the messages they boost!

Feel free to interact via erik@mastodon.utwente.nl :-)

I think the fundamental problem is that people's values and perspectives can be too different to be in the same room together without going at it.

Most people couldn't handle being in the same room as an avowed neo-Nazi saying Nazi things, for example, without at least picking a verbal fight, even if the Nazi wasn't addressing them directly. If they're talking about how they want to kill Jews, most decent people will feel like they can't just let that go unchallenged. And that's not the kind of argument that can really be handled civilly.

You get the same issue -- albeit usually not quite as strongly -- in a thousand different ways, when you have a globally scoped social platform. All those groups with fundamentally conflicting positions, all targeting each other. The result is chaos, which is why platforms are increasingly tightening the bounds of acceptable discourse.