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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

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Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#141

Post by gargron »

TheJoYo wrote: post #138
riffic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reach out to Eugen about that -- afaik he runs the @joinmastodon Twitter account directly or has someone helping him with it, but he's approachable about feedback.

Thanks, I did reply back when I noticed it. They seem to be collecting other people's posts on the topic at the moment. My main concern is the misconception that federated protocol provide ambiguous "security" that is: > Safer social media experience https://joinmastodon.org/ There's noting safe or secure inherent to federated social media.

"Safer social media experience" refers to user safety, i.e. moderation and safety tools like content warnings, phrase filters, mutes, blocks, and the various quality of life improvements to those features.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#142

Post by sneak »

kelnos wrote: post #127
sneak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized, opt-in publishing requires decentralized, opt-in moderation. 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 ne…

I don't think this is the point. You are trying to solve a social problem via technical means, and that generally does not work. Spam/scam email isn't a great parallel: that sort of thing is a more-or-less anonymous party intruding into someone else's life in order to try to sell them something or steal something from them. Blocking that kind of communication is the correct solution, and that's what success looks lik…

In a system where anyone can talk to anyone, for free, natural human tendencies are going to result in the vast majority of traffic being ads for sex, drugs, or salty carbohydrates.

Social networking needs moderation and filtering, because there are always going to be people who don't respect the time of others. Email just happened to be the first online social network, followed by usenet (which had killfiles).

There's going to be filtering. The only question is do you want it to be a small number of large, unaccountable corporations (and the governments that can put guns in the faces of their sysadmins), or "everyone who cares to, and you can pick"?

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#143

Post by TheJoYo »

Zoo3y wrote: post #106

Most of the points they elaborated on are People problems, not Mastodon problems. The genuine critiques of Mastodon they listed are migration issues, updating posts (it makes sense 'edited' posts lose their clout), and character limit (already way bigger than twitter's). Also, aren't they falling into their own "Us vs. Them" argument by complaining about general Mastodon users?

I'm sure they've never made lazy statements about information security, like recommending stackexchange over a federated platform.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#144

Post by TheJoYo »

mariusor wrote: post #113
kowlo wrote: post #3

> The “I read headlines only” problem This remains true for most platforms, not just those in the fediverse. HN is one example! I am reading this article with great interest. I've recently started exploring fediverse platforms with much excitement. I'm more interested in building a community at the moment, and although this can be achieved with a classic bulletin board system, the fediverse had me curious.

If you're interested in hosting a discussion based community similar to HN or reddit, I'm working on a project that might interest you. Link in my bio.

I wish you all the luck in that.

Every attempt at an AP derivative for voting has ended in scary ways.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#145

Post by rglullis »

kelnos wrote: post #127
sneak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized, opt-in publishing requires decentralized, opt-in moderation. 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 ne…

I don't think this is the point. You are trying to solve a social problem via technical means, and that generally does not work. Spam/scam email isn't a great parallel: that sort of thing is a more-or-less anonymous party intruding into someone else's life in order to try to sell them something or steal something from them. Blocking that kind of communication is the correct solution, and that's what success looks lik…

Relevant XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/constructive.png

Dealing with millions/billions of people online, it's impossible to know who I can/can not expect to have nuanced, respectful conversations beforehand.

So, yes, I think it's not a bad idea if we took deny-by-default approach with new connections and treating them as hostile, unless they can have some backing social proof from one of your peers.

I would also be interested in an approach where every the initiator had to pay actual money to be able to interact, no big amounts, just enough to work as a deterrent to stop spammers, scammers and moderation crusaders:

- Want to send a DM? Pay $1, get it back if the recipient clears you up.

- Want to make a comment for the first time on someone else's thread? Poster decides the minimum amount to leave as scrow. Really good comments could even collect some of the money from spammers/hostile ones.

- Want to report someone because you don't like them or their views? Put $10 in scrow for the moderators. If accepted, you get the money back. If there is no grounds for the report, the reported person gets to choose which charity to donate the money and the next report from you will cost double.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#146

Post by mariusor »

TheJoYo wrote: post #144
mariusor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in hosting a discussion based community similar to HN or reddit, I'm working on a project that might interest you. Link in my bio.

I wish you all the luck in that. Every attempt at an AP derivative for voting has ended in scary ways.

I consider myself to be pretty plugged in the AP ecosystem, yet I have no idea about what you're talking about. What happened?

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#147

Post by TheJoYo »

jancsika wrote: post #72
tylerchilds wrote: post #7

As a regular fediverse user, the main detail I'd be curious about is: Which server was the experiment done on and which servers were federated with? I don't have anything against this article per se, but it's worth noting every fediverse encounter is different. My main take on this article is that it's like walking into a McDonald's and being upset they don't serve pizza and then condemning all fast-food as being ter…

Show me the Mastodon server with the moderation policy that fits the author's use case. It appears I can't even search mastodon instances by the criteria of moderation policy. (But if I'm missing something obvious please correct me because I'd love to be able to do this!) There an abundant history of examples of centralized, publicly accessible forums where the quality of the discussion matches what the author desire…

My instance moderation policy fits my use case exactly. Not even one report in the years I've hosted my own instance.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#148

Post by dleslie »

librexpr wrote: post #105
dleslie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all true of hosting a private Discourse instance, as well.

You said in your original comment: > using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups Even if what freeone3000 said about Mastodon is also all true about Discourse (I know nothing about Discourse, but I'll take your word for it), it's not true about Twitter/Facebook. And since Mastodon is aimed more at the public group use case, Mastodon is a useful replacement of Twitter/Facebook even by yo…

Not quite: Twitter and Facebook have _armies_ of community moderation employees at their disposal; the fediverse has volunteers.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#149

Post by sneak »

rglullis wrote: post #145
kelnos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the point. You are trying to solve a social problem via technical means, and that generally does not work. Spam/scam email isn't a great parallel: that sort of thing is a more-or-less anonymous party intruding into someone else's life in order to try to sell them something or steal something from them. Blocking that kind of communication is the correct solution, and that's what success looks lik…

Relevant XKCD: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/constructive.png Dealing with millions/billions of people online, it's impossible to know who I can/can not expect to have nuanced, respectful conversations beforehand. So, yes, I think it's not a bad idea if we took deny-by-default approach with new connections and treating them as hostile, unless they can have some backing social proof from one of your peers. I would also…

Sadly, these sorts of bond-posting antispam systems are rendered mostly illegal due to financial surveillance requirements in the US: you can't really do micropayments like this without going through full KYC/AML on everyone you're receiving from or paying, which is a huge barrier to entry and adoption.

The intense regulatory requirements for total financial surveillance in the USA are holding so many insanely cool apps from being developed now that there's programmable money. Doing anything novel or cool with it is basically illegal.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#150

Post by TheJoYo »

mariusor wrote: post #146
TheJoYo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish you all the luck in that. Every attempt at an AP derivative for voting has ended in scary ways.

I consider myself to be pretty plugged in the AP ecosystem, yet I have no idea about what you're talking about. What happened?

I remember 3 or 4 projects that were abandoned but Prismo is the one that stands out to me.

https://fediverse.blog/~/Prismo/on-prismo-data-loss

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