11–20 of 29 posts
For a wildly different path to reaching the same conclusion, see also this SSC post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...
I really dislike this sort of argument. Doesn't it apply to anything? Your ISP, email, Facebook, internet, TCP/IP, WhatsApp, TikTok, roads, flats, air, city, country.
The article suggests it was killed by the same thing that kills all "total freedom, no moderation" chat forums. They attracted all of the pedos, trolls, and nutjobs and it killed the community, just like every single community that has tried this in the past. The concept just doesn't scale. You can't build a social platform without accounting for bad actors. It's like trying to build and airplane without accounting f…
It feels like every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan c…
It's really just obnoxious journalists that shape this kind of public opinion too, who well, nobody sane really trusts anymore.
The difference with IRC is that when one agrees to the global terms of the particular network they are joining, there are global network operators and admins that can ban bad behavior network wide. This is a middle ground between one centralized service like Twitter and the completely decentralized concept of Mastodon. There is still drama and bad actors but I would suggest far less than what one gets when each instance can have it's own rules or lack thereof. When a person is repeatedly violating the global rules they will be globally banned on that specific IRC network. They can go join another one and repeat the process.
Anyone can create their own IRC network and have their own global rules and connect their servers to their friends servers. There are small IRC networks, some are public and some are private.
Based on all the discussions I have seen on HN about Mastodon, I believe that the lack of a concept of global operators and admins is the missing piece that encourages bad actors to poison the well. The bad actors will find the instances that lack moderation and the human moderation delay will make the entire network look bad. This is not even counting the trolls that intentionally post illegal things and then instruct search engines, archive.org, archive.ph and other archive sites to mirror the content so they can get the domains and servers cancelled. To add more clarrification around my comment, this is not so much about the technology yes IRC lacks a web interface by default and must be bolted on but rather about the concept of global admins and moderators. People can block a specific instance but that is just and endless game of whack-a-mole and does not solve the root cause of the issues.
The Fediverse is not dead and has existed long before Mastodon. People do not call IRC the Fediverse but for all intents and purposes it is one. It just works a little differently. The bigger IRC networks are comprised of many servers linked together but owned by different organizations, companies, individual people and so on. Rather than joining an instance, they are all joined manually and one instead joins or crea…
Yes, 100% agreed - I spend the first section talking about just that.
Ultimately I think that IRC-like networks might be a really interesting social form to explore via smaller federations of ActivityPub software. It's not something I'd want to start or run (and huge shoutout to IRC ops, it's not an easy job) but I'd love to see what such a thing looks like in the world of microblogging.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It feels like every federated network will be judged by the worst actor in that network, whether or not they are isolated from each other. As a result it doesn't matter (for public opinion) if there are strictly moderated mastodon instances because they will be associated with the free-for-all ones by the Mastodon name alone. This is different from how the internet as a whole is interpreted, where both HN and 4chan c…
"It will be judged" a way doesn't mean it makes any sense to judge it that way. Eventually, people will get wise to being mislead to think there's nothing of value there by such a faulty metric. It's really just obnoxious journalists that shape this kind of public opinion too, who well, nobody sane really trusts anymore.
Nora is a long-time member of and contributor to the fediverse and not some looky-loo who parachuted in during a boom to dismiss it out of hand. I've skimmed and read past the headline and saved for later reading. I recommend everyone also read past the headline.
> “The Fediverse” needs to end, and I don’t think anything should replace it. Speak instead about communities, and prioritize the strength of those communities. Speak about the way those communities interact, and don’t; the way they form strands and islands and gulfs. I’ve taken to calling this the Social Archipelago. For a wildly different path to reaching the same conclusion, see also this SSC post: https://slatest…
The Fediverse is not dead and has existed long before Mastodon. People do not call IRC the Fediverse but for all intents and purposes it is one. It just works a little differently. The bigger IRC networks are comprised of many servers linked together but owned by different organizations, companies, individual people and so on. Rather than joining an instance, they are all joined manually and one instead joins or crea…
> The Fediverse [...] has existed long before Mastodon. Yes, 100% agreed - I spend the first section talking about just that. Ultimately I think that IRC-like networks might be a really interesting social form to explore via smaller federations of ActivityPub software. It's not something I'd want to start or run (and huge shoutout to IRC ops, it's not an easy job) but I'd love to see what such a thing looks like in t…