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Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

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Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#31
> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work.

This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences.

As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them.

What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#32
> "Twitter’s decline..."

Is Twitter in decline? According to what measure?

I use Twitter as a read-only way to follow a handful of interesting people in tech, science, journalism etc. All of them, regardless of their political leaning, are still posting the same as ever. If anything I see more activity than before.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#33

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should they be blocked?

Having an instance with a x million users is impossible to moderate. Instances have been blocked for not being able to moderate low thousands of users due to incompetent/unresponsive mods. Having a poorly moderated instance federate with yours is seen as a threat to your users and a proactive admin would not allow federation. Also most admins are aware of EEE tactics and we all know we cannot expect anything even rem…

I was just going to reply with EEE, but the situation you're describing presents a problem.

Suppose the network wants to be able to handle billions of users, but you want to keep each instance "small," i.e. thousands of users.

Then you'll have millions of instances.

Having each instance manually curate a list of others it federates with isn't going to work, but neither is instances not federating with the large majority of other instances.

You all need to figure out a way to get rid of this instance-level whitelisting or blacklisting, because that ends with either Meta or an intractable scalability problem.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid of the same outcome too. However I think many admins in the Fediverse are aware and I expected most servers to block any instance from Meta.

Why should they be blocked?

Because you don't have a decentralized network anymore if one server has 2B users while the second largest has 200k.

Also moderation as the sibling comment mentioned.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#37

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…

Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug.

A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#38
post #33

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

[deleted]

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#39
post #19

> decentralized, text-based social network We had that. It was called Usenet, and it was great. Google destroyed it, so Facebook is going to own the next one from the get-go? Doesn't sound good.

You have to really be rewriting history to blame google for the downfall of usenet.

To put it another way, Deja put Usenet out of a coma, and Google finally pulled the plug.

Re: Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network

#40
post #33

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the pr…

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"
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