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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

#291

Post by 8note »

thr717272 wrote: post #168
exitb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.

One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances. I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.

That sounds like US secondary sanctions.

A working system when your community is popular to deal with

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

#292

Post by hiidrew »

Reminds me of Noah Smith's recent article, Vertical Communities (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/vertical-communities).

It does seem like there is a slight trend with some of the Twitter-exodus leading to users going to specific Mastodon communities, which seem closer to subreddits than Twitter. Takes me back to my early internet days of growing up on phpbb forums.

But then of course you have the flip side of companies trying to copy the Tiktok model, one feed with the algo ruling all. I think I prefer the former though!

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

#293

Post by 8note »

traviswt wrote: post #63
lmpdev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules

This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.

It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance

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

#294

Post by 8note »

nathan_compton wrote: post #236
swayvil wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would nuance that system a bit. Replace "moderator" with "any peer". Replace "block" with "vote". (And that vote could be as simple as "up down" or maybe something more sophisticated) Now everybody you meet (every "peer") has a "rating". Based on the cumulative voting of yourself and your peers. A peer that you upvote, his votes are weighted-up in that cumulative rating calculation. A peer that you downvote, his vo…

This doesn't really work because it doesn't allow a moderator to set the tenor of a community. People can filter out individual messages, but a dedicated set of bad actors can turn a community into swiss cheese or undermine discussion just by spamming, baiting and trolling and taking advantage of the variance in the level of tolerance for the bad behavior. Communities function when there is a standard to which the co…

That is to say, every community is for meme pictures

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

#295

Post by Zetice »

bhupy wrote: post #283
Zetice wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't spend all day on email blocking! Gmail does a great job.

Correct, and with blocklists / opt-in moderation, whatever system that is would do a similarly great job. With email, you can manually block wherever anything falls through the cracks, and that's effectively what your parent commenter is proposing. I don't think anyone thinks that having to manually block every single person from scratch is a sustainable equilibrium.

Oh I read it as "I only want to block people manually". For sure if there are existing "moderation" tools in place to clear spam and wildly offensive material then yeah manually blocking the rest seems... mostly fine?

I guess the problem arises when we talk about what "wildly offensive" means. Deadnaming people and trying to claim there is no racial inequality in the American criminal justice system are two "wildly offensive" concepts to me that may not be to others, for example.

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

#296

Post by olah_1 »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #276
olah_1 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ideal social network would just extend the natural social networks of real life. Moxie at Signal was right when he said the real “social network” is just your phone contacts.

No he wasn't. Most of the people I have connected to via social networks do not appear in my phone contacts. And the social networks themselves do not have my phone number.

Phone numbers became a “bigger deal” when they started being abused.

People just started using instagram as a first means of contact because it felt less personal. It allowed for more “escape hatches” if it turns out that you don’t like the person so much.

If phone numbers allowed for varying levels of trust like instagram, it would work as a social network today like it once did in the past

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

#297

Post by gretch »

JohnFen wrote: post #202
mym1990 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me the difference is that 1) you pay for hotels and you know exactly what the cost is 2) hotels provide a tangible benefit, mostly being the bed to sleep in. Social media often has this idea that it is “free” and so people don’t think about the massive amounts of time and privacy that is given up as the hours whizz by.

Hotels where you don't pay rent, in exchange for the hotel recording everything you do in the room, in the lobby, and if you aren't careful, putting a GPS tracker on your person.

I don't know if you meant this facetiously or not, but I'm pretty sure a LOT of people would want to take this deal if it existed.

Which is also why a lot of people are perfectly okay with, and use social media

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

#298

Post by capableweb »

sangnoir wrote: post #250
yazzku wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bastardization of the term "decentralized" in this post has energy levels over 9000 for sure. Should be flagged as click-bait.

* * What if it's going to be part of the Fediverse?

Then it's federated, so they're still using "decentralized" wrong, which would imply direct clientclient communication (decentralized), rather than clientserverclient (federated) communication.

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

#299

Post by totemandtoken »

mym1990 wrote: post #83

What if, and hear me out: we ditch the idea of a better replacement social network and just ditch the concept in general? Let’s go back to not being bombarded by ads every 3rd post, to not getting lost in massive echo chambers, to not doom scrolling for 20-40% of our waking hours, being locked into mega platforms, etc... Is the proposition of “being more connected” really worth the downsides?

I hear arguments like this all the time, and it bothers me that such arguments miss that there is something that people like about social media - connecting with people. It clearly is worth it and that's been around since the beginning of the internet in some shape or form be it IRC, forums, usenet, whatever. There's innovations that constitute as modern "social media," like the feed or social search, but the core notion of using the internet to try to connect people is going to be a demand as long as there are people and there is an internet. The best we can possibly do is identify maladaptive innovations and try to provide some alternative, until one is dominant enough that "social media" is as dated as "forums."

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

#300

Post by tarotuser »

sangnoir wrote: post #250
yazzku wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bastardization of the term "decentralized" in this post has energy levels over 9000 for sure. Should be flagged as click-bait.

* * What if it's going to be part of the Fediverse?

That's actually a significant worry.

Embrace, extend, extinguish: is a standard playbook for monopolists and oligopolists everywhere in tech.

     1. Make "cool corporate mastodon server" that all the cool kids play on. 
     2. Extend the masto code with proprietary extensions for better features, but DONT SHARE CODE
     3. Convert people on other masto instances cause they don't have "cool feature".
     4. Users flock to "cool masto server", and mastobook is created.
     5. Other servers either try to play catch-up or close. A few holdouts straggle on.
     6. Shitty company successfully proprietizes a federated system.
Email, another federated system, has nearly gone this route. Sure, you can make your own mail server and do all the right things WRT spf/dkim/dmarc. But when most email is through gmail and outlook.com and they decide you're bad, you're not 'running' email.
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