The case for the decentralization of online forums

http://usenet.trigofacile.com/hierarchies/index.py?status=pr... and https://web.archive.org/web/20220815151921/http://bofh.taron...

Peering to larger ISPs was more of a matter of convince and that is often part of a business arrangement for a company and a client.

Another use of usenet back in the day SGI had its bug tracker write out to news. A Usenet reader was one of the preferred interfaces to creating and commenting on bugs internally. Furthermore, exporting the bug tracking system to a partner was "simply" a matter of adding them to the feed and making sure that they didn't route bugs from their server to others.

The point is that the "little to big to bigger" was just convince - not code or enforced in any way.

Many university CS departments would peer with each other back in the day. Recall that news was originally across UUCP - the same mechanism that email was sent. If you wanted to send email to someone at another university you'd much rather have them as a peer so that it was just one hop rather than going some other route that could take days to get there. And so various hub and spokes evolved. Everything in the University of Wisconsin peered with Madison. Everything in Illinois peered with UIUC and Madison peered with UIUC. Note the word 'peer'.

And if UW Whitewater wanted to get their email to UIC faster, then they would peer too. Would UW Madison complain that it's not going through them? Not at all! It meant their phone bills would be less.

A distributed, open-source, collaborative approach to forums could work. It did work in the past. Somewhere in between usenet and reddit was a plethora of small message boards run, frequently, on open source software. Many of the same people who ran those message boards now run reddit subs only because its easier and because users gravitate towards big, centralized places like reddit.

A return to a multitude of little message boards seems unlikely at this point, but migration to a monolithic and distributed open-source alternative to Reddit or Stackoverflow could happen. We just have to reach the point where enough people appreciate that there is a need for such a thing. A lot of people probably thought reddit was some kind of non-profit public service, but now they're going to have to wake up to the reality that Reddit is a business and they are now determined to make a profit even if it means driving their service into the ground. (From a business standpoint, a few years of actual profit leading to collapse is better than decades of producing no profits, especially in a sector where disruption could easily lead to collapse in that timeframe anyways.)

Moderation is a key problem to solve. Moderation is what keeps forums on-topic and free from spam, hate, and other trash, but it's also frequently abused to push bias or power trip. Existing social media sites typically do a poor job of providing transparent or accountable moderation. You typically don't know who the mods are, what they've done, what they're doing, nor do you have any way to challenge their actions in a meaningful way if you have a reason to do so.

Getting moderation up to professional standards without paying for it would seem like an obstacle to a free social media service, but today's social media sites don't pay their mods either. If you provide anonymity and don't demand accountability, it turns out people will just volunteer for the job! As such, a lack of an elegant solution to the moderation problem should not be viewed as something that blocks alternatives to the online forums we have now. They haven't addressed the problem either.

The replacement for reddit doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be there.

Go to any country in the world with an upper-middle class neighbourhood and ask them if it's alright to plop an extra condo or apartment building in the middle.

The only way you'll smoothly get permission is by providing huge, costly, benefits to the local households.

Otherwise it would involve a long drawn-out court battle, or some scheme with the local political potentates, pretty much everywhere where there are such neighbourhoods.

Mastodon seems to be a good canary, to see how decentralization works. It’s already well under way.

But I’m just a scarred, traumatized old soldier, and my opinion probably doesn’t count for much.

Maybe we really do need another alt.tasteless. It would seem quaint, compared to today’s foolishness.