Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse • Hacker News Board

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#101

Post by raffael_de » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #94

raffael_de wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not let people say whatever they want? you already hinted the appropriate solution which is that you don't have to listen.

Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource. When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die. Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spe…

> Moderators are a downright scare resource.

if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

> When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community

can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?

> Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it

there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with. it's a personal choice about how to spend your time.

> and this asymmetry means that "just let them speak" means the toxic liars win.

what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody. there's only something to lose and that's time.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#102

Post by raffael_de » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #92

raffael_de wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not let people say whatever they want? you already hinted the appropriate solution which is that you don't have to listen.

If a social network has an ACTUAL straight chronological feed of only accts you follow, or lists you curate, that works great. Somebody posts abhorrent Nazi racist crap, or lies about what is happening, you shut them off, and they'll never be heard by you again. Yes, you need to see/hear the crap or propaganda once for each Nazi or liar, but that's it. The problem is nearly every social platform needs to increase you…

the context here is the fediverse and not social platforms based on financial incentives.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#103

Post by madjo80 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

satisfice wrote: post #27

I just tried to check out the Fediverse and found utter confusion. I'm not saying its bad-- I'm saying I am bewildered. There are communities I can join, but I can't tell how I should choose a community. I could find no way to search for communities that might be a fit. Apparently there are a lot of different kinds of social media under the broad banner of the Fediverse. How should I choose, and what are the implicat…

How did you choose the provider of your email address?

For Mastodon, you can check https://joinmastodon.org/servers to figure out what server you want to join. But joining one server doesn't mean you can't access people and communities from other servers. It's one big network, but with many different access points (the mastodon servers), each access point has their own niche. These access points each can have their own rules, so be sure to read them before joining.

What the point of joining the fediverse is, I can't answer that for you, that's different for everyone. The only thing I can tell you is that there's a wealth of information available there.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#104

Post by madjo80 » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

matt_heimer wrote: post #90

threetonesun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a little wild to read comments like this because this was just how the Internet worked before Twitter got popular. I still get “happy birthday” emails from forums I joined 20+ years ago.

I still host one of those 20+ year old forums. The Fediverse is different. With forums (and HN/Reddit) you immediately had good sense of them being for you or not. With the Fediverse to have to commit to servers and even then you don't know if they are right for you unless you try and spend time customizing your feeds/follows. It's a lot of work and you don't know if it will pay off. I tried again today and so much o…

How did you get that 'good sense' with forums back in the day? I did that by reading into the community. Just look around on the server, see the posts on there, and see if there's a connection. You can do that with Mastodon servers too. And it's not that high stakes. You are not stuck on that server, if you find out that it's not quite the right fit, you can move to another server. In fact, if I were to look at my following list, I think I see more people from outside the mastodon server I joined than people from the same server.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#105

Post by sdsd » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

darqis wrote: post #33

The Fediverse has one problem, concentration of users on few instances, mastodon.social being the largest. And cancel culture. Highly politically motivated cancel culture. What right do they believe to have to dictate to their users what the can and can't read? That should be solely in the user's hand. The irony of writing this in HN is ... whatever the right word is Also, fragmentation and visibility. It's neigh imp…

I'm on infosec.exchange and there's plenty of content, especially since it federates so I get content from all over the fediverse. I don't mind that there are only several very large instances, since federating to them from a tiny or even personal instance is no problem.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#106

Post by skybrian » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:38 PM UTC

I'm glad he found interesting people to follow, but since he didn't make any recommendations, it's not really actionable for anyone else. They would be starting from scratch. Results will vary.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#107

Post by handoflixue » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

raffael_de wrote: post #101

Arainach wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource. When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die. Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spe…

> Moderators are a downright scare resource. if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators. > When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see? > Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it there is no…

> if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators.

Have you ever been involved with moderating even a small subreddit or Discord server? I'm on a server with one moderator and it routinely gets spammed while the guy is asleep.

> can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see?

How do I block people BEFORE seeing the opinions I don't want to see? Trolls can roll up a new account for every single post they make, if they want to.

> there is no obligation to refute bullshit to begin with.

No, but if you're neither blocking nor refuting it, then your community is going to quickly become majority bullshit.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#108

Post by sqrtminusone » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

Yeah, no, getting out of the Fediverse was my best decision, or perhaps second only to getting out of Twitter.

I think the model itself of following people (instead of, e.g. following topics) is basically irredeemable, you either:

a) follow only people with whom you 100% agree, which is very dangerous;

b) follow only people who post cat pictures or anything else as unobjectionable;

c) get a lot of negative emotions from all the nonsense in the feed.

It was the latter for me, I still have nightmares from having to ban the #NixOS tag from my feed, from my entire feed approving of the murder of some random insurance CEO, from the endless "AI is scam" takes, etc., etc...

And I can't really unfollow someone who posts 75% of nonsense if they post 25% of interesting technical stuff. Because then my entire feed is gone. You can /technically/ follow topics on Mastodon, but that doesn't really work as it should.

Besides:

> So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had.

Like, no. Getting news from social media is a dead end, is this not obvious just from looking at people who get their news from Twitter? In the very best case one might follow reliable journalists, but then one should follow the places they work. What's more likely is that the author has found a very comfortable bubble.

I have hope that there can be some actual truth-seeking information aggregation algorithm that can finally replace the very imperfect media system, but so far it's not even close. It's very ironic that "a fascist high on ketamine" has, against all odds, managed to produce Community Notes, which is the best attempt so far, but it's like, a few orders of magnitude off being capable of replacing the so-called "legacy media".

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#109

Post by Arainach » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

raffael_de wrote: post #101

Arainach wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Community members are a finite resource. Moderators are a downright scare resource. When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community and are left with a toxic cesspool that no one wants to visit. Your moderators will burn out and leave as well. That's a very reliable way for your space to die. Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spe…

> Moderators are a downright scare resource. if you restrict moderation to stuff like gore and porn, then you don't need that many moderators. > When you let people spew hateful things you drive away the people you want in the community can't people just unfollow or block others whose opinions they don't want to see? > Then there's the fact that it takes far more energy to refute bullshit than to spew it there is no…

> what's there to win? there is nothing to win for anybody.

There are ideological battles to be fought by all sorts of parties - convincing groups to hate each other, to support or oppose the governments in power, to spread division and destroy societies.

There are trolls who consider it a battle to be won, and the more they succeed the more everyone else leaves the platform.

The party currently in control of the United States is there largely due to people who were fed divisive narratives (often in online channels) to make them hate other groups and a significant number of them consider it more important to "own the libs" and "hurt the right people" than to have the government actually improve their own circumstances. So yes, there's absolutely things to be won.

Re: Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

#110

Post by xigoi » Sat, Mar 07, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

ses1984 wrote: post #91

lolurnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Free speech does exist in the law, not just as an ethical ideal. The law states that the government can’t infringe on your speech. Anyone who is not the government is free to block your ass if they don’t like you or what you’re saying. Not all speech is worth defending. The only people who benefit from free speech absolutism are the ones with only horrible things to say.

I am fine with blocking. However, it should be me who decides whose speech I don’t want to see, not someone else.