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The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

berk.es

141–150 of 219 posts

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#141
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. Mastodon servers do often have a "federated timeline" that shows you all the posts from servers your instance knows about. People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you. > Who is the person who has the final say which server may b…

> People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you. You can deal with that by blocking them personally. No need for a guardian angel.

You can't block everyone bad because you don't know who they are until after they spam you. Last month I got 100 spam texts from the same sender ([Redacted] Political Party) using a different phone number for each.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#142
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.

> it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy

"Democratic" means "people rule" not "majority vote".

By giving you the choice of which server to use, you choose your moderation. If other people choose (or choose to delegate the choice) to block you, that's still democracy.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#143

thought experiment: Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want. vs. Write twitter. I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha) Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over.…

[deleted]

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to Kathy Griffin and Jeph Jaques. And even before that, I doubt that people getting banned were considering it as "not personal".

Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts? I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.

I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts? I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.

I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear that I’m glad people are enjoying Mastodon but I take issue when everyone seems to be omitting the tradeoffs. To make things worse im being seen as some kind of concern troll for pointing it out.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

i think in many cases users are closer--node wise and influence wise--to their server admins than they were to twitter's moderation team. always? of course not. but, if this is a major concern for you, then its easy to either start your own server with a group of people or even spin up on your own. this was not possible under twitter.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#148
post #26

I like Mastodon because it reminds me of an earlier and more interesting web. The same people I follow on Twitter I follow on Mastodon and I feel they are being more honest on Mastodon. This might not be true.

I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to.

But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had.

As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#149
post #58
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not. That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really reall…

Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.

A big deal was that a good Gmail client was available early on Android, and that you would basically get a gmail address set up for you ? (I wonder if Google didn't allow, feature-wise, for other email clients to work as well on Android ? I know that instant messengers have issues like that...)

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#150

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease…

Yeah, people are using it. Infosec.exchange and fosstodon.org are pretty busy now. I’m on a smaller instance (but still like 10K users) called ioc.exchange and that’s pretty good too (obviously they all link to each other, but I’ve found it is good to be on a server with a fairly interesting ‘local’ feed to have a look through when not much is happening with the people you follow).

I’m in Australia and a lot of people have moved from Twitter to a server called aus.social, so if I was going to tell friends or relatives to get on Mastodon I wouldn’t probably direct them to sign up to that specific Mastodon server, not just say “you should use Mastodon” and then expect them to work it out. That one has a lot more rules than the infosec ones though.

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