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ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

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Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#41

Post by vidarh »

saurik wrote: post #30
kstrauser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology?…

What you are describing -- a system where I have to maintain accounts on a number of separate networks that don't interoperate due to content control disagreements -- is an ecosystem of competing centralized systems, not a decentralized one, and that people who run their own servers are reportedly presumed evil and defederated either by default or at the drop of a hat is a visceral demonstration that this setup under…

The number of people who have to maintain more than one account is minuscule, and most of the time they ought to reflect over why they are part of communities with such mutual animosity that they can't find one home that accepts both/all.

I run my own, and have seen no trace of this being "presumed evil" you speak of.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#42

Post by vidarh »

echelon wrote: post #39
vidarh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No minds are "put in jails". But they do not have a right to unfettered access to me . I'm free to choose to set standards, and the standard of requiring them to have a second account if they both want access to me and to content I find deplorable is a really low barrier. And others are free to choose to commune with me in the spaces I want to spend time in, and communities are free to set their standards. I've not a…

> No minds are "put in jails". I got banned from my city's subreddit because I said something once about crime the mods disagreed with. Now I can't enjoy a platform about the city I live in. I can't ask about restaurants, talk about concerts. It's frankly troubling. I posted something to /r/conservative once that asked them to be more inclusive of trans people. They banned me on sight, which figures. From that moment…

They willfully sign up to my ban list if they join my instance, same as users on Reddit willfully sign up to the the rules and the moderators when they join a subreddit.

Nobody has argued for the power to keep you from enjoying the public. But my instances are not public space, neither are subreddits.

If you want to run an uncensored space for your city, you can. If you want an uncensored place for conservatives, you can have that too. And so on. The reality is that no such places stay functioning if they are uncensored, and so the question tends to be if they are open enough that you don't notice.

I'll note we're having this discussion on one of the more heavily moderated forums available.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#43

Post by irusensei »

kstrauser wrote: post #14
echelon wrote: post #2

ActivityPub is ahead, but it feels like a dead end. It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. Nostr and Bluesky's AT protocol are the most promising. I love the truly distributed nature of Nostr, but the ecosystem is hard to get into. Bluesky has strong technical underpinnings and accessibility, but they're…

> It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology?…

Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The impression I got is that the normie side instance admins apparently cooperate on blocking instances.

What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#44

Post by krapp »

irusensei wrote: post #43
kstrauser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology?…

Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The impression I got is that the normie side instance admins apparently cooperate on blocking instances. What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.

Two accounts are trivial to manage, especially with a third party client. I managed more than that through a bookmarks folder. Many people have multiple accounts on various platforms anyway.

Also you could always host your own instance and be your own admin. I started doing that a couple of weeks ago. It's easy to find a host plan, if you don't want to do all of the work yourself. But you could still do that if you wanted to.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#45

Post by kstrauser »

irusensei wrote: post #43
kstrauser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has the same issue with Reddit's little fiefdoms: moderators still lord over everyone and control speech, the algorithm, your feed, and your freedom. That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your preferences, there's an ActivityPub instance with moderation you'll like. Want to be in a liberal thought bubble? It's there. Want nothing but all Trump, all the time? They have that. Only the good things about astrology?…

Issue is that the admin is the one who decides what you can see. I remember a few months ago some meme/map or the network divided in "normie" and "weird" sides of the network. The impression I got is that the normie side instance admins apparently cooperate on blocking instances. What if I want to be on both? Well you need two accounts.

Then get 2. They’re generally free.

That schism is inevitable. To pick an extreme case, imagine a server for LGBTQ people and another for self-declared neo-Nazis. The people on the 1st might have very strong feelings that they want no contact whatsoever with people on the 2nd. There’s no world where it’s reasonable to say they have to keep their servers connected.

Now suppose you want to follow people on the 2nd server for journalism purposes. It’s unreasonable to have an account on the 1st server and then complain that they’re not talking to the 2nd. Even if you have legitimate purposes that aren’t creepy, they’re not going to go along with it. So instead, you get another account to follow the 2nd server and everyone’s happy.

The Mastodon server I own turned 7 years old today. We’ve blocked probably a couple dozen servers over the years. In every case I can tell you exactly why we blocked that instance. Most of them involve, literally, their users sending mine swastika imagery, death threats, or other utterly indefensible content, and the moderators of those instances being OK with it. My users stick around because they trust my explanations for the moderation actions I take. They don’t want to manually filter actual Nazi content from their timelines. Those that do can pick any number of servers that wouldn’t block that content.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#46

Post by krapp »

mg wrote: post #12
kstrauser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wholeheartedly believe that those are anti-features. They're metrics that drive antisocial behavior and make the world a little worse.

You say so on a website that displays the number of likes (here: "points") for every post right on the front page.

Karma and voting are ruining Hacker News as well, just not as quickly because the algorithms here are not as aggressively tuned to maximize engagement.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#48

Post by kstrauser »

xigoi wrote: post #47
kstrauser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Join one of the instances with looser moderation.

Suhh instances tend to be put on shared blocklists, effectively making them echo-chambers too.

I think that says more about the content of those instances being blocked. If you're transmitting content bad enough to get blocked by a large portion of the fediverse, the problem has more to do with what you're saying than their decision not to hear it.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#49

Post by echelon »

mariusor wrote: post #37
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that's absolutely your right. I just want spaces for me and others where this isn't the default imposed upon everyone. I don't want to subscribe to [x filtering] unless I choose. House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons. The legislators are going to make rules that enforce these technological straddles, and the defaults will slowly change in directions you neither an…

> House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons. I can't understand how you can think that fediverse instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under the rules of the people that keep them running and not everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on their servers. The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the many software that you can just pick…

Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media", when in reality it's not much different than Reddit without central corporate control and profit.

Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power dynamics and the end users are not powerful.

My concern is that we stop here and this becomes "distributed social networking". What we need more than anything -- more than Mastodon and ActivityPub -- are protocols that enable peer to peer communication where no node can impose its will upon others and the barrier to participation in the broad community doesn't demand fielty to powerful moderators.

Re: ActivityPub/Nostr/At-Bluesky Compared

#50

Post by krapp »

echelon wrote: post #49
mariusor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> House rules and filtering should be opt-in and not the default for the public commons. I can't understand how you can think that fediverse instances are "public commons". Each of them is run under the rules of the people that keep them running and not everyone can be moot to be able to suffer everything on their servers. The public commons part of the fediverse is formed of the many software that you can just pick…

Mastodon is thought of as "distributed social media", when in reality it's not much different than Reddit without central corporate control and profit. Instance owners can block anyone based on manual or automated rules. It's just an extension of the status quo. This is fantastic for building insular communities, but it doesn't get us into a better place with respect to individual user freedom. There are still power…

The status quo is that most people don't want pure anarchy, they want communities, and communities have boundaries. Uncensored free-for-all discussion only results in the most aggressively toxic elements and effective spammers driving away the rest. Even the guy who runs Gab recently found that out.

If that's what you want, I'm sure you can already find it somewhere. But I think you're in the minority, and it certainly isn't what's needed "more than anything."

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