The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by nonrandomstring » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #27

mlindner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.

It’s almost as if it’s a people problem and not a technical problem.

Way back in the mists of ancient times, about 1970, a myth arose in minds of primitive men and women;

The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to anybody.

This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending to the death.

However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the limit - that is to say the idea that;

"occasionally anyone could talk to anyone"

silently transformed into the idea that

"everyone should talk to everyone all the time"

whereas in fact

"most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time".

That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for.

It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of resilience through diversity in the OP.

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

#52

Post by irusensei » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:37 AM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #47

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

It seems a bit dubious to trust twitter with my data anyway? Mastodon at least is not trying to shove politics and celebrities down my throat.

Two wrongs do not make a right. Enjoy Mastodon but be conscious of your federated benevolent dictator if you are not running your own instance.

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

#53

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

nells wrote: post #39

JonathonW wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers. There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.

That’s good in theory, but in reality it really is the same list for all popular nodes, making it effectively a centralised blacklist.

Sure, just like the guy who poops in the produce section gets banned from all the local grocery stores.

Freedom sometimes means no one wants to talk to you.

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

#54

Post by kmlx » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

ImaCake wrote: post #47

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

It seems a bit dubious to trust twitter with my data anyway? Mastodon at least is not trying to shove politics and celebrities down my throat.

well, at least twitter is a well established, extremely visible corp. for a mastodon instance the list of questions is long and start with: who’s your hosting provider.

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

#55

Post by irusensei » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:42 AM UTC

HollowEyes wrote: post #36

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one. It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station. The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much. Who moderates offshore content?

> Who moderates offshore content

Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular Mastodon servers.

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

#56

Post by newaccount2021 » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

irusensei wrote: post #35

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

[dead]

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

#57

Post by zasdffaa » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

thrown_22 wrote: post #22

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #14

This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale. This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere. But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they co…

That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown…

The "doubled in price for every 20 miles" bit is extremely interesting, do you have anything I can follow this up on, thanks.

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

#58

Post by bawolff » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:47 AM UTC

haunter wrote: post #46

csande17 wrote: post #7

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one p…

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.

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

#59

Post by ilyt » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #50

I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where y…

I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter.

Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.

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

#60

Post by ilyt » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #58

haunter wrote: 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.

Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess.

I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.