---------------------------------------- Mastoconflict June 02nd, 2018 ---------------------------------------- Mastodon is having a little tiff right now over the introduction of a new feature: trending hashtags. As the project maintainer puts it, it has been the most requested feature addition for over a year. When it rolled out, though, it was met with widespread criticism and, in many cases, open hostility. The rebuttals back and forth quickly escalated and became personal. Pretty much everyone involved is greatly unhappy, regardless of their position on the issue. Meanwhile, I'm sitting back here thinking to myself, "democracy in action." A collective developed and idea with their voices (the addition of trending hashtags). When that idea was implemented, other collectives disagreed. They weren't aware of its development, they argue. It is unsafe and can be used for evil. It will target groups who are often targets and make Mastodon unsafe or unwelcoming. There's one person in charge of the project. He must be the problem. If it weren't for him, surely the issue would be put to rest. It's as simple as that, because a "pure" democracy will always work things out. This is an example of corruption of the perfect, federated state. Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. The issue isn't having a single leader. The issue is that groups of people have different wants and needs. This is inherent to any sized group of people greater than one. You cannot make them all equally happy. You cannot serve every single use case simultaneously. The utopia of democracy does not exist, just as it does not exist for communism, or socialism, or even monarchy. So what do we do? We use our brains. We make decisions that help as many as we can. We use our morals and make decisions that hurt as few as possible. We don't cross lines that shouldn't be crossed. We listen to the words of the suffering and try to ease that suffering. We say to those with excess, "you have excess. Your priorities are lower than those who need help." This is all but impossible in systems that favor group-think. The power in those systems comes from those who can manipulate the system. Who can speak loudest is often the one with the most money. The wider the spread of power, the more this systematic influence becomes absolute. It can devolve to cult of personality eventually. The key to the recipe is broad reach of voice. What is the countermeasure? Strong-willed leaders who can champion the "right" decisions. What makes those decisions right? The things I listed above. What ensures a leader will execute those decisions and not others? That depends on your system. In government, there's not much, though a constitutional system can help balance it. It's easy to slide into despotism. In social systems like open source projects, the answer is the freedom to move on. The system is open source and the protocol can work with other projects. Mastodon can be forked and formed into something else by others with a different set of principles. If the current leader of the project does not implement policy (in the form of software features) that reflects the needs of the people, that's the easiest path to take. No bloodshed, just moving on and building something new. But back to the question of trending hashtags themselves. Are they a good idea? Probably not, at least in the way they've been implemented so far. There's been a lot of valid points about how bad actors already abuse similar systems in other networks. There's nothing currently in place to prevent that, and the distributed nature of the network makes stopping those attacks even harder than on Twitter. There have been very good ideas to tweak the feature to avoid the abuse. Ultimately it should come down to a cost/benefit analysis. Unfortunately it's more likely to come down to the loudest screamers. But that's democracy.