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       Mastoconflict
       June 02nd, 2018
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       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.