[HN Gopher] Fediverse in 2020
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Fediverse in 2020
Author : buovjaga
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-01-20 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fediverse.party)
(TXT) w3m dump (fediverse.party)
| bob29 wrote:
| The Fediverse is an interesting social experiment testing the
| hypothesis of whether the ad revenue/profit motive of twitter,
| and the subsequent algorithms that maximize engagement, are the
| primary source of toxicity and other negative qualities of social
| media that have been documented recently (social dilemma et al)
|
| Interestingly, the* (see edit) Fediverse data point seems to show
| that really none of Twitter's problems are solved when its the
| user's paying and admining the servers themselves.
|
| EDIT: only my conclusion based on personal experience and
| expectations, encourage anyone to look for themselves
| kixiQu wrote:
| Plenty of problems are solved. They may not be ones you care
| about, but they're not "really none". Anecdotally, the
| instances I know of take a _much_ harder line on moderation of
| transphobic content than does mainstream social media, which is
| something desired by some communities and made possible by
| heterogeneous moderation policies; "no ads" is a problem
| solved in of itself; no QTs gets rid of about 70% of the
| "dunking on this bad take" posts relative to Twitter; lower
| stakes discoverability means people express themselves
| differently; content warnings make your feed more manageable;
| etc. etc.
| bob29 wrote:
| This and sibling comments make good points about improvements
| it has made. I edited my comment to be less universally
| judgemental.
|
| My experience is based on a pretty generic unknown low drama
| instance, that doesn't really block or get blocked, instead
| relying on users to mute/block/instance block themselves per-
| account. So initially I saw a lot of ugly things, the usual
| culture war topics discussed without nuance or compassion,
| bots and spam, etc.
| young_unixer wrote:
| What's a QT in this context? Are cuties getting banned from
| Mastodon?
| dljsjr wrote:
| Quote Tweets.
| _-o-_ wrote:
| Quote tweets. Basically retweeting someone's disagreeable
| tweet to you followers and adding some scalding commentary.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| So this proves that much stricter regulation and censorship
| can be maintained effectively in a decentralized setting.
| kixiQu wrote:
| Also much looser rules as well; sex workers, for instance,
| have a lot more freedoms to post their content in a lot of
| the Fediverse. Different instances have different rules.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Sure, this supports better bubbles. Sex workers and
| evangelicals will be nicely separated from each other, so
| will be Nazis and Jews.
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| Like in real life, where you select friends and
| acquaintances, and do things that are interesting to you,
| and don't tolerate trolls in your physical life.
|
| I mean, that can actually foster higher quality debate and
| discussion. Like in a political discussion page, you would
| expect that users debate in good faith, and kick those who
| don't.
|
| Facebook and Twitter seem to just devolve.
|
| Hacker news is also largely the same with downvoting and
| significant moderation... And as a result it has higher
| quality discussion.
|
| Being open minded and thoughtful does not mean listening to
| just anyone...
|
| For me it's analogous to walking away from someone
| objectionable. If it was censorship they wouldn't be
| allowed to say it. But they still can, at least somewhere
| in the fediverse. Just not necessarily to me.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I'm an instance admin and set moderation rules that
| appropriate for me and my users. If I do a bad job of it,
| those users are free to go to another instance with
| policies that they like better. As a result, I don't have
| to make some one-size-fits-all monster that pleases no
| one.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It proves that you can have community standards when you
| actually have a community.
|
| A big advantage of decentralization is that it doesn't try
| to impose a single worldview on everybody. If libertarians
| want to have an instance where they talk about how taxation
| is theft and communists want to have an instance where they
| talk about how capitalism sucks and moderates want to have
| an instance where all ideas are welcome but personal
| attacks are not, they can all do those things at the same
| time.
| yborg wrote:
| Exactly this. But there are a set of people who enjoy or
| feel the need to engage in combat with other schools of
| thought, either as validation or because of genuine
| desire to proselytize; and there is a subset of those
| people that believe that everyone should be forced into a
| single arena where the strongest ideas will prevail and
| thereby clearly delineate 'right' and 'wrong'. One of the
| major advantages of the Fediverse right now is that
| trying to do this is harder, plus there already are such
| arenas in the form of Twitter and Facebook. To me the
| complaint about 'bubbles' is usually from these believers
| in the school of trial by combat that are frustrated by
| their inability to impose this philosophy on the
| Fediverse. Which means it is working as designed...
| jl6 wrote:
| > heterogeneous moderation
|
| Does this mean users sort themselves into filter bubbles
| rather than having algorithms do it for them?
| kixiQu wrote:
| No. "Filter bubble" is a term with a particular meaning:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
|
| Mastodon displays content _only_ chronologically, so it 's
| not a relevant term.
|
| Now, do people's choices of social association determine
| what they see? Of course, but... it's social media, so
| that's priced in, frankly.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's a good point. Any social media that doesn't pair
| you up with random strangers is going to put you in a bit
| of a bubble because you choose who you're going to hang
| out with, both online and in real life.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| filter bubble has to be the worst word ever invented. What
| people actually apply this label to today is certainly
| almost always people exercising freedom of association of
| people aligning along common interests. Every political
| organisation, every civic group, every church, every
| coherent community by definition is a filter bubble, and
| that's a perfectly fine thing. As Madison put it
|
| _" Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of
| parties and interests; you make it less probable that a
| majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade
| the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive
| exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to
| discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each
| other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked, that
| where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable
| purposes, a communication is always checked by distrust, in
| proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary._"
| packetlost wrote:
| Yes
| sammorrowdrums wrote:
| There's a bit more interest in specific shared interest
| servers (like writing, being a Roman Catholic, being a
| furry, photography for example), so while yes they are
| bubbles, they aren't necessarily organised around holding
| specific political views. Also you can join multiple
| servers.
|
| Also there are benefits of the bubbles in this context as
| while you may not be being exposed to all content, nasty
| groups can't as easily spread content as they get blocked
| by most servers, so I think it does reduce radicalisation.
|
| Also, within servers that don't block each other, you can
| bring on federated content from any of them, and that can
| actually be horizon broadening too, but not in the
| frequently antagonistic way of Facebook or Twitter. At
| least in my personal experience.
| eitland wrote:
| mountainb had a very good explanation from a few days ago:
|
| > 'Bubbles' are a pejorative way of just saying 'local
| communities.'
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25777814
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Interestingly, the Fediverse data point seems to show that
| really none of Twitter's problems are solved when its the
| user's paying and admining the servers themselves.
|
| It doesn't really tell you that until it becomes a more
| dominant form of social media. Otherwise most of the users
| there are also users of Twitter and Facebook, where they go to
| get radicalized and pick up nonsense conspiracy theories and
| vitriol which they then bring everywhere they go.
|
| Also, you're wrong and most parts of the Fediverse are already
| much less toxic than most of Twitter.
|
| And notice that you would otherwise expect the opposite of this
| if the major platforms are booting off any significant number
| of actual asshats for legitimate reasons, who then move to
| invade any alternatives. The relative success with which most
| decentralized alternatives have fended off this onslaught is a
| very good sign.
| devmunchies wrote:
| think of the fediverse like social media parallel to email. you
| can create your account on someone else's service (e.g. gmail
| or yahoo) or self-host your own service.
|
| Nothing is preventing a server from putting ads in their
| service. It would be like protonmail or gmail jamming ads down
| your throat. but because it federated like email, you can
| leave. its not centralized, but its still owned instances.
| mariusor wrote:
| Personally I kind of lost confidence in the non-viciousness of
| the microblogging fediverse, when Wil Wheaton got driven off of
| it because he got upset at being trolled by someone.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Perhaps "toxicity" has always been found on computer networks,
| consider 1990's Usenet. What is different now is that Twitter,
| Facebook, etc. are "monetising" web usage, any sort of usage
| (e.g., purely recreational, non-commercial usage), by selling
| web users out to advertisers, not to mention political
| campaigns. Imagine if all Usenet usage had been carefully
| surveilled with all possible deomgraphic and behavioural data
| collected whereupon the people doing this surveillance
| proclaimed "we are a startup" and tried to "services" to
| advertisers or political organisations.
|
| "Centralisation" makes surveillance much easier, hence
| "decentralisation" is percieved as a panacea. It also helps to
| curb the viral spread of low quality information. As long
| something makes surveillance and data collection more
| difficult, it is helpful. Because when the surveillance is no
| longer easy, the profit motive should decrease. The data
| collection frenzy should start to fade. We can close this ugly
| chapter in business and get back to real work.
|
| Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. want centralisation. They need
| sustained, heavy web traffic, lest they could not make money.
| They _still_ do not have a legitimate, viable "business plan"
| outside of surveillance, data collection and perpetuating an
| online ad circus.
|
| The smart way to deal with all of this is to pass laws
| regulating the collection and usage of data on web users.
| Unfortunately leadership today is at crisis levels, corruption
| is on the rise, so this may not come anytime soon. In absence
| of legal protections, web users must fend for themselves.
| Digory wrote:
| The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing.
|
| It doesn't solve the human inclination to share strong emotions
| with likeminded people, and to exclude and punish people who
| make you mad or sad. That causes many good things, but not in
| absolute terms, it seems.
|
| What we don't have is a Taleb-like model for anti-fragile
| speech under new tech. Is there a mix of social speech that
| includes "trans criticism" that makes trans people stronger, or
| encourages social cooperation even with the 'transphobic'? Is
| there any circumstance where "sticks and stones" helps, or are
| we rejecting that totally?
| devmunchies wrote:
| > The Fediverse solves the problem of authoritarian silencing
|
| I would say it "addresses" the problem but you can't solve
| it. Battling powerful classes of people, whether businesses
| or governments, will be a constant fact of life. No resting
| or your laurels.
| Digory wrote:
| Agreed. I'm kind of pricing in DNS as a public good that
| can't be cut off.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| "Critics" are free to make their own instance and invite
| people on, but they are not owed a debate by trans people who
| are just trying to socialize and live their lives.
| Digory wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think you can compel debates. I'm sensitive
| to arguments about bodily integrity and complicity. People
| are exercising a right to exclude voices they don't want to
| hear.
|
| But new tech lets us do it _so_ well. And all-day, every-
| day people self-sort into silos, and then get a steady
| stream of "facts" about pedophile rings and pee tapes.
| QAnon seems like a problem of having too much power to
| self-sort, not a problem of "unmoderated free speech."
|
| Is there a healthy amount of "hate" that makes us stronger,
| like mental exercise? If we don't owe it to them, is it in
| our own interest to give more to those who hate us or
| disagree strongly?
| jancsika wrote:
| > interesting social experiment
|
| A social experiment where people from the variable group
| randomly and freely wander into the control group?
|
| I don't think so.
| sdfjkl wrote:
| > 502 Bad Gateway
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210102052512/https://fediverse...
| TheJoYo wrote:
| it's back up
| lawrencevillain wrote:
| How do things like this make it to the top of HN? I know it's
| unrelated, but I'm curious, is it due to the users post
| history? I mean within 15 minutes of posting it was down, and
| it already had 50 upvotes?
| berkes wrote:
| Why do think it should not make it to the top?
|
| (Edit: parent comment sounded as if it didn't think the
| article deserves to be on frontpage HN. re-reading, I see
| that I might have misread it: sorry in that case)
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Probably cause you can't click on the article and read it.
| berkes wrote:
| In that case, cause-effect is turned around: it went down
| _because_ it hit the frontpage.
|
| ---
|
| I've had some of my blogpost hit FP of HN: the traffic
| spike then is huge; HN feed is widely spread over
| internet. Hours after FP I started getting referers RSS
| readers, intranets, reposters etc. Running a static file
| blog, my EUR5.00/month shared vps hardly missed a beat
| with the traffic spike; but it's so big that "going down"
| is pretty normal for anything "dynamic" I presume.
| asutekku wrote:
| Why should a link that does not function go to the top?
| atoav wrote:
| Because often the HN-Hug-of-Death means that a link only
| stops to function _after_ having reached the top?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| People upvoting based on the title, without clicking on the
| link.
| cccc4all wrote:
| The technical implementations seem interesting. But, who scrubs
| the toilets in this social network? Who does the boring, dirty
| jobs required to clean up after users?
| TheJoYo wrote:
| I host a single user instance, so I do the clean up which is
| none at all.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same. I've got a couple thousand users, and on average get a
| moderation request every other month or so.
| ibeckermayer wrote:
| Are you liable for illicit content being cached on your
| server? Like say a user on a server you're federated with
| posts child porn, can you be criminally liable if it's
| unknowingly downloaded onto the instance you host?
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'd say that varies by country, but section 230 of the
| CDA [0] would seem to say that Americans are generally
| OK:
|
| > No provider or user of an interactive computer service
| shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any
| information provided by another information content
| provider.
|
| Wikipedia expounds to say:
|
| "The statute in Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good
| Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators
| of interactive computer services in the removal or
| moderation of third-party material they deem obscene or
| offensive, even of constitutionally protected speech, as
| long as it is done in good faith."
|
| My understanding is that you (if you're American) would
| be OK as long as you're not the source of it and that
| it's incidental to your operations, like your intent is
| to make a message board for normal conversational stuff
| and it's not called "Totally Not Child Porn Wink
| Wink.com".
|
| One nice feature of Mastodon in particular is that you
| can configure it not to cache content from specific
| servers. I use that to avoid hosting images from
| particular servers that specialize in stuff with a high
| "ick factor". If a use really wants to follow users on
| those servers, they can, but then _that_ server is the
| one serving images to my user, not me. I like that setup.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230
| [deleted]
| riffic wrote:
| The secret sauce of the Fediverse is that you really don't need
| crazy software like Mastodon or Pleroma to participate in it.
|
| Have a WordPress site? Throw this plugin on it and you've entered
| the Fediverse:
|
| https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/
|
| Cancel that!
| benibela wrote:
| What if you only have a static website, HTML files only?
| tedunangst wrote:
| You can publish activitypub objects statically, but
| fundamentally it's a push model. You receive follow requests,
| then push new posts.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The objects are actually defined in the ActivityStreams
| spec, which is a prereq for ActivityPub. So, a purely
| static site can only meaningfully implement the former, not
| the latter. However implementing ActivityStreams object
| types would still be useful inasmuch as it might provide
| some limited interop with the Fediverse.
|
| (Future server-side improvements might also allow for some
| kind of automated polling of statically-hosted
| ActivityStreams, outside of the standardized "push" model.)
| sbierwagen wrote:
| A pure HTML server won't work, of course. You need something
| that can execute code.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Any Fediverse/ActivityPub plugins for traditional server-hosted
| forums/message boards? Support in Wordpress is nice but that's
| purely a single-user thing; it's not much of a "social"
| platform.
| TheJoYo wrote:
| I host a single user instance that's purely social.
|
| I'm not sure what your point is.
| fsflover wrote:
| See also the statistics here: https://the-federation.info/.
| eitland wrote:
| Users do.
|
| And since this isn't an attempt to squeeze out money from users
| there is little need to let users that mods find toxic stick
| around and it is also OK to slightly raise the bar (some
| instances ask you questions to verify that you are local or
| know the local language or something, something Facebook and
| Twitter could never do.)
|
| Also users that are kicked can either create their own instance
| or find anlther were they are welcome.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > some instances ask you questions to verify that you are
| local or know the local language or something, something
| Facebook and Twitter could never do
|
| Some neighborhood groups on Facebook do ask you hyperlocal
| questions before you can join. It's up to the moderators to
| decide the joining criteria.
| eitland wrote:
| Wow, I try to avoid Facebook so I didn't know.
|
| Thanks!
| russdpale wrote:
| honestly, I find the fediverse a bit too distributed and
| fractured to have any relevance. Creating an account for each new
| instance is a pain in the ass, and franky, no one really wants to
| do that.
|
| I pretty stopped posting on all my fediverse accounts because
| what is the point? No one I personally know wants to switch over
| and the instances have little user interaction.
| msoucy wrote:
| The whole point of federation is that you don't need an accout
| on each instance, you can interact (respond, boost, favorite)
| with posts from one instance from the comfort of another.
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