If your narrative can be derailed by pseudo-anonymous actors, you don't control the narrative.
The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
Largely agreed, which makes for accord but lousy debate ;-)
In light of the monopoly-power-control dynamic, though, I see frames for analysing and room for thinking about how federated systems should be structured to avoid creating cryptic control loci.
As an example, Mastodon (on which part of this discussion is occurring) saw a remarkably bad interactiion two hears ago when a set of griefers followed Wil Wheaton from Twitter and swamped Mastodon's feeble harassment and abuse detection-and-mitigation systems (they've been improved, I'm given to understand).
Diaspora, where I'd posted this article, has a nagging (though unclear if growing or just persisting) issue with disinformation and propaganda dissemination. On the one hand, effects are pretty limited without algorithmic amplification. On the other, blocking, reporting, and content- or account-removal seem ...underpowered.
The worse forms of abuse seem infrequent, though, which is a good sign.
Federation solves nothing. The problem with the current generation of social media is quite simply the profit motive. Elon Musk tried to make a big deal out of being a free speech absolutist, but his company is run for profit and any time free speech butts up against profit, profit wins. Federation's only advantage is that the profiteers haven't invaded that space yet, but Bluesky is loudly telegraphing that it will no longer be a safe space and they intend to start monetizing it.
If you want to a shining example of effective content moderation, public utility and centralization, then just look at Wikipedia. What's different about them? Non-profit.
It matters deeply when the people who run and develop the platform support something that simply shouldn't be supported, and at the end of the day even if they don't control the federation they do control a significant chunk of the direction and policies of the federation.
It would be like encouraging everyone to move to a place like voat. Don't give random extremists to the opportunity to control media or any form of narrative.
I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their argument is a bit strange.
Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them.
But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in.
The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.
You are not wrong but the question isn't whether a platform is allowed to have a pov and an agenda rather it is should we trust our time, our lives, our stories to such centralized platforms.
Further should be trust people like twitter to keep our secrets when we could trust software platforms where nobody holds the key to giving our identities to a man in a suit that will do his best to ruin us.
I think you are referring to corporate and state controlled social media. There is a big difference between those platforms and the fediverse instances I am running on a RPI sitting on my desk.
I mean, surely federalised social media is the solution rather than the problem here. If you think some monolithic worldview is challenging to welcome new people, then being able to quickly create a new instance for your friends and like minded colleagues seems like a win (hence why the tech behind Mastodon is also being Truth social etc)
This just reminds me that the problem with discourse isn't centralization, control, lack of privacy or security, or any other thing.
The problem is that people act in bad faith online, a lot.
Give a bunch of people a platform to broadcast their thoughts, and a lot of people will be lazy about those thoughts. A lot of people will turn it into a competition and be more concerned about creating a following rather than spreading truth and fostering healthy discussion.
Sure, I'd take a Fediverse over a Facebook or a Twitter any day; lack of corporate control and the ability to run your own instance and federate are just plain better from a "health of the internet" perspective. But that doesn't solve the social problems inherent in any community where people most don't know each other personally and don't have to interact face-to-face.
This is so ludicrously naive. Yes there are problems with legacy media - largely related to their plutocratic ownership. No, centralising control of our public discourse and spaces for debate in even fewer hands won’t help fix that problem.
We lose nothing as Musk drives twitter into the ground. We have the potential to gain if federated protocols gain even a small amount of traction because critical mass for their viability may be smaller than we think given the overall increased size of the pie relative to when the first and second mover social media players were founded.
A non-trivial part of the reason this environment exists is that we are being enticed into these big centralized platforms, with centralized identities, because it benefits the witches, not us.
When there was no central big service, there was no ground for these massive centralized pushes to exist. Bad stuff happened, but bad stuff happens in real life, too; as long as the scales are roughly comparable I'm not inclined to go too ballistic trading freedom for safety. The risk of all those things exists today in such an outsized way because it benefits Facebook and Twitter to centralize everything.
The issue is when companies build platforms which are literally designed to allow people to force their views (and often threats) into other people's faces because that "drives engagement" or improves some other bullshit statistic. If companies were to stop doing that, there'd be much less of a push for moderation of those platforms.
Of course, luckily, there's now federated systems like Mastodon which are designed to avoid doing that and to provide the tools for communities to self-organise, meaning one group can have their neofascist server and another their tankie server and the two can block each other and be relatively happy.
I never understood the appeal of decentralized social media platforms until now. How does it make sense for large centralized platforms to police their platform for every little thing that the current social environment finds unacceptable? People should be able to organize themselves into groups as they see fit and no unilateral decision should have final say in a global community's thoughts and discussions
The problem with this (and I think the difficulty in understanding what the author is trying to get across) is 'who owns the data?', or 'who owns the initiating platform.
Sure all platforms can communicate with the others, which is more akin to e-mail, but you still have a platform and a suppliers.
You wouldn't want a platformless environment where anything you post is spread anywhere and everywhere without your knowledge. You kinda have that with twitter now, but you can still delete your posts.
federated alternatives to "Big media" already exist, in usable form for the average user. Signing onto Mastodon is barely any different than signing onto twitter. The only thing that's missing is a coordinated effort to actually move everyone out of the silos.
We can democratize discourse without having facebook in the loop who has the exact same incentives that big media has to monetize and curate what we say. Big Tech is no more democratic or acting in our interest than big media just because they've got a juicero machine in the office and a ping pong table in the lobby.
Yeah, the fundamental problem here is social medias ought to be a protocol, not a platform.
Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.
This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.
Platforms have the problem of scale. If I don't like how facebook or twitter are contributing to the information ecosystem I could go hang out on Gab or some other niche platform - but the tradeoff is that the people I want to interact with aren't there. These systems are inertial - while it is a great idea that future platforms should implement design choices that incentivize a well informed public and discourage conspiracy-mongering and misinformation that doesn't fix the issues with the current information ecosystem for years if not decades to come. Even if users were well informed about content moderation policies (they aren't), and users were rational actors (they're not), there are other goods involved that prevent that sort of ordered transition scenario. Frankly large scale platforms need to make significant changes to how they handle their role in information-space.
Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin limits who you can federate with, and if the policy changes, it requires you to rebuild from scratch if you want to move.
That's what's keeping platforms like Twitter on top even though many of its prolific users now sound more like an abused spouse than anything else.
I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with persecution and social status games.
Please note, this is why stuff like Twitter and Facebook do so well. Those of you who are surprised, or discouraged, when the public chooses a walled-garden like Twitter or Facebook, please remember how self-destructive some technologists have been, when promoting technologies that could server as decentralized alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.
In this particular story, the villain is Dave Winer, but at other times there have been other technologists who have undermined the very thing they were nominally promoting.
The idea that I'm primarily disagreeing with is that Facebook, Twitter, et al. can be hegemonic in a user-populated space. I don't think they can. They can certainly exert large amounts of influence and constrain it, but it's not monolithic and they don't control it. Federation only makes that influence more invisible. It certainly doesn't remove it.
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