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.
i think that's asking the wrong question. i think most or all of them started off pretty good. where we went wrong is creating a system where social media sites are paid for with ads, which gives warped incentives to the owners of those sites.
in that respect, federation is the answer. take the power away from anybody who could screw it all up for us.
Federation is fine for groups of like minded people who want to discuss topics in echo chambers. That might be most of the discussion that happens online. It's absolutely fine.
However we also need a public square online. One where anyone may speak and anyone may respond and challenge the ideas. A place where anyone can put their claims on the record. It's not a place for sharing holiday photos. It is a place for public figures, journalists and politicians. Twitter has already been moving out of this space with it's various 'snowflake protection' policies and I hope Mr. Musk can restore this public square and strengthen it.
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.
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)
I'd like to see the 'Wikipedia' of social media emerge: a centrally managed, decentrally moderated, non-profit, 'nagware' funded social media.
Most users don't care about federation or decentralisation. They want low-cost and convenience but they're starting to realise they don't want it at the expense of their mental health or privacy.
Nothing can be simpler for the end user than a centrally managed service: I just go to wikipedia.org and start reading/writing. Censorship issues are avoided because moderation is decentralised: the site has a governance framework.
So I believe there's a space for a similar concept in social media. There's no question social media fulfils a genuine human need. But the profit motive inevitably forces commercial social medias to make decisions that detriment the user. For example, 'engagement': a santised term for addiction. Is it good for the user that social media should be continually engineered to increase 'engagement'? A non-profit has no such conflict of interest. It may even take steps to reduce engagement if it believes users are at risk of depression, addiction, anxiety etc.
I would love to talk to anyone who has ideas about bootstrapping something like that (email address in profile).
The problem is that social media is not and was never designed to be a replacement to public square..
Social media started as tool to allow people to stay in touch after their time together came to an end and eventually evolved\merged with forums as a tool to bring people with similar interest together.
The thing we have today that kind resemble a public square is a side effect of then needing to make money, that they decided to do by using ads.
In order to make more money with ads they need to keep people around for longer so they started taking content and spreading around to random people.
Kind like a public square but not really because you need to keep advertisers happy, so you cannot allow any speech in your platform that displeases the advertisers, or at least you need to ensure ads will not show next to speech that make advertisers unhappy or else they are going away and you now have a money problem (exactly twitter situation).
Public square is a end to end relation.. You go somewhere and speak and whoever is in ear shoot listen, if they don't want to listen they get away, if a lot of people that does not want to listen get together they make you leave, but you can always come back later.
The moment you add any kind of platform in the middle, specially one with an algorithm that decide what you should see, you are now bound to the platform rules and biases. And that is no longer a public square.
Social media today is, in my opinion, more akin to personal ads or letters to the editor in a newspaper then to a public square. It will spread your speech further then a public square but is bound to the rules and biases of the newspaper publishing then.
And I don't think any protocol can solve this. All a protocol can do is allow you to created biased silos where different types of speech live and they might or might not federate to other silos.
Basically federation allow you to turn social media in glorified forums, but it will never really replace public square.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is approaching the social media issue as if it was a technical problem - it's not. No amount of decentralisation or protocols address (or even attempt) the root cause. The closest would be the crypto-based social networks, which while they have their own problems at least attempt to address the issue of funding the platform. You know it's bad when the closest thing to a solution comes from crypto grifters. Same issue with the rest of the "alternative" world, whether it's OSes or software. Lots of time spent on technicalities or ideologies, zero time spent on addressing the actual problem - that's why the "year of the Linux desktop" is still a recurring joke.
The problem with social media right now is the lack of a non-adversarial, sustainable business model. All these changes stem from the fact that advertising-based business models are on their last legs and are fundamentally flawed because they are adversarial to the users - the Twitter API shutdown is at least partly because they want to drive everyone to use the official client where it's easier to impose user-hostile functionality.
Decentralisation merely side-steps this problem which works on a very small scale but not only will break down at a larger scale (operating a social media platform costs money) but also brings a lot of its own issues. Part of the appeal of a social media platform is its popularity, network effects and a sense of community where most people are happy with or at least tolerate the rules and moderation policy.
A Mastodon-powered future will have 2 outcomes:
1) every instance federates with everyone and the entire thing becomes flooded with spam and other unsavoury (or outright illegal, at least in some jurisdictions) content because there is no common moderation policy. Users eventually get fed up and leave to a centralised competitor.
2) instances federate on a case-by-case basis which fundamentally breaks network effects and makes global conversation and community building impossible. Good luck explaining to non-technical users why they can't see/interact with the same posts as their friends because they happen to be on different instances that don't federate with each other, or because the content they both want to see is on a separate instance that doesn't federate with theirs. Users get fed up & leave or can't get started to begin with and sign up on a centralised competitor instead.
In both cases I haven't even addressed the issue of funding the network itself - there is still no business model (and any business model where users pay would require the service to have enough value for them to begin doing so - chicken & egg problem when the value of a social network is in its network effects), and even if there was, it will be more expensive because decentralisation requires a lot more system resources.
The problem with these decentralised platforms is that the first people to flock to them are the people who have been deplatformed by major services.
Some services try to capitalize on that (Gab, Trump's Twitter) while others ignore the problem and end up destined to be abandoned by normal people.
Large parts of the Mastodon network are filled with porn and alt-right accounts that got banned from Twitter. Youtube alternatives are quickly filled with conspiracy theories and other content even Youtube doesn't want its algorithm to push. Hell, even centralised services have this problem; DailyMotion is the last real Youtube alternative and these days it's mostly pirated content, from what I can tell.
Until some major content providers switch, which they won't, because they'll lose their income, there won't be a transition to free software. I fear the Fediverse came about 10 years too late to be successful.
I'm okay with this. Very little good has come from this. How many of the social platforms would be where they are now if they had to fund themselves differently?
I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are actually succeeding.
Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is self-contradictory.
I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.
This is a strange [as in deceptively simple yet not that hard] question of externalities.
Especially that most new platforms completely agree with you (ie. they don't want to allow arbitrary user content, because moderation is hard, spam/scammers/4chan-raids are bad for the user experience, and selling ads is hard if your platform is constantly in the news as a great new thing with the thorny little problem of a small nazi community in its side).
But those who benefit from the endless firehose of low-quality user generated content (FB, Twitter, TikTok, YT and so on, mostly the old guard) have a vested interest in putting the cost of the externalities on society, and free speech related concepts serve as great explanations and arguments.
Obviously we know the real cost of censorship and the positive value of an effective 4th branch.
And since there is some relationship between moderation, webhosting, DDoS protection, centralization, monopolies, regulatory capture and the previous "censorship bad, speech good" intuition. So it's not surprising that the latter always ends up overshadowing the whole concrete object level question.
The solution seems to be an unsatisfying acknowledgement that as long as the threat of authoritarianism, populism and their ilk are real the intuition to push back against state mandated moderation seems to be the correct one while also pushing back against the groups that support the aforementioned ideologies.
So as a consequence it would be great to develop a better model than the current seesaw of initially pushing for the intuition then doing a sudden 180 degree reversal and trying to scorch the earth of even the memory of some website.
Twitter has timeouts (and now AI speech police). Stock exchanges have circuit breakers. Do these make sense for Cloudflare? Maybe, maybe not.
Platforms are a form of the public commons that have been privatized. The privatization is the problem, not the content. What is happening is that the form of free public speech has become, over the past 15 years, something that we now have to pay rent to use. FB, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Parler are private forms of communication that we now all have to pay rent to in order to communicate. There needs to be a free public commons of communication. If that existed this problem would not exist. It is, as most here have asserted, a dissonance and problem with allowing unelected billionaires to decide on free speech. This is because it attacks the form of free public speech only because of the content and our economic order. The solution is to create an international public commons that protects communication, health, etc.
Yeah, it's 'my friends are here' and 'the content I want to read/interact with is here'.
It's the same reason people haven't mass switched to Mastodon or other Fediverse services; because the userbase is so much smaller than the likes of Twitter that there's a good chance the people and content they care about isn't available there. Or why so many competitors to popular services fail in general, regardless of their stance on free speech. The network effect is strong, and sometimes even billions of dollars and tons of marketing can't overcome that (see Google+ for example).
Would people prefer a free speech orientated alternative? Hard to say, for the same reason as whether they'd prefer a decentralised or federated one; it's the content and users that bring people to a site or service, and the competitors to the popular ones are so much smaller and less active it isn't much of a comparison.
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.
There is no easy answer that I can see to this dilemma.
Advertising driven platforms lead to people seeking meme type approval and are encouraged to share outlandish claims. On the other hand allowing government to set policy is obviously problematic (insert CCP, United Russia, or even the Dem or Repub parties in the US setting the rules). Other than perhaps dispersed federation (to cap growth) I don’t see a good way to manage this.
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.
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