Centralisation of communications media is an extremely powerful force.
The typical remediation for centralization is regulated public utilities is breaking up a monopoly into a cartel of 3-5 local monopolies.
Also not great.
We are participating here at a very rare occurrence of decentralisation.
For everyone who thinks this is important for our lives and for the world, it is incumbent on all of us to build structures now that hold this ground as the federation grows.
I highly recommend the excellent book "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu.
It details the initial decentralization, followed by centralization and monopoly, of various media from telegrams to film, radio, tv, telephones, cable TV, and the Internet.
It's a fascinating read, and well worth your time.
One of the big mistakes people make, over and over again, is relying on technological determinism.
That is, thinking the architecture of the technology will preserve the topology of the network.
Mastodon is Open Source. It's built with open standards.
This is necessary but not sufficient to keep the network decentralized.
We're going to need social and legal structures, plus cultural norms, that counterbalance Metcalfe's law, which pushes the network towards centralization.
I do agree that centralization is coming to the fediverse, but not for any of the reasons that most people on here think. That centralization is coming for the exact same reasons that centralization came to email, and it's a reason that many folks that would like things to stay decentralised keep ignoring.
And that is user safety.
A lot of Mastodon fans keep pretending that Mastodon is inclusive. It's not. But it could be.
As a Black person, simply signing up for a Mastodon account can expose you to vile racist slurs and threats of violence. Most Mastodon users are one popular toot away from discovering that their instance mods are either unwilling or completely unprepared to deal with this.
Because a centralized whitelist was abused in a cynical attack years ago, the fediverse kinda gave up on that idea, and has been very resistant to it ever since.
It's entirely possible for decentralized instances to provide safety, but most don't/won't. I'm super happy with hachyderm.io for example. ♥️👍🏿
But a larger company is going to integrate with the fediverse, and fulfill the most basic user feature request: "As a user of your product, I would like to know that signing up will not expose me to death threats from nazis" 🤷🏿♂️
Then more new users are going to flow there.
The best thing to do to "counter" this coming centralization is super easy to do, but from my short time observing here, it won't happen:
1. There should be stricter criteria for an instance being listed on "join Mastodon." Insufficient moderation gets you de-listed. Handle cynical false reports.
2. It should be easier for a new admin to just check a box and opt-in to a whitelisted federation that excludes the worst instances.
Personally I care a lot more about user safety than decentralization. I care about decentralization as it pertains to user safety, product innovation, and inclusion. Which is why for the day job, I choose jobs where I can make sure that small companies compete and win against the big company I'm at. This creates a healthier world, and works better for everyone.
But I don't value decentralization for decentralization's sake.
There's increasing evidence that good moderation just doesn't scale well. Having a mod to user ratio of under 1 to 1000 seems ideal. There's all the opportunity for decentralized social to be safer than centralized. And we're squandering it.
By funneling marginalized users to big instances like mastodon.cloud and mastodon.social, letting them experience horrible abuse, and then blocking them for not using CW when they ask for help.
@allenpg @mekkaokereke @evan @markallerton @ks it's kind of been happening a lot, a couple of people with very large followings got banned from m.social. If you follow Eugen he talks about it quite a bit.
But on this one, probably do your own research. I'll get you started. @triketora is **huge**. https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1594348646396559361
@peter_ellis @alexhammy209 @markallerton @mekkaokereke @evan @ks @triketora
I'm able to read your posts. I'm unsure who blocked you or why based on the thread I've just read. Not a bright moment. I'll leave it at that as far as this discussion goes. I look forward to reading your rstats stuff.
@peter_ellis @allenpg @alexhammy209 @markallerton @evan @ks @triketora
Not sure who blocked you? I didn't block you.
I'm just not answering the questions for reasons I've answered in other threads. We don't have to reply to every question.
@mekkaokereke @markallerton @ks @allenpg @evan
I just left a position where I was working with the teams that manage the software for tens of thousands of manual reviewers.
Even reports scheduled for manual review are ranked according to potential harm, and anything below the threshold isn't handled at all. We're talking millions of potentially actionable events per minute across the network.
It definitely doesn't scale.
And that's before you consider cultural issues. You've got English speakers in India reviewing AAVE conversations in the US. Arabic speakers in Indonesia reviewing Arabic posts in the Middle East. Items being reviewed through translations. ML doesn't handle context well, but neither do people from different cultures. Ask anyone on Facebook and they'll tell you about some friend, or themselves, getting warnings for things which are clearly false positives.
I honestly don't know if it's a solvable problem. Although I do think that ML-assisted reviewing could help.
@nazgul @markallerton @ks @allenpg @evan
Holy interesting bio!
SWE with a BA in anthropology. Yay liberal arts!
Some of our biggest problems are socio-technical. We need more folks with warm hearts that understand both worlds. Or even better, know multiple worlds!
@evan @markallerton @ks It's ironic and sad that we're seeing the biggest spikes in fediverse adoption in history precisely because users are fleeing a centralized network that is becoming less safe... and yet we still don't acknowledge that for social networks, safety is the P0 feature.
Yes, the fediverse is safer for some users than centralized social networks, and I'm truly happy for them. But for other users, it is much less safe.
The analogy that several Black users have said, is "Mastodon is the digital equivalent of fleeing 'regular' racism in the deep South, just to experience 'racism doesn't happen here!' racism in Boston." 🙂🙃
Mastodon has more cultural norms around not talking about racist abuse, than around preventing it from happening. I don't know how to convince y'all that this is bad.
So yeah, this creates an opening for centralizers.
@markallerton @evan @ks @mekkaokereke
@zephoria did some research on "white flight" on social media site, circa 2009.
i've been thinking about this frequently.
Years from now, someone is going to cry about "Automaticc or Flickr used 'embrace and extend' to bully us! This always happens! They did this to us!"
But the reality is going to be that "At a time when millions of users were desperate for something, anything, other than Twitter... Automaticc and Flickr took the guesswork out of signing up for an Activity Pub based service that would protect you from Nazis. Noone else did."
@thisismissem The one the journa.host folks were sharing around was at ryona (dot) agency (you are warned, that instance is NSFLunch). What it did was keep a catalogue of which servers were banned by which other servers so if you knew of a person you wanted to harass, you could find an instance that was federated with their instance to sign up at so you could evade previous bans and continue harassment.
The journa.host guy published this in Columbia Journalism Review. Like, Columbia University.
@zzzeek @thisismissem https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalists-want-to-recreate-twitter-on-mastodon-mastodon-is-not-into-it.php
If you know anything about Kiwifarms you know "harassing other users" is a substantial understatement.
<p>Ever since Elon Musk completed his $45 billion takeover of Twitter last month, there has been a steady stream of users, including a number of journalists, signing up for Mastodon, an open-source alternative. No one controls Mastodon—or rather, everyone controls their own version of it. There are thousands of servers running the software, and each […]</p>
@zzzeek @thisismissem specifically, the database that shows which instances are blocked by which other instances that journa.host was linking to is a ban evasion tool. To spell it out, that would be a tool you could use to find a server that's not banned by the server your target uses. That is, to evade bans put up by the admin of your target's instance.
that's the kiwifarms link that was removed from the article.
did you visit the host involved, ryona (dot) agency? don't do it over lunch.
@mekkaokereke
Probably the most important post on the thread.
#Mastodon #Hive #TwitterMigration #MastodonFailureModes #moderationIsWork #moderation #MastodonSafety
@mekkaokereke @evan @markallerton @ks
Relatedly, this is a worthwhile read: https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/ -- even if it doesn't immediately resonate, please try reading it with an open mind, even if you don't agree with every detail.
@mekkaokereke @evan @markallerton @ks
I"ve been trying to follow instances of "blocked because you failed to CW your own experience", and "defederated because you made us uncomfortable".
But it's hard to get past low-cardinality anecdata. I was hoping tools like https://fedidb.org/network would help, but I have yet to find any structured data on blocking and defederation.
Not to suggest tech solutions to cultural issues, but I think it would be helpful to get better data at a broad scale.
Here's one anecdote. Yes, I got blocked by this user.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109388611222845153
Here's another.
https://mastodon.lol/@chanda@blacktwitter.io/109390934235602632
But the deeper issue is that folks that ask for more data to prove that harm is happening, typically don't do anything when they get that data.🤷🏿♂️
And the people that will actually do something to reduce harm, tend to believe folks that report harm without requiring reams of data.👍🏿
@[email protected] No, lets! 🙂 I am "bashing" an instance. (If providing useful feedback to protect other users is considered bashing?) The instance I'm bashing is "Mastodon dot cloud." The reason I'm bashing it is because the moderation is insufficient to protect users from a vile instance clearly run by self proclaimed racists for the purpose of harassing Black people, Jewish people, and members of the LGBTQA community. There are better moderate instances users should go to.
So here's a non rhetorical question...
Suppose you get unimpeachable data that shows you that these issues really are widespread.
What would you do differently than what you could do today with only anecdotes + reports from so many Black users that these things are making the place unwelcoming?
In short what does the data unlock?
@mekkaokereke @evan @markallerton @ks
Sorry -- I didn't mean to suggest that I'm interested in this data for purposes of proving the existence or scale of harassment. I've no doubt whatsoever that it exists, and is disturbingly frequent.
Rather, I'm interested in understanding how _everyone_ can get more information on the de facto behavior and enforcement of policies and norms on different instances...
@mekkaokereke @evan @markallerton @ks
... and using that information to drive clarity, both so users can choose instances that are more likely to be safe, and avoid those that are more interested in arguing about CWs than the safety of their users.
After reading Dr. Flowers' interview, it struck me how little visibility we have into federation and blocking behavior, and the more subtle kinds of suppression he calls out.
I don't _know_ that would help, but it seems worth looking at.
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