If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/04/pick-all-three/#agonism

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Rozenshtein proposes a solution (of sorts) to the Moderator's Trilemma: federation. De-siloing social media, breaking it out of centralized walled gardens and recomposing it as a bunch of small servers run by a diversity of operators with a diversity of #ContentModeration approaches. The #Fediverse, in other words.

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In Albert Hirschman's classic treatise *Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,* stakeholders in an institution who are dissatisfied with its direction have two choices: #voice (arguing for changes) or #exit (going elsewhere). Rozenshtein argues that Fediverse users (especially users of #Mastodon, the most popular part of the Fediverse) have more voice *and* more #FreedomOfExit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

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Large platforms - think #Twitter, #Facebook, etc - are very unresponsive to users. Most famously, Facebook polled its users on whether they wanted to be spied on. Faced with overwhelming opposition to commercial surveillance, Facebook ignored the poll result and cranked the #surveillance dial up to a million:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683

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A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the #VoxPopuli, which, in this instance, was not #VoxDei:

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df

Facebook, Twitter and other #WalledGardens are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high #SwitchingCosts to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls.

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Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow *them*.

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With one more click, users can import that data into any other Fediverse server and be back up and running with almost no cost or hassle:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

Last month, "Nathan," the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users' arguments about the new #HarryPotter game.

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Commentators called this a mark against federation: "You can't rely on random, thin-skinned volunteer sysops for your online social life!"

https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265

But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the *strength* of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop - but when he #enshittifies his platform, they can't just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:

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Mastodon.lol shows us how, if you don't like your host's content moderation policies, you can exercise voice - even to the extent of making him so upset that he shuts off his server - and where voice fails, exit steps in to fill the gap, providing a soft landing for users who find the moderation policies untenable:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

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Traditionally, centralization has been posed as beneficial to content moderation. As Rozenshtein writes, a company that can "enclose" its users and lock them in has an incentive to invest in better user experience, while companies whose users can easily migrate to rivals are less invested in those users.

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And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and #twiddle them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.

Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation.

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As @tarleton writes, “Moderation is central to what platforms do, not peripheral... [it] is, in many ways, the commodity that platforms offer":

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/

Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe - from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn't say so, it's important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803

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And they also fail at blocking malicious code:

https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class

But even where platforms *do* act to "keep users safe," they fail, thanks to the Moderator's Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will *always* feel like speech is being underblocked - while others will feel it's overblocked (and both will be right!):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

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And platforms play very fast and loose with their definition of "malicious code" - as when #Apple blocked #OGApp, an #Instagram ad-blocker that gave you a simple feed consisting of just the posts from the people you followed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace #subsidiarity: "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

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For Rozenshtein, "content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual instances that make up the overall network." The fact that users can leave a server and set up somewhere else means that when a user gets pissed off enough about a moderation policy, they don't have to choose between leaving social media or tolerating the policy - they can simply choose another server that's part of the same federation.

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Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different modeations norms. But Reddit's devolution is a matter of *policy*, not *architecture* - subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit's owners.

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Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community.

You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can band that subreddit, they can ban *any* subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.

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By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from *antagonism* (the "zero-sum destructiveness" that dominates current online debate) to #agonism, where your opponent isn't an enemy - they are a "political adversary":

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites @320x200 and @rra's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

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> For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus...

So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms."

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But the whole Fediverse "is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances."

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A good case-study here is #Gab, a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely - but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.

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