Mastodawn

https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/109533315401943335

Mastodon Migration

We've seen this movie before. In 2023 journalist Taylor Lorenz @taylorlorenz was suspended from Twitter ironically also for posting about Elon Musk, initiating a regime of increasing censorship and control over user content, mostly self enforced to avoid the same fate.

Bluesky users take note, this is about freedom of expression and the chilling effect of knowing you may be banned for stepping over arbitrary lines set by the owners of your centralized platform.

Why is it different here? The answer is obvious, but bears repeating. The Fedi is truly a #decentralized network.

If the owners of your instance suspend your account, you actually do have the option to set up shop on another instance and continue to interact on the network. You are not banned from the network. No one has that power.

And, importantly here it is the owners who must be careful not to alienate users with capricious rules. The dynamic is reversed. Here the users have the power.

https://mastodon.social/@Popehat/111427290962583386

@mastodonmigration All that may be true, but Ken White doesn't post on Mastodon anymore either, and cited the constant "HOA" scolding as his reason for leaving. He's got a point.

I like Mastodon. I'm using Mastodon right now. But for all that it's decentralized, Mastodon's got its own cultural problems that put people off. Including Ken White.

Hell, even now I'm half-expecting some reply-guy to scold me for saying "Mastodon" when they think I should have said "Fedi".

Keith 3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration maybe I’m weird, but I see a world of difference between a hard ban by the owners/controllers of a site, and criticism (“scolding”) by other users. The ban is silencing speech from above. Scolding is more speech; peers expressing their disagreement. This may lead some people to self-censor based on their fear of disapproval. But there is a clear difference between this and forced censorship.

https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/116801417557910092

@keydelk @Thad

💯 Wrote about that here...

W6KME 3d ago

@keydelk @Thad @mastodonmigration I strongly agree with Keith here.

@W6KME @keydelk @Thad

💯 It is the essential point

@keydelk That's a fair distinction though I disagree with your use of phrasing like "forced censorship" and your reference to Brandeis' "more speech/enforced silence" quote. Brandeis was referring to government censorship, not a private entities enforcing conditions on the use of their services. In the context of the Whitney ruling, a private company telling people "you can't say that here" IS more speech. And so is choosing not to use it, which is Popehat's point. @mastodonmigration

Keith 3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration I used to feel this way, but with the power that many of these social media platforms have, I feel that the effects start to resemble state censorship. @pluralistic actually changed my opinion on this matter with a couple well-written essays: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

Yes, It’s Censorship – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

@keydelk It's not "censorship" I'm disagreeing with so much as "forced". Men with guns don't come to your house and arrest you for what you post on Bluesky. That's not a trivial difference.

Holmes spoke of the marketplace of ideas; that's the market in action. That the market is dominated by a few giant players isn't a speech issue, it's an antitrust one.

Keith 3d ago

@Thad I'll agree with that. The root problem of a lot of this is we've enabled massive monopolies to form across the tech-landscape. Abuse of these monopoly powers is a big reason I left the corporate social media platforms for the fediverse.

Guillotine Jones, Flâneur 3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration
Have culture, have problems.
I'll still take the cultural problems of Mastodon or the Fediverse over the problems at the walled gardens.
Here I can mute, block, edit, and migrate freely to mitigate some of the issues that are built-in elsewhere.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man.

stux⚡️3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration Please don't let the people who interact for that kinda stuff scare you away

The fast majority is happy they post in the first place!

Nathan A. Stine 3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration the solution to this is to mute/block early and often.

@stinerman Which works pretty well for me, but my account's not as popular as Popehat.

Bluesky's blocklists seem like a pretty useful feature. @mastodonmigration

F4GRX SÃ©bastien 3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration what do you prefer, a few tech nerds scolding you about local cultural details or being banned from a platform for dubious reasons ?

@f4grx What point are you trying to make and to whom?

I'm already here, dude. So is literally everyone else who will see your post. Who are you arguing with?

Christopher 1d ago

@f4grx
Well, they can amount to the same thing, if the sizes are comparable.

But the thing is, the "local cultural details" are neither local nor cultural. Almost all of the whining comes from people on *other servers* trying to impose *their* local server rules on *someone else's* users. This stems from the misbegotten global-first model of the fediverse, where the local server is nothing more than a decorative URL to hang off the ass end of your handle, rather than as the fundamental building block of the social web.
@Thad @mastodonmigration

Aria <3

3d ago

@Thad @mastodonmigration ""HOA" scolding"?

@ariarhythmic Homeowner's Association. Organizations that are generally regarded as nuisances that annoy their neighbors over trivial matters that are none of their business.

Christopher 1d ago

@Thad
The thing is, in a lot of ways the HOA problem is a distinctly Mastodon issue. Not uniquely, of course, but still overwhelmingly. A significant chunk of the HOA crowd has spent years decrying the discussion of features that other platforms have, and insisting upon the use of features other platforms may not.

Mods need to start treating off-topic discussion as discussions that need to be moderated and split, but Mastodon doesn't have the ability to split a discussion thread, and the cultural expectation is still rooted in corporate social media norms, not the norms of pre-corporate social media, so the idea of managing someone else's discussion, or even imposing repercussions for generally disruptive behaviour is seemingly unthinkable.
@mastodonmigration

burly 3d ago

@mastodonmigration I guess I'm confused, can't he just start his own bluesky instance that he can't get banned from? I thought that was one of the selling points of bluesky, but perhaps Im just ignorant, I rarely if ever use it. It looks like a twitter clone with the same creepy SV cult like backing as other social media.

Wesley Cook ⚡🚲3d ago

@burly Not really, you'd have to host all of the other infrastructure too like a relay, etc. which is very expensive but he'd still be banned on the main network either way I think.

Blacksky is one such alternative network

@mastodonmigration My take on this, from a network/protocols/platform perspective, is that this is an indication that the "stacked moderation" that Bluesky is trying is failing to solve the scaling problem with moderation. As Ken points out, many, many other people - most of them more marginalized and with less of a platform than Ken - have been temporarily or permanently banned. In theory, Bluesky has a bunch of tools, including shared blocklists and a "label" system that give users a significant amount of control over their experience, and it's the users themselves that get to create these things. This is good, and the Fediverse has things it should learn from this. However, the original idea was that Bluesky would do minimal moderation at the "base" layer, and these "stacked" tools would be the main way users kept their experience safe and enjoyable. This was supposed to solve the problem that Mike Masnick has written about extensively that good moderation does not scale. Unfortunately, this is not how it has worked out. Yes, users make good use of the stacked tools. But Bluesky is still doing bad moderation at the base layer.

@mastodonmigration Another important point that Ken makes that I think is worth paying attention to is the fact that it does not matter whether the immediate decision here was automated or made by a human; the humans built the system, the humans can (or at least should) see how it is operating to systematically suppress people who are angry at the powerful people causing harm, privileging the very people doing the harm. The humans are still responsible for the moderation decisions. The same applies for all kinds of decision-making that people are trying to automate and/or offload to AI.

@ricci

Indeed! This is a very important point. Increasingly corporations are blaming AI, using it as a shield against culpability.

@mastodonmigration This is the kind of thing that people like @emilymbender, @timnitGebru , and @alex have been saying for years, so if this is a new idea to anyone reading this, go follow them, you'll learn a lot.

@burly @mastodonmigration

burly 3d ago

@ricci @mastodonmigration That sounds like some interesting reading, but I'm equally curious as to the claim/assumption that moderation works even at smaller scales.

He's written about it several times, here's the main article: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/

The main idea, at least the way I look at it, is that at small scale, it's possible to have an actual shared context and shared values. This is impossible at large scales.

Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

As some people know, I’ve spent a fair bit of time studying economist Kenneth Arrow whose work on endogenous growth theory and information economics influenced a lot of my thinking on the eco…

Techdirt

@burly @mastodonmigration

Here's a specific example where moderation without context makes a (relatively harmless in this case, and funny) decision: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/09/23/the-most-famous-blunder-of-content-moderation-do-not-quote-the-princess-bride/

The Most Famous Blunder Of Content Moderation: Do NOT Quote The Princess Bride

We’ve written stories about people having difficulty recognizing people joking around quoting movies. Sometimes it ends up ridiculously, like the guy who was arrested for quoting Fight Club a…

Techdirt

@burly @mastodonmigration In a furtherly-funny incident, Bluesky (which Mike is on the board of) suspended someone for quoting a Johnny Cash lyric, in response to an article about Johnny Cash, basically exactly the same thing Mike had written about years before.