This is @deoxxa's overview of the various components of OStatus: https://www.fknsrs.biz/blog/don-statusnet-node-part-one-read-protocols.html
It's worth reading. IMO the component to think about is PubSubHubbub. Specifically, the hubs, which serve as notification intermediaries between publishers and subscribers.
Key notes:
1. Hubs do NOT need to be Twitter-like user homes.
2. Hubs are very capable of tracking user behavior, even if notifications are encrypted.
3. Hubs need to be reliable.
So the question: how to make hubs that are/have
* reliable
* trustworthy
* non-exploitative of users
* non-authoritarian (wrt censorship)
* proxy-able
* graceful failover
* graceful obsolescence
* potentially anonymous
* potentially transient
I think in the absence of these considerations, mastodon networks will, as others like @bcrypt have pointed out, tend to consolidate around a few large instances that will have too much trust & reliability burden placed on them.
I'm uncomfortable with hub-runners deciding which other instances they do and do not federate with. People can certainly run filtering services, but they should be independent of instances/hubs, not tied to them.
For similar reasons, I don't think hubs/instances should be thought of as communities with individual cultures, because you then turn the hub-runner into the de facto community leader.
Running a SMTP/NNTP/OSocial server shouldn't make you a doyenne. People get high off of that power.
@auerbach in practice the servers are little communities. they just are, I don't know how to justify it but they end up working that way. but part of that is that who you talk to and how is shaped by the contours of the software.
earlier version of mastodon made no distinction between local and remote users, this caused constant problems for the rest of us on gnu social because mastodon users kept shitting all over GS users for violating community norms when we weren't really in their community
@MoonMan Okay, it's pretty funny I'm talking to "MoonMan" about this subject.
I don't disagree that community clusters can form. In fact, I assume that they will, and that's precisely why I think content discrimination should be separated out from instance administration. An instance administrator can run a blacklist/filter as well, but formal separation of function will make it so that instance users are not subject to the whims of the instance admin.
@auerbach i want the social network you're asking for, but I think there are a lot of technical issues accomplishing it on this platform with the way these servers work and its a distraction from what they already do best.
not meaning to weigh you down with back and forth, just my thoughts from some of the challenges running my own server. my server is https://shitposter.club/ and probably about 60+% of mastodon servers block us outright. my acct on this server is for inter-server comms :-)
@auerbach @MoonMan
Isn't reviewing the policies of the instance admin part of the process of picking an instance? I'm with @Elucidating in that the isolation is a feature.
I mod on several subreddits, and I think that the ability of each community to set their own rules and is a workable model. Being able to say "nothing even remotely transphobic is allowed and I'm the final arbiter" protects my users from BS under the banner of "discussion".
@auerbach I think you've got to be able to cut off potentially bad actors. For example, if an instance takes a friendly policy towards mass spamming or trying to clog queues they've got to be cut off.
The notion of a truly decentralized but fully connected network is not the paradise people seem to think it is. It's something like Twitter but worse.
@Elucidating Agreed. But already we are seeing clustering based not on bad actors but on ideology. I'm in favor of pushing content discrimination as high up in the stack as possible, not putting it at the level of IP blacklisting.
I'm not advocating an absolutist position, but right now I think balkanization is a more pressing problem than spam, precisely because authority to cut off bad actors is already relatively centralized.
@auerbach I think segmentation like that is a feature people want. They come here eager to escape the excess and oppressions of fully connected networks.
There is a strange idea that Twitter's model is what we need or want and I am expressing doubt. It sounds smart, but upon experimentation I think it's wrong.
Most people afraid of "censorship by the graph" are not mad that censorship exists but that in fact they might be in the minority when it all shakes out.
@Elucidating You aren't arguing against my point that it should be modular and separable from federation itself.
It doesn't seem controversial to say that content discrimination shouldn't be determined at the routing level.
@auerbach But when users are also the people who run the routing, I think it does become controversial to say that.
There isn't a real difference between toxic information and toxic peer behavior, in my opinion. It seems quite arbitrary to demand routers cannot participate in this process.
@Elucidating The users aren't running the routing. I don't run mastodon.social. The people who do run it can run a filter as well. The separation would be formal and functional, not organizational.
I don't think users should be required to buy into both to use one. That seems to go against all principles of FOSS.
auerbach
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