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> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to ho

> Individual servers would let different groups set their own community standards, though likely with a “floor” of rules set by Meta, in a fashion similar to how Reddit’s individual communities work. This is not praise. Reddit bans people for expressing widely held beliefs. Subreddit mods are required to enforce the site-wide rules regardless of the subreddit's own preferences. As another commenter put it [1], the property that makes a decentralized social network desirable is actually that it's non-excludeable. There's no outside entity that can exclude people from the network. This is very similar to the core of what censorship is: there is a speaker and a listener who both want to communicate, but some third party prevents them. What I would like from a social network is opt-in filtering, where you can choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists. But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. If this new social network Meta is building puts users in control, it could be great. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091164

exitb 4y ago
That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.
- Zardoz84 4y ago
  And allow us to kick out any fascist guy and/or instance from the federated network.
  - thr717272 4y ago
    Problem is people have no idea what Facism and Nazism is. You find people here in the west who hate Jews claiming to be anti-facists and people starting a massive invasion of a very peaceful central European country - all while repeating much of Hitlers playbook - while claiming they do it to crush the "Nazis" there.
- thr717272 4y ago
  One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances. I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.
  - 8note 4y ago
    That sounds like US secondary sanctions. A working system when your community is popular to deal with
    - thr717272 4y ago
      It is understandable when it deals with Iran, a terrorist organization sitting on top of an oil field, terrorizing large parts of the Middle East (note that nowhere do I criticize the overthrowing of the old regime, I just criticize what they themselves is/became).
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Unfortunately that's ended up with a netsplit between covenanted and free servers, some servers will even de-federate you for federating with the "wrong" servers. So the only way to access the whole fediverse is either have multiple accounts, or run your own server.
  - exitb 4y ago
    This is not a technical problem, but a societal one.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I don't think I consider that a bad thing.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    You say all that like it's a problem. If I run a gay furry porn instance, like wall to wall kitsune dicks, why should anyone federate with me? If you want fox dicks you come to my server. If you don't you avoid my server. You shouldn't have to see a bunch of raunchy furry gifs at work to decide you don't want to see those and block me manually. Federation should be a totally voluntary thing between servers. Only instances with compatible policies should federate. Accessing the whole fediverse should only ever be a client problem in logging into multiple instances. Instances shouldn't be expected to just federate with everyone.
Fatnino 4y ago
So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"
  - lmpdev 4y ago
    That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules
    - frodetb 4y ago
      "Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.
    - traviswt 4y ago
      This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.
      - 8note 4y ago
        It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance
    - xigoi 4y ago
      “Cheese pizza” is banned by law in most countries, so it won't be “permitted” either way.
    - 4y ago
papito 4y ago
Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug. A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - papito 4y ago
    So, you have no problem, I assume, with the "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books to remove anything offensive? Right? You know, to prevent "government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education." I'll wait.
    - chimineycricket 4y ago
      In parent's defense, banning kids from reading certain books is not the same as "woke" governors banning or revising classic books for _everyone_, not just kids. If people are banning books at school because the content can be bad for kids (debatable on what "bad" means obviously) then the parents can go get the book from elsewhere and have their kids read it at home. Whatever. But changing books for everyone is stupid.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - traviswt 4y ago
      This seems like a great case against public education, since the mechanism to address this "whoever is in power decides" situation is of course competition and free choice. Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step down, but public school is where the parent matters the least and we end up in perpetual holy wars like this.
gonzo41 4y ago
You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you? Moderation is really hard. And it's especially hard because a lot of people have very para-social relationships between themselves and rando's they talk to online. Whilst I know that sometimes those rando's turn into real friends in the real world. For the most part people are strangers, and the better form of moderation is getting off social media for a while. If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Bubbles are generally bad. And everything goes to shit, even on HN, when we start getting into politics.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you? Unsubscribe
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  There is an open music making forum. It is completely toxic. Even if I set to ignore garbage users they influence the discussions and most threads. A relevant music making subreddit deleted my music on an open to all feedback request thread without giving me any reason, yet I still prefer that subreddit because it's not just pure toxic negativity. We need a mix of both with people free to choose their model.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
rusticpenn 4y ago
How is it different from whatsapp?
jonathanstrange 4y ago
I think you're wrong and not the typical user. Personally, I would never use any social network without strong moderation and banning of toxic users, and I'm that many if not most people share this sentiment. Places without strong moderation turn into hellholes and are generally less interesting. Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.
- adrr 4y ago
  You don’t like hanging out on 4chan? It’s not what users want anyway, it is what advertisers want. They don’t want toxic content next to their ads.
  - anoy8888 4y ago
    Wow , you are very different from most people as most (99.9999?)can’t stand toxic trolls.
    - adrr 4y ago
      It was a sarcastic remark to emphasis that majority of people don't like toxic content.
  - drowsspa 4y ago
    Most people don't like hanging out on 4chan.
  - astura 4y ago
    The vast majority of 4chan users are children or very young adults. Most people grow out of that.
- _HMCB_ 4y ago
  Agreed 100%.
- bhupy 4y ago
rakoo 4y ago
You're probably interested in Aether then: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
mattigames 4y ago
The huge problem is scaling, the bigger the social network gets the more moderators you would need to subscribe because the ones you already subscribed to are not cutting enough noise anymore, so it's almost inevitable that there would be a scarcity of moderators, at some point the only useful moderators would be paid ones or more likely bots, the bots with the most success at banning "toxic people" using AI or whatever would quickly win that race... and then you just would have created Facebook again.
footlose_3815 4y ago
Widely held beliefs Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"? You appear to have done some research into the topic so I think it would be beneficial to your point if you gave examples of the beliefs. Because of Bandwagon fallacy, because we know just because something is widely-held doesn't necessarily make it valid, so these popular beliefs, I'd like to see what they are.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  You will get banned on Reddit if you say trans women aren’t real women. They call it promoting hate towards a marginalized group. You may be sympathetic towards that so think twice before moving the goalpost.
  - turnsout 4y ago
    The goalpost is always moving—it's called the Overton window. And whether you like it or not, the window is not moving in your direction on this issue.
    - figlett4 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      But the point is it’s a valid example of a widely held belief that gets banned, even if you agree with Reddits policy. The goalpost move I’m referring to is from “Reddit doesn’t ban widely held beliefs “ to “Well Reddit should ban this widely held belief “
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - wilsonnb3 4y ago
      Believing that there are differences between trans women and AFAB women is not denying anyone’s right to exist.
altairprime 4y ago
That same property of inviolable non-excludable makes a social network inaccessible to those who are frequently harassed. The right to shun some participants is a necessary function of social spaces, to mitigate known and documented human tendencies over the past couple thousand years to drown out, abuse, and in general commit conversational warfare upon others. “Just block them” doesn’t scale when each harasser is harassing thousands of people. “Just block scripts” is no more effective than blocking adblockers. “Opt-in moderators” is no more legally viable than “No moderators”. If you want to moderate a space, then set up and run a space of your own. If you want to federate with others, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your federations. If you want your space to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your hosting and transit providers. If you want your federation to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your organization’s laws. This is true today for all social sites, whether solo or distributed. Facebook thinks they can opt out of expensive and difficult moderation duties by transferring the legal requirements for moderation to their users. They may succeed briefly, but the EU will not look kindly upon their attempt to circumvent the law.
nmz 4y ago
Suppose I create a bot and create millions of accounts. post in each article, now you're spending a huge, myriad of time just filtering/ignoring users.
giantrobot 4y ago
> But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. The difficulty there is the end users are not hosting or distributing content. Some server(s) need to host content. No one can be forced to host content. A host is always going to be the final arbiter of what content is ultimately available. Even if someone wants to run a Mastodon (or whatever) instance filled with Nazi content no one else is obligated to federate with them.

exitb 4y ago

That's roughly how Mastodon works. Each instance is responsible for moderation of their own users. If an instance does not meet arbitrary standards of moderation, other instances may choose not to federate with them, but nothing can stop willing instances from federating.

Zardoz84 4y ago
And allow us to kick out any fascist guy and/or instance from the federated network.
- thr717272 4y ago
  Problem is people have no idea what Facism and Nazism is. You find people here in the west who hate Jews claiming to be anti-facists and people starting a massive invasion of a very peaceful central European country - all while repeating much of Hitlers playbook - while claiming they do it to crush the "Nazis" there.
thr717272 4y ago
One problem: as far as I understand a number of high profile instances enforced a rule where they would block any instance that didn't block certain other instances. I'm all for blocking a good number of instances myself, but putting limits on others, that is a whole different thing.
- 8note 4y ago
  That sounds like US secondary sanctions. A working system when your community is popular to deal with
  - thr717272 4y ago
    It is understandable when it deals with Iran, a terrorist organization sitting on top of an oil field, terrorizing large parts of the Middle East (note that nowhere do I criticize the overthrowing of the old regime, I just criticize what they themselves is/became).
RobotToaster 4y ago
Unfortunately that's ended up with a netsplit between covenanted and free servers, some servers will even de-federate you for federating with the "wrong" servers. So the only way to access the whole fediverse is either have multiple accounts, or run your own server.
- exitb 4y ago
  This is not a technical problem, but a societal one.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I don't think I consider that a bad thing.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  You say all that like it's a problem. If I run a gay furry porn instance, like wall to wall kitsune dicks, why should anyone federate with me? If you want fox dicks you come to my server. If you don't you avoid my server. You shouldn't have to see a bunch of raunchy furry gifs at work to decide you don't want to see those and block me manually. Federation should be a totally voluntary thing between servers. Only instances with compatible policies should federate. Accessing the whole fediverse should only ever be a client problem in logging into multiple instances. Instances shouldn't be expected to just federate with everyone.

Fatnino 4y ago

So everyone needs to explicitly block cheese pizza for themselves just so a few perverts can share that stuff in the name of "free speech"?

jazzyjackson 4y ago
No, everyone needs to explicitly "choose some list of moderators whose decisions you trust, and subscribe to their block lists"
- lmpdev 4y ago
  That still implies either: A) Cheese pizza is permitted B) There are a "floor" of rules
  - frodetb 4y ago
    "Permitted" is a strong word for activity enabled by a protocol. It implies some moral acceptance from the ones who designed the tool. I think a better word would be "possible". Similar to how e-mail makes it possible to send all kinds of content.
  - traviswt 4y ago
    This is why free speech is so hard to maintain. There are so many cases where you want to ban or censor something obviously repugnant, but once the power is created to do so, it will be abused, probably as soon as someone you don't like is now in charge.
    - 8note 4y ago
      It really isn't - the cheese pizza lover can make their own instance
  - xigoi 4y ago
    “Cheese pizza” is banned by law in most countries, so it won't be “permitted” either way.
  - 4y ago

papito 4y ago

Just because over 10 million Americans believe that Tom Hanks violates, kills, and eats children - a widely held belief - does not mean that a private company can't tell those people to go suck a bug. A private company does moderation and it's the end of the world. Ron DeSantis bans books and he is just "anti-woke". The actual government.

zmgsabst 4y ago
[flagged]
- papito 4y ago
  So, you have no problem, I assume, with the "woke" governors banning or revising classic children's books to remove anything offensive? Right? You know, to prevent "government employees and licensed child educators from providing certain books to children, in the context of government mandated education." I'll wait.
  - chimineycricket 4y ago
    In parent's defense, banning kids from reading certain books is not the same as "woke" governors banning or revising classic books for _everyone_, not just kids. If people are banning books at school because the content can be bad for kids (debatable on what "bad" means obviously) then the parents can go get the book from elsewhere and have their kids read it at home. Whatever. But changing books for everyone is stupid.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - traviswt 4y ago
    This seems like a great case against public education, since the mechanism to address this "whoever is in power decides" situation is of course competition and free choice. Indoctrination of children is just natural a natural consequence of everyone having their biases. Parents are the ones who should choose, because that is how we have diversity. Home schooling gives parents the most choice, private school a step down, but public school is where the parent matters the least and we end up in perpetual holy wars like this.

gonzo41 4y ago

You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you? Moderation is really hard. And it's especially hard because a lot of people have very para-social relationships between themselves and rando's they talk to online. Whilst I know that sometimes those rando's turn into real friends in the real world. For the most part people are strangers, and the better form of moderation is getting off social media for a while. If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Bubbles are generally bad. And everything goes to shit, even on HN, when we start getting into politics.

nonethewiser 4y ago
> You see mods on reddit go on ego trip ban spree's all the time. It's classic 90's mod meltdown stuff. I don't think subscribing to a benevolent master is a good model. What happens if their gaze turns to you? Unsubscribe
ROTMetro 4y ago
There is an open music making forum. It is completely toxic. Even if I set to ignore garbage users they influence the discussions and most threads. A relevant music making subreddit deleted my music on an open to all feedback request thread without giving me any reason, yet I still prefer that subreddit because it's not just pure toxic negativity. We need a mix of both with people free to choose their model.
JohnFen 4y ago
> If meta wanted to do something amazing. It'd enforce one reality tunnel on the networks. Rather than have a base set of rules. Have a base set of news and facts that everyone shares in. Just no. I don't want any large corporation to determine what the "news and facts" are -- and particularly not Facebook.
- dragonwriter 4y ago

rusticpenn 4y ago

How is it different from whatsapp?

jonathanstrange 4y ago

I think you're wrong and not the typical user. Personally, I would never use any social network without strong moderation and banning of toxic users, and I'm that many if not most people share this sentiment. Places without strong moderation turn into hellholes and are generally less interesting. Whether a network is decentralized or not is a completely different, purely technical question. I don't understand why two issues get mixed up so often. The design of a community should never be based on technical considerations.

adrr 4y ago
You don’t like hanging out on 4chan? It’s not what users want anyway, it is what advertisers want. They don’t want toxic content next to their ads.
- anoy8888 4y ago
  Wow , you are very different from most people as most (99.9999?)can’t stand toxic trolls.
  - adrr 4y ago
    It was a sarcastic remark to emphasis that majority of people don't like toxic content.
- drowsspa 4y ago
  Most people don't like hanging out on 4chan.
- astura 4y ago
  The vast majority of 4chan users are children or very young adults. Most people grow out of that.
_HMCB_ 4y ago
Agreed 100%.
bhupy 4y ago

rakoo 4y ago

You're probably interested in Aether then: https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/

mattigames 4y ago

The huge problem is scaling, the bigger the social network gets the more moderators you would need to subscribe because the ones you already subscribed to are not cutting enough noise anymore, so it's almost inevitable that there would be a scarcity of moderators, at some point the only useful moderators would be paid ones or more likely bots, the bots with the most success at banning "toxic people" using AI or whatever would quickly win that race... and then you just would have created Facebook again.

footlose_3815 4y ago

Widely held beliefs Can you elaborate on these "Widely held beliefs"? You appear to have done some research into the topic so I think it would be beneficial to your point if you gave examples of the beliefs. Because of Bandwagon fallacy, because we know just because something is widely-held doesn't necessarily make it valid, so these popular beliefs, I'd like to see what they are.

nonethewiser 4y ago
You will get banned on Reddit if you say trans women aren’t real women. They call it promoting hate towards a marginalized group. You may be sympathetic towards that so think twice before moving the goalpost.
- turnsout 4y ago
  The goalpost is always moving—it's called the Overton window. And whether you like it or not, the window is not moving in your direction on this issue.
  - figlett4 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    But the point is it’s a valid example of a widely held belief that gets banned, even if you agree with Reddits policy. The goalpost move I’m referring to is from “Reddit doesn’t ban widely held beliefs “ to “Well Reddit should ban this widely held belief “
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - wilsonnb3 4y ago
    Believing that there are differences between trans women and AFAB women is not denying anyone’s right to exist.

altairprime 4y ago

That same property of inviolable non-excludable makes a social network inaccessible to those who are frequently harassed. The right to shun some participants is a necessary function of social spaces, to mitigate known and documented human tendencies over the past couple thousand years to drown out, abuse, and in general commit conversational warfare upon others. “Just block them” doesn’t scale when each harasser is harassing thousands of people. “Just block scripts” is no more effective than blocking adblockers. “Opt-in moderators” is no more legally viable than “No moderators”. If you want to moderate a space, then set up and run a space of your own. If you want to federate with others, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your federations. If you want your space to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your hosting and transit providers. If you want your federation to stay online, you’ll comply with the moderation requirements of your organization’s laws. This is true today for all social sites, whether solo or distributed. Facebook thinks they can opt out of expensive and difficult moderation duties by transferring the legal requirements for moderation to their users. They may succeed briefly, but the EU will not look kindly upon their attempt to circumvent the law.

nmz 4y ago

Suppose I create a bot and create millions of accounts. post in each article, now you're spending a huge, myriad of time just filtering/ignoring users.

giantrobot 4y ago

> But users should always have the final say on whose posts they view. The difficulty there is the end users are not hosting or distributing content. Some server(s) need to host content. No one can be forced to host content. A host is always going to be the final arbiter of what content is ultimately available. Even if someone wants to run a Mastodon (or whatever) instance filled with Nazi content no one else is obligated to federate with them.