So I opened up a server and started
monitoring it. I invited any kind
of user in with a strict “no rules”
policy.
That's admirable, but these days it's totally naïve. Seriously, how can anyone with any experience at all of on-line communities believe that this could ever end well?
... I would need to monitor what my
users are saying at all times, ...
goes against my hands off approach.
So I’m closing the server ...
In today's world you either facilitate people doing some things that are utterly vile, or you monitor, constrain, curate, and censor. You can't blame Mastodon for this (although the author never explicitly said they did blame Mastodon, I feel that it's the impression they want to give).
Federating content on the public internet is a hard problem. That doesn't mean it's unsolvable though. Currently the only working the solution so far is massive human effort - that just puts managing a Mastodon instance outside of the possibility of doing it on your own. If you want to run a server you really need to recruit people to help. Mastodon makes it very easy to block users on other servers, and entire servers, so it's really a matter of further moderation rather than being actually impossible. There's also an effort by Mastodon admin to share a list of the potentially dangerous servers so admin can block them if they wish to.
So does Mastodon cache everything, even people you don't visit/follow? ZeroNet only serves sites you actively visit, correct?
I have been meaning to setup a Mastodon server, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Can't you just chose to help cache/serve content for only people you trust/follow?
My thoughts on this kind of federated gate keeping is that it should always be opt in. Explicit gate keeping in other words. In general though, this doesn't seem to be the inclination?
I'd be interested to know what you're suggesting here. The way Mastodon works is that on a given instance there is a local timeline, and you can see everything people toot on that. Additionally, anything tooted by a followee of a local user appears in the federated timeline, as does anything boosted by a local user. It seems obvious that these are desirable features.
What sort of gate-keeping are you suggesting? Things tooted on other instances don't turn up unless there's a reason - what then would you then require in addition?
I probably don't understand Mastodon well enough so I might be tooting misinformation. ;)
But to answer your question (and I'm probably oversimplifying a problem here), imagine Mastodon was more like WordPress, and less a bunch of federated servers. I set up a site, just for me, and "opt in" who I want to see—and no one else gets through. If you're worried about someone's content, just oust them/unfollow.
Granted, this kind of federation requires a centralized follow tree which would have to be hosted somewhere else...OR with a different set of federated sites...(getting complex here)...
I still don't really understand what you're suggesting, but the hint I'm getting is that you're suggesting something interesting, but whatever it is, it's really not Mastodon.
Local instances are like Twitter - you toot, everyone on the instance can see what you say. You can follow someone, and their tots turn up in your specific timeline. The flow of control is that you control what you see.
You seem to be suggesting that people should somehow control who can see what they say. In a sense you can semi-do that. You can set all your toots to private, and then confirm "by hand" anyone who wants to follow you. In this way only those you have specifically confirmed can see what you say.
Fair enough, that may be what you want. But in what sense would that ever be "social media"? You may as well have a mailing list.
So with Mastodon you can follow people, and then only ever look at your timeline. That means you'll only ever see things by people you have specifically asked to see. And you can set all your toots to "Private", so only people you have specifically permitted to follow you will see what you say.
I agree. Moreover, one of the thing that surprise me is when someone tries to make a clone of HN and totally forget about the moderation work that is necessary.
This issue seems overblown, and I'm not surprised. Child porn is a great trigger word for making people approach an issue emotionally. I'd like to challenge everyone to take a few steps back and look at it more rationally instead. Many people who are concerned about their own instances probably does not have to worry [1]. I disagree with anyone taking the moral high road here too - I think it's disingenuous to call this "child porn" and illicit all of the emotional hatred that it implies when no children are being abused and it's legal to create, posess, and distribute in many countries.
The issue at hand is simply that it doesn't make sense for Mastodon to mirror content posted from other instances. It could be CP, or it could be a copyrighted work, doesn't matter. While this is clearly an issue to be resolved, it's been overhyped and a resolution is underway. I think any court would be friendly to a defendant who mirrored illegal content unintentionally through the behavior of their software in the meantime.
In your opinion, what's the difference between a mastodon instance having such contents because a user posted it; and twitter having such contents because a user posted it?
Twitter can demonstrate a procedure in place to deal with the problem, that is proportional to the size of the problem. An individual's procedures can only be proportional to their available time. The law will still say you should put up a server only if you can comply with the regulations it requires, and a defense based on "I'm doing my best to comply" will fail if your best is not good enough.
Not only that, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have full time people dedicated to dealing specifically with illegal content. They don't have many full-time employees (they can't as these positions often require very specific contracts with the Department of Justice for handling this type of evidence) which has resulted in at least two cases of employees sustaining pretty bad mental health problems:
"Probably" here explicitly refers to the fact that it's probably not illegal in the country an arbitrary reader is from. Please do not misconstrue my words.
I don't have a cross reference of instance owners vs countries where the legality of the material is not clearly guaranteed, but since potentially "dangerous" countries include the US, Canada or the UK, I stand by my assertion.
While the case may be resolved favorably in the court of law, the defendant will still be pilloried in the court of public opinion. There's also the issue of having their assets seized, with all the financial costs associated with that.
I think Mastodon is going to crash and burn just like 100 other clones before it (remember the black and white artistic FB clone by hipster cycle manufacturer, or App.NET), but in process its going to teach a lot of wide-eyed naive optimists about the sad reality of human nature, and need for things like moderation, rules etc.
The idea that it has never worked before so it will never work at all has been debunked WRT internet services too many times to count. Mastodon is part of the decentralized social web that doesn't need to profit, nor grow large to provide value to its members.
I've been deeply skeptical of these types of projects in the past. I feel like I need to stay on top of new developments, though, so when Mastodon popped up I found an instance and set up an account there to play around with.
So far, it's... good! Really good. I've had interesting conversations with interesting people from around the world. Unlike Twitter, which has evolved into a one-way mechanism for celebrities and #brands to shout at you, Mastodon/OStatus is grass-rootsy enough to feel personal. And they've addressed some of the broken design decisions that made Twitter what it is today (which I outlined here a few years ago: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/02/i-kind-of-hate-twitter), so there's some hope that it will be able to retain its charm.
None of which is to say that it's perfect, or even close to perfect. But it's good enough to be interesting, which is something I haven't seen in the social-networking space in a long, long time.
A better comparison is Linux on the desktop: I've been assured it's been about to happen for the last two decades by programmers who thought the hard part was writing a kernel when in reality it was all of “boring” work offering a decent user experience.
Similarly, anyone who starts a social project and talks about tech is almost certain to fail, no matter whether they're a bunch of OSS developers or Google, unless they have put even more time into the actual key problem: good user experience.
If you don't have a solid story for how people will find other people they want to interact with, what reasons they have to interact in the first place, and how you'll deal with abuse, nothing else will matter.
I've been a bit torn on Mastodon. It's a very interesting idea and a few performance issues aside, quite an impressive bit of technology. That federation works at all is a pleasant surprise.
I've had good conversations in the "fediverse". Engagement is super high. I've had more comments, reshares, and off-site link follows from 70 people on Mastodon than 700 people on Twitter. But I've also had a higher proportion of bad conversations than on Twitter. I guess there is a bit of a hollowing out of the middle that happens, as it takes effort to switch, so only people who feel strongly about staying on Twitter are going to go.
There's also way too much meta-discussion on Mastodon. Childish phrasing like "that bird site" instead of just saying Twitter. Too much back clapping about how amazing the fediverse is. Too much hand-wringing about what any of it means. Too much bitching about how blocking CP is "as bad as Twitter." Too much complaining about GNU Social not getting its day and trying to say Mastodon is just GNU Social (they are not the same thing, they have OStatus in common). I largely don't talk on Mastodon now because I just don't want to talk about Mastodon.
What I want right now is just my Twitter followers/followings with the 500 character post length of Mastodon. Use UX design to encourage brevity, but enable longer form when it's desired.
> There's also way too much meta-discussion on Mastodon. Childish phrasing like "that bird site" instead of just saying Twitter. Too much back clapping about how amazing the fediverse is. Too much hand-wringing about what any of it means. Too much bitching about how blocking CP is "as bad as Twitter."
This is exactly the same problem Voat had. Unfortunately it's pretty much inevitable whenever any kind of online space is explicitly founded as "[existing service], but without moderation!". Almost by definition, the people who are going to go there first, and form the basic norms of the community, are going to be the people who felt the impact of moderation on the old service-- i.e., trolls, immature brats, and people who want to post CP.
Freedom of speech is good, but it has to be a "background virtue": any online community explicitly founded on freedom of speech is going to be a garbage fire.
> any kind of online space is explicitly founded as "[existing service], but without moderation!".
I don't think that's a fair characterization of Mastodon. But that's how many users see it, because that's how it has been advertised to them by media and other users. (And some instances have taken it as a slogan or a goal, e.g. apparently the authors)
I agree it's not a fair characterization of Mastadon, but it's definitely a fair characterization of some of the servers, including the one that the guy in the story set up.
Interestingly, when I heard about Mastodon it was via Metafilter, where the main thrust of conversation wasn't "finally, we get an unmoderated space"; it was more "finally, we can inhabit/create better-moderated spaces".
If it's a background virtue, as it was made to be on Reddit (users had to dig up the commments by admins saying it would be a 'bastion of free speech'), does that not lead to the principles being forgotten, and a revolution to move to another service?
If it's a background virtue it means it's not important, and if it's not important, then it won't be followed up when the pressure is put on. Some communities founded on principles of free speech (though not wholly operating that way as such) have turned out fine; certain boards on 8chan are ripe with intelligent and informing discussion, with a very strong undercurrent of free speech and against censorship.
>> certain boards on 8chan are ripe with intelligent and informing discussion
The misconception here is that A) this is unique to 8chan, that those discussions are some how special and not being repeated across pretty much all online communities everywhere, and that B) this is the result of the lack of a dogmatic view of free speech that even evicts legal censorship of illegal activity.
Twitter updated their TOS many years ago to prohibit anything that would let you migrate away seamlessly. You can't mix their posts in a feed with other services, and there are constraints on mirroring them. :(
I have a command-line script to "toot", and I run a cross-posting tool that crosses in each direction. So I "toot" from the command line and it appears on Twitter. Equally, if I tweet, it appears as a "toot".
It gives me a chance to see how things go. So far, I'm preferring Mastodon because I'm on a small instance with a very definite community feel, rather than the sprawling, undifferentiated mess that is "Twitter".
That's very much regional slang. And I'm pretty sure people know it - software is full of immature, juvenile, and puerile jokes, references, and people. My approach is just to ignore the muffled giggles and treat it all with a straight face.
Different instances have different terms for things, some more sensible, some less so. On cybre.space you don't "toot", you "Ping!", and there's another instance where you "Awoo".
Yes, the terminology doesn't help, but used to be stupid to say that you would "tweet" something.
Tweet at least made sense in context, twitter is all bird branded and a single tweet is one message of many, just like a single bird tweet is one of many that make up bird songs/calls
Having different terminology per server seems even worse than having a unified word that makes out you're farting information at people. "Hey I'm going to awoo you the link" "you what?", where the second person is used to it being referred to as something else
I could be wrong, but I am under the impression that the phrase "that bird site" only exists as a way around oulipo.social's self-imposed "no letter e" rule.
A consequence of federation is that people on other instances don't necessarily realize what oulipo.social is or why the posts are worded oddly. At one point I briefly ended up in an argument with somebody who was unaware I was doing constrained writing.
Fair enough, that's a misapprehension on my part then. Plus I guess the form of it I've seen on oulipo.social must be "that bird platform" or something.
I think this is where NNTPchan (and to some extent imageboard culture itself) helps with working around legal issues.
On imageboards content is confined to relevant boards e.g. posts about anime would go on /a/(anime) not /k/(weapons) unless they are weapon-themed anime. In addition posting illegal/unsavory content (e.g. cp or gore) on boards it doesn't belong is usually considered a ban-worthy offence.
The way NNTPchan specifically helps is by letting the server admin decide which boards are permitted, so NNTPchan servers have the option to not handle any content related to /loli/ or any other boards that could get them into legal trouble.
Not to mention that the last time I worked on image board code there was a list of auto-ban rules the server checked on posting, which included the MD5s of child porn. Posters may be more sophisticated now, tweaking a pixel to make the hashes not match, but there is software that can match the background scenery now with the illegal part removed that can catch even that. We didn't have an auto-ban list for drawings of it, though. That was up to the normal human moderation.
Microsoft has this service called PhotoDNA [1] that uses a perceptual hash to match bad content in photos, even when the image has been modified. It sounds pretty cool.
In a nutshell—don't run a social network of any kind if you don't have the financial backing for all the mess that comes with running a social network.
It's insteresting because the Japanese instance the post is talking about (pawoo.net, backed by Pixiv) is by far the largest Mastodon instance in the world. In fact, 3 out of 4 biggest instances are Japanese. [1]
I'm not sure why the author sees the only alternatives to be "run open no-rules server" and "packing my bags and saying goodbye". Running personal server for yourself and possibly few friends&family should sidestep most of the legal/moral issues (I imagine), so why not do that?
This is rather tangentially related, and may be an unpopular opinion, but I think it is silly that drawings of fictional characters who appear to be under the age of 18, nude or engaged in sexual activity, is posing such a legal issue. It's very strange and in my opinion ridiculous that such material is illegal.
Though I can understand the wider application to materials not allowed to be possessed, there isn't much that a single instance owner can do other than to shut out the whole federation aspect of Mastodon, which would be a great loss and simply centralise things again.
If the metadata could somehow be moved from the server to the client, or the client chooses to whom to subscribe and post to, wouldn't that be better? Why is it done on the server side?
Edit: it would be nice if people could please explain downvotes, so I know how to better improve the posts I write. Downvoting itself is not helpful to this understanding.
Just to clarify, fictional representations of this type of work are considered legal in some places (the US and Japan) and totally illegal in others (The UK .. and much of the rest of the world).
But that isn't the question here. The question is, if you setup a Mastodon instance, do you want to be responsible for caching questionable content, not just potentially illegal content, but even political content you don't agree with?
I haven't setup a Mastadon instance yet, but I assume it caches more than what you just visit, unlike ZeroNet? And unlike FreeNet, what you cache isn't encrypted? (With FreeNet, you have no idea what you're serving from the segment of your hard drive you donate to the network).
They are in fact illegal in the US, if they are 'obscene', but what is deemed 'obscene' I believe is up to state law. A supreme court decision ruled that the material would be OK if it was not 'obscene'. I'm sorry I can't source this at the moment, I'd be interested if there's any more information about it. I believe it was something along the lines of the 'PROTECT' act, though again, I'm not sure.
>The question is, if you setup a Mastodon instance, do you want to be responsible for caching questionable content
I don't see why it has to be cached at all; if you don't want to run the risk, why not disable caching?
I had the idea that clients could choose particular instances to 'stream' from, and that the stream need not be coordinated by a server. In a similar way to IRC where you can join a channel, it would be similar, but with multiple servers. The server doesn't need to store the messages it doesn't want to. Though, I'm sorry if I'm missing something terribly obvious here.
I didn't downvote you but I think the flaw in your reasoning here is that who gets to determine what is a "fictional character." Perverts are never satisfied so the train of 'fictional' porn goes from standard waifu/anime stuff which is fairly tasteless and inserts itself everywhere[1], then a character drawn just like the person's tween neighbor or celebrity but she has a sword and red hair so its totally not her (wink wink), to photoshops of real children playing and put into sexual or quasi-sexual situations, then video edited with transplanted heads and such, etc. The line is too blurry to be drawn so the common sense approach is to block all generated CP.
[1] This is the more common problem. You may have a good gaming or comics group on steam or reddit or tumblr then your activity feed is all tween looking girls drawn anime style in highly sexualized positions or literally having sex with a slight blur. Then arguments for 'free speech' happen which is incredibly polarizing and the non-perverts leave the community. Now that community is dead and you have yet another zombie community of lolita-style postings which are frankly wank material and nothing else. It really only takes one person or poor moderation to kill online communities like this.
If you want to be upset, be upset at the people who do this. Not the people who flee from it for rational reasons, which may or may not involve legal risk. I can't even check my steam activity feed at work because there's always a person or two who suddenly gets into overly-sexualized anime-style games and posts screenshots. None of those girls look remotely 18.
The reason these images are frowned upon/banned have nothing to do with people having bad moderation skills... It generally is a slippery slope argument to child porn.
I think most people understand why photos of children are criminal. But is a nude drawing of Bart Simpson the same level of crime? Depending on your country (and in the US, your state) the answer may surprise you.
>who gets to determine what is a "fictional character."
Japan turns out tens of thousands of comics containing this material every year. Although I think it may be impossible to determine whether the subject is a fictional character or not, that's not really solid grounds for making the content illegal, any more than it is an argument in favour for banning material in which people appear to be murdered, or appear to be drug abusers.
With regard to you drawing the child of your neighbor, whom you only see playing in the yard or walking from school, what's the issue with using him or her as inspiration? You're not using the same name; the only similarity is that of appearance. In what way does that harm the child? Why should it be illegal? You've presented it as a bad thing without justifying it other than by calling the people who enjoy the material 'perverts'. What about if I make an animation in which someone who looks a lot like my neighbor gets murdered? Why ought that to be illegal? This seems like a shaky argument to me.
It is a very wild claim (which I know you're not making here) that these comics contain drawings of regular children. A single look at the qualities of the drawings would show this. It is just as wild a claim that most or any portion of anime/manga characters in general are based off real people's depictions. Aside from parody, I have never seen a real person, other than popular politicians, being depicted in anime/manga, at least from a drawing reference.
>to photoshops of real children playing and put into sexual or quasi-sexual situations
This is already illegal in some countries, under a different law. I do not necessarily disagree with this material being disallowed, though. There is a very wide divide between manga material and photoshops or rotoscopes of real children. The division is so wide that a judge or magistrate could probably tell the difference, better yet, an expert could tell the difference too.
>all tween looking girls drawn anime style in highly sexualized positions or literally having sex with a slight blur.
Unfollow those people, I can't really see the issue. I don't follow baseball magasines, because I'm not into baseball. Or, find a way to filter out that content, which is frequently marked as 'NSFW'. Taking your point specifically though, both Reddit and Tumblr have taken steps to block the material, though of course sometimes it leaks through.
>Not the people who flee from it for rational reasons.
I want to be clear that I do not enjoy the material myself, and I do not blame the people trying to escape from viewing it. I also don't like a host of other things that are disgusting to me, and nobody would blame me for not wanting to see it, or blocking it, or not wanting it on a website I have. My point relates more to the aspect of making it illegal even to possess which is the current law in some Commonwealth nations, which I very strongly disagree with.
>I can't even check my steam activity feed at work because there's always a person or two who suddenly gets into overly-sexualized anime-style games and posts screenshots. None of those girls look remotely 18.
You should your tell your friend that you don't want to see that. I'm not really sure what point you're making here; saying that you don't want to see certain things is not an argument for censoring it at the country-level, even to criminalise possession. This last point is almost certainly also be said for legal pornography too, though I doubt you're in favour of making that illegal.
People will downvote any dissenting or unpopular opinion, regardless of the quality or relevance of the posts you write.
It's a shitty system popularized by Reddit and I can't wait until it dies (which, unfortunately, will not happen soon enough).
Yet there are much "worse" articles posted here, or at least there have been. There was an article about Falkvinge arguing to legalise photographic child pornography, which was posted here. It got a large number of upvotes. This article inside it talks about the issue. The issue doesn't have to be discussed right now, it can be discussed when people at home. People don't have to even look at my comment, though in my judgment it seems as though you might find any sort of discussion when you go to a HN comments thread, some unsavory.
There's also a lot of people who aren't viewing from work. I'm not asking people to discuss my point, though just because you don't want to discuss, it doesn't mean the correct response is to downvote my comment.
It is tangentially related, and frequently we find even more 'off topic' posts getting upvoted, such as even those about the website's JS and CSS quirks. My point ties in well with why certain content can't be carried, which is in line or at least related to the article itself.
I'm really failing to see your point, and it doesn't justify the downvotes.
And yet it would have appeared on your screen nevertheless. You, or others in your position, also wouldn't have replied to me in such an instance, if you didn't want to discuss the topic. I was asking for a reason why my comment was being downvoted, not why people weren't replying to it.
The discussion is not only about Mastodon, but the importance and meaning and implementation of censorship on Mastodon instances. It is as much a political and social issue as it is a technical one, as any article about tech law or policy will tell you. I picked up on one particular aspect of the social issue. Your explanation, well intentioned as it may have been, failed to explain why people were downvoting, or at least from my point of view failed to rationalise the behavior of the downvoters.
I think I've whined about downvotes (specific ones and in general terms) in the distant past (it gets you nowhere, and is boring) and I think they often cause the kind of negativity this site otherwise attempts to avoid, but in this case maybe some people just disagree with you on the tangential subject you brought up, but didn't want to get into a discussion about it with you, or didn't want to see a discussion on that subject float to the top.
Please don't mistake me, I wasn't trying to whine about downvotes. I wanted to find out the reason why people are downvoting, rather than replying. Hacker News strikes me as a very odd place; on one hand, encouraging discussion of interesting topics, on the other hand, giving a group of people with more than 500 points this ability to hide discussion they like.
It would be much better if, rather than disagreeing by downvoting, which is effectively a statement like "I don't like that" (which humorously, HN discourages if you state explicitly), to either say nothing at all (like those with <500 karma) or to state your disagreement.
For me it's hard, too. The HN moderators have decided to block me from posting too quickly. I never used to get this message until recently; now I am told that "You're posting too fast, please slow down.", which to be honest, I can't describe the words of irritation I would otherwise use if I wasn't being civil on this forum. It's so silly to be stopping people from engaging in quick discussion. I know it's to prevent flamewars, but the fact that it applies even if I'm not flaming (which I don't do much here) is ridiculous.
The worst part is where the HN moderators roll in with the classic "we've detached this and marked it off-topic". This is perhaps the one thing which reddit/<n>chan gets right, the moderators won't tell you that something is off topic just because they think it is. It evidently isn't off topic if people are discussing it.
This website really does baffle me sometimes. In some cases it's unparalleled for informative discussion where I can learn sometimes about hotter topics. On the other hand, it has this truly horrible and infantile elite-downvoters culture which exists to control how you think and what kind of opinions you espouse, for fear of being downvoted. It encourages self-censure to the tune of the opinion of the downvoting group. You have to dance their jig, or have your comment greyed out, which probably attracts more downvotes.
Having one discussion floating to the top doesn't mean that the other discussions are unavailable. If it really is as uninteresting as the downvoter thinks it is, few people will engage in it.
I'm sorry for the rant, but this website is very grating, and it's not because of the users, it's because of the way it's run, and what powers the users have. It's almost as if downvoting was implemented beacuse it's known to be exactly like an "I don't like that" message, which will make anyone annoyed when all they want to do is engage in thoughtful discussion. And don't get me started on how people will downvote you on topics when you speak of politics they disagree with or make cogent points. I've noticed this on both sides; when I speak of my Communism and anarchism, I'm getting downvoted for it. When some speak of their strongly libertarian "an"cap principles, they're getting downvoted. And time and time again, I've been told by those helpful commenters - it's not beacuse of the quality of my comments. It's just that people disagree. And that means I get my comment greyed out and I'm not allowed to post more than twice every two hours.
I really wish intelligent discussion like on HN would take place on other websites (except reddit). That way, I wouldn't have to deal with this elite-downvoter culture. And before someone brings up the point that discussion here is intelligent because of the power to downvote, it would be nice if there were some evidence for that assertion. Mailing lists and forums and the old-style chans (by old-style I mean before the addition of backlinks and "(You)"s) didn't have downvotes.
Thus proving that moderation isn't something you can just ignore or leave to the community. You need to be proactive, and doing that takes time, effort, and maybe money.
