This is a very interesting concept and one I think most comments here are missing. This isn't a question as to why Mastodon (or "Fediverse") has yet to catch on in the wider public. It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.
But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.
Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it!
Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up tons of money. But there's still peer review.
In my experience open access still includes a big publisher sucking up tons of money. It is just money paid up front by authors. Do you have an example of open access were that is not the case?
Some disciplines have started moving to Arxiv. And all the major programming languages conferences (PLDI, POPL, ICFP, more) switched to PACMPL, which is open acess and I expect is cheaper but am not sure how to check. I don't know much about this; mostly just wanted to make the point that peer review != publishing.
That is fair, I have no reason to paint all academic publishing with a single broad brush. Personally, I am strongly on the side of free and open - probably in the direction of things like the Open Data Institute (ODI).
But data, including academic papers published by scientific societies, being free and open has nothing whatsoever to do with the communication protocols underlying those societies. You can have free, open and peer reviewed journals distributed by email, by FTP, by carrier pigeon, etc.
So if your beef with academic societies is merely the cost or the closed nature, federated protocols needn't be part of the discussion at all.
You are on point: paid journals bring nothing to the table, except that they have somehow established reputations (of varying levels), where people publish their papers. But the journals themselves do very little. It's largely or entirely volunteers who review papers and select the ones that get publish.
The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination. The volunteers would do exactly the same work. Obviously, the website requires some funding, but a tiny fraction of what the journals take.
> You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination.
Just as a quick counter - you'd want to base this on something more permanent. CLOCKSS[0] or something similar is a necessity with DOIs pointing to the papers. Otherwise you're back to "the source code is here: (broken link to old academic site)"
I agree that the use of journals for the literal job of publishing seems antiquated.
(disclaimer, worked previously for the parent company of FigShare, other providers are available)
Last time I read such an HN comment thread, one poster claimed that Sci-Hub was morally wrong because “how will peer reviewers get paid if people just pirate the papers?”. Tell me you don’t know anything about academic publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about academic publishing. Seems to be a widespread misconception.
> There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
> Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.
To be clear, federation and even the ActivityPub protocol have nothing to do with the tweet-like interface of Mastodon (and ActivityPub isn't the only way to federate, either. Email is federated), although TBF the article itself fails to make this distinction clear. There are a number of ActivityPub applications which use a different presentation:
* Wordpress: Ubiquitous (maximalist?) long-form blogging platform that has recently added ActivityPub support
That said, I'll admit I have no idea what the obstacles are since I never got into that world. Are there technical requirements which nothing else fulfills? Does it mainly require providing a means of searching for research documents in different stages of review and validating that an individual is a legitimate reviewer/contributor (something like the authorization around git, come to think of it)?
To be more precise, ActivityPub is pretty much just a JSON/HTTP version of email.
There's a few fancy things to have stuff like user profiles and stuff to make it "look nice", but if you look "under the hood", the data structures you find ends up and the methods of communication end up looking more or less like a modernized version of email.
---
Mastodon is a sub-implementation of AP that follows some of the components and then weirdly tweaks some of them in weird ways (because Mastodons internal representation doesn't actually match up with these data structures and Gargron wanted some features like Content Warnings without bothering with the entire process of protocol modifications, so he ended up cannibalizing a different field for it, resulting in an implementation that... mostly results in people yelling at each other for not using CWs "appropriately"), resulting in strange compatibility issues when writing your own AP instance.
Most AP instances typically end up trying to then match Mastodons weird implementation (basically look at the social feed of any AP implementer for long enough and you'll find complaints about how Mastodon doesn't follow the spec), simply because of Mastodons excessive popularity.
I'm not an expert on ActivityPub nor academic publishing. What I'm trying to say is that what is built on top of the protocol has more to do with its suitability for a particular purpose than the foundational technology.
The first quote is an observation that It is unlikely that Mastodon will be a suitable drop-in-replacement for the current process.
The second quote is an observation that perhaps there is a way to use the technological pieces that are currently available for federation and apply them to the organization of scientific/academic societies. But that whole system is going to be significantly more than the federated aspect.
Part of this is I remember Google Wave and the unreasonable hype around it. It would replace email, newsgroups, instant messaging … basically all forms of text based communication! Some of the hype for these more contemporary niche technologies is even wilder, this article for example claiming it should force a complete re-think of academic publishing.
> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
That is a decision by granting agencies and administrators who distribute funding. The scholars will organize around whatever the people who pay them tell them to.
This is the only response that actually addresses the article and my criticism. You make a good point that pressuring the governmental agencies that distribute funding to adopt a set of requirements could push the entire academic body in a particular direction.
I still don't see the point in choosing federated protocols as a mandate if we were to do this. My preference would be to use that energy towards free and open data sources. I think arXiv is the best example for that and not Mastodon.
> scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
They aren’t necessarily. In some branches of linguistics, history, and archaeology, for example, the major journals are still published by learned societies or national academies of science, and they are open-access and authors don’t pay to publish. The costs are covered by the massive endowments that the learned societies sit on (some were founded in the 19th century).
> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.
On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.
To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?
My concern with scholarship on the fediverse would be clash between academic cultures, and potential exclusion. Some fields of the humanities in some parts of the world do not have the absorbing interest in race/sexuality/gender/power that North American and Western European academia does; they look at those developments with bemusement or horror, and frequently complain about how funding gets tied to using Westerners’ magic words instead of things they feel relevant in their context.
The mainstream federated servers of the fediverse largely draw from those same North American or Western European circles. It is very common to see founding members of Mastodon claim that their own subculture’s values and concerns ought to be upheld across the fediverse even as new members sign up, and never diluted. How welcoming can the fediverse therefore be to academics from elsewhere with different concerns and views?
This is a truly bizarre critique, because it seems completely backwards in every respect.
The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place.
And all other alternatives are far worse in that specific aspect you bring. There is a very mild barrier to running your own Mastodon/PeerTube/etc. instance (you don't even have to self-host, you can get one on Masto.host or similar services). But it is flat-out impossible to run your own Twitter or Youtube or Discord.
And most cloud services adhere strictly not just to Western cultural norms, but specifically to Bay Area cultural norms, which are even more narrow.
> The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place.
Of course that selling point isn't, in practice, what's happening, as anyone observing or participating in the space for the past couple years knows.
Fediverse is a lonely place if no one wants to federate with you, but that's where you'll end up if you don't yield to the specific set of concerns and demands of a small minority that infected the main network, and rules it under threat of "do not federate with those we don't like, lest you find yourself on that list too".
You got it. Talk about the outcomes. It's like saying this thing is inclusive but only if you're one of us. We're willing to have the hard conversation but not at my expense.
In the real world, the #1 selling point at the moment is merely that the fediverse is not Twitter. The supposed freedom of running server instances is an exaggerated benefit. Being federated with the big instances is essential for reaching the general public with your content, and that’s important for any academics doing pop-sci outreach. Moreover, as the other person mentions, even if your server conforms in every way with Mastodon founding-generation demands, your server can get defederated from the big instances if it federates with a server they don’t like.
> The ability to not be beholden to the preferences of whoever runs a fedi server is, in fact, the #1 selling point of federated network in the first place.
But you're ignoring that this is dependent upon not being blacklisted from the majority of (and the biggest) servers for not agreeing with their politics.
Folks regularly make the comparison to e-mail, so let's go with that: anyone can run their own e-mail server and send/ receive e-mail from users on other servers. We would find it unacceptable to blacklist an e-mail server because of the politics of the owner or users. Spam, sure, but not _politics_.
The main Mastodon developers also run the main instance, run a directory of other instances, and blacklist instances which do not follow their politics.
So anyone can run their own instance, but the other important part of federation is BROKEN.
I mean, surely federalised social media is the solution rather than the problem here. If you think some monolithic worldview is challenging to welcome new people, then being able to quickly create a new instance for your friends and like minded colleagues seems like a win (hence why the tech behind Mastodon is also being Truth social etc)
Distributed, fully-decentralized is the solution, not federated. Each person should have full control over who they follow, without relying on the whims of server admins.
After spending a number of months on Lemmy as my primary social media, I actually think the fediverse makes one of the biggest issues of social media much worse.
There's a very real and dangerous trend towards extremist positions as a result of social media bubbles. I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.
The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.
So while it's promising from a standpoint of shrugging off corporate driven issues in managing social media, the fragmentary nature is perhaps the opposite of what social media actually needs, which is less bubble driven optimization with regression towards extremist means and more broad exposure and interaction with regression towards the normal mean.
The supposed "social media bubble" is a silly myth. The exact opposite is the case: On even the most algorithmically filtered social media platform, you cannot avoid encountering opinions and viewpoints that are dramatically different from what you find in your real-life circles.
The real bubbles are your family, your workplace, and your friends. Most of them are the same nationality, roughly the same social class, and roughly the same level of education as you. Your colleagues, by definition, all work in the same business as you. You have (subconsciously) hand-picked your friends to align with you on a multitude of levels.
Meanwhile, on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.
> on Facebook or Reddit, you suddenly read a comment written by a veterinarian in Azerbaijan – someone who you would almost certainly never have met in real life and who is more different from you in every way than all the people you interact with as part of your daily routine.
that veterinarian may be more different than the people you see in everyday life, but the point of a social media bubble is that the veterinarian and you are likely to be very similar. Otherwise, why would you be on the same subreddit? How would you have met them on the internet if not because you were interested in common topics?
Interested in one common topic. If I like crocheting, interacting with people in a crocheting subreddit doesn't create a "filter bubble". The people in that sub are still going to have wildly different opinions and preferences from myself on any topic besides crocheting. And large subs like AskReddit are obviously being frequented by people from every imaginable background.
A forum on a single common topic can still create a filter bubble. For example, I know some music and outdoor-sports forums where the participants now post about not only those topics, but also a limited spectrum of US political rants or social-justice advocacy. If you come from somewhere else and you have different views or do not participate in such discussions, you can feel outright excluded from the club.
On any anglophone forum, it can happen that just enough participants are North Americans with the same views, that their political and social concerns are considered relevant and important. Some Reddit subs have seen this, too. Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.
> Obviously a moderation rule of “no politics” or “no off-topic” would help, but sometimes even the moderators are passionate about those same political or social concerns, and believe that preventing discussion of such would be fascist.
Worse, as long as the the mods have free reign to decide what is and isn't politics this is just yet another way of phrasing the real rule of "no things we don't approve of".
Could not have said it better myself. The bubble idea is a myth and, as we've seen here, when people attempt to articulate it, it cashes out as something astonishingly shallow.
It's such a lazy analysis that it overlooks countless ordinary and familiar examples that are not controversial or problematic at all, niche communities of every variety, convergences of common interest where the commonality is a baseline of curiosity about ideas are interests that supports healthy and curious and varied discussion, communities that aren't in any strict way of bubble but are just proactive about filtering out hate, communities where a common interest doesn't clearly map onto the analysis of bubbles or politics that people have in mind when they say bubble is a problem (eg tech early adopters, FOSS enthusiasts), and on and on. It's totally ignorant of the kinds of communities that in practice have emerged and taken advantage of the ability to form these niches, which in Mastodon's case was things like comic book artists, the furry community, astronomy nerds and so on.
Not to mention the theory of this "bubble" is fundamentally broken, because it lazily equates common interests specifically to the narrow idea of political escalation and extremism, and the actual convergence of human interests plays out with any number of social dynamics that can't necessarily be mapped on to the specific one of political extremism.
It's just across the board an embarrassing and intellectually lazy idea that misses out on dozens of counterexamples and dozens of social dynamics that it can't and doesn't even bother to explain, and assumes everything fits a narrow theory that's specific to certain kinds of political conversations among specific kinds of political groups.
That phrase is hiding the real issue: on the internet, people engage with what they want to, and ignore what they want to. Attention, respect, engagement don't result from 'suddenly reading a comment'.
When there was only establishment newspapers and media they presented (what they considered) a balanced and responsible view. Now they've lost control of information and communication. Journalists dug deep to find a problem with the internet, and landed on 'the bubble'. The bubble is when people lack a balanced and responsible view...
There is just enough truth to 'the bubble' to keep the idea alive. On the internet it's easy to find radical information, and restrict your information sources to what you want. Back when everyone read the newspaper it kept public discussion narrowly focused [1]. Now we have lots of people who 'do their own research' and hold radical views. Also, the views that were suppressed under the establishment media are public and accessible to everyone.
There have always been people who live in their own little world, or bubble, but now it's much larger number. From the view of companies and social establishments that controlled the news this is a huge problem. From my view of society, I now sympathize with the US being a republic rather than a pure democracy, and I never thought that would happen.
[1] The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum..." -Noam Chomsky
The difference is that with your real-life social bubble you try to not embarrass yourself, so you only discuss your more moderate views with them. While on the internet if you support some extremistic view, you can just shout it out without much consequence.
The other problem is that ideas are contagious, so when a few wackos shout out their extremist views, other people start thinking this may be normal, and more and more of them become sympathetic to it. This is why so many Americans believe in crazy BS conspiracy theories like "adrenochrome" now; in the pre-internet days, this stuff couldn't go very far. This is why those family gatherings have gotten so bad: decades ago, very few people believed in "extremist" stuff, but because of social media and other internet media sources, many of those views have become somewhat normalized so that a large portion of the population believes them.
This is not the average vet in Azerbaijan. It's the vet telling a story that fits the values of YOUR bubble. There are probably Azerbaijanis in your own city who you don't know and wouldn't even listen to because they don't live in the same bubble. They might be struggling to put food on the table and they may think that you are a privileged ** and that you think you are morally superior because your bubble also contains privileged **s who happen to live in other countries.
You'd probably get more outside of your bubble by getting acquainted with a person at your local bus stop. But the reality is: you wouldn't want to because they don't live in your bubble.
Your hatred is steaming out of your ears like if you were a cartoon character. Relax, some random poster on the internet is not to blame for your suffering. And just because they have a different opinion on something meaningless, doesn't mean they're an ass, "privileged", or ignorantly living in a "filter bubble".
It sounds like you're in a bubble where only cartoon characters convey their opinions passionately. And there are people outside of your bubble that have a different opinion on something you do consider meaningful. At least on the topic 'what is meaningful' I think you will find many different opinions being held.
I think the idea of a "bubble" is less that "bubbles" don't exist in real life or that it's impossible to hear anything outside them and more that the internet makes it particularly easy to find communities offering mutual reinforcement and insisting it's everyone else that's wrong. Even for people who are initially only idly curious about whether anyone else has ever felt that way.
This includes things you might have happily accepted you might have just made a mistake on (but I thought I remembered this documentary about Mandela's assassination...) when your real world social circle pushed back, if only it wasn't so easy to find other people that thought the same, and theories of why you are right all along. Usually with a lot of other baggage linked into you being right and everyone else being wrong
Obviously this isn't always a bad thing: people also use the internet to discover that same sex attraction is actually accepted in places outside their community or that their government's position on a border dispute isn't universally accepted in environments where alternative views are legal to express. And it happens offline too (the original 'Mandela Effect' was apparently conceived by a bunch of paranormal enthusiasts in an offline environment). But if the Azeri vet is one of the few people in the world to not think what you're saying is complete nonsense, you'll be much more likely to find him online. Not all taboos are against stuff which is inherently bad to discuss, and not all beliefs universally held within a community are accurate. But a lot of fringe stuff on the internet is fringe for good reason, and even when such views are quiet widely-held "bubbles" suck in people who would never have had the motivation to seek out an offline group for discussing the coming race war or whose fault their lack of confidence in dating really was.
We all live in bubbles. But, for some reasons, people think that some places are "bubble free".
They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".
> They see right-wing fascists all the time on the television and think it is normal. They see a few moderate leftists on the fediverse and "the fediverse is a bubble, a niche".
This does feel a little like a bubbley description of things.
> The fediverse makes these bubbles so much worse, with servers of like minded moderation creating a trend towards groupthink as opposed to representing a variety of opinions.
You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.
> regression towards the normal mean.
Yeah, the normal mean is something to strive for... If it already benefits you.
No one questions that living in a bubble is comfortable. But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you. They’re now in a bubble (or “safe space”) where everyone agrees with them, so they’re more convinced than ever that they’re right.
And yeah ok, you say that’s not your responsibility. That’s fine, but then you shouldn’t be surprised when society is torn apart by these differences.
This comment is the slippery slope fallacy because the person responding to you has rightly pointed out that not every situation that's described as a "groupthink bubble" actually is one; sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever. Maybe the assholes getting shown the door in such situations always tell themselves that "Society is about to get torn apart by me getting treated this way" but thinking it does not make it so.
> sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.
When they exit, the remainders are going to more and more normalize these, as more and more of the moderates exit. Eventually it could even become the default norm.
>sometimes it's just people not wanting to hang out with guys who drop the N-word "as a joke" or overtly support authoritarianism or whatever.
those people were formed due to and in part of a bubble; and denying them the opportunity to have their bubble popped as it causes you discomfort is the exact opposite of being able to express oneself at all - it always comes with the chance of making someone uncomfortable.
I’m really confused here. Are you saying black people live in a bubble for not wanting slurs thrown at them? It’s not like black people are unfamiliar with that word or the word is particularly enlightening? Who are we making uncomfortable by barring calling black people racial slurs, here? This is absolutely baffling logic when applied to racial slurs and black people.
Maybe this is some cultural difference, but I kinda don't get why using n-word is different from using any other slurs. Most people would agree (I hope) that slurs are not part of normal, civil discussion, and I cannot understand why would anyone try to create a safe space for discussion with someone who calls them "motherf*** fa**". I think such person has no interest in polite conversation, unless, of course, in other countries being showered with word vomit is considered a normal conversation starter, akin to "We have different views, let's talk about that"
The problem is that like there are safe spaces for people to not hear slurs, there exists safe spaces for people to say slurs without backslash. The first is not a problem but the second very much is.
If you can exclude the ppl that say slurs, the ppl that say slurs can do the same, ending up in slurland, were they get worse and worse until they go to the street and kill someone.
I was being exagerated a lil bit with the go to the streets and kill someone. What I mean is that bad people start creating circles of bad people and people that are slightly bad and would become good otherwise end up joining these circles and going extreme.
It is not that we must allow people to say slurs, is that it is better for those people to say slurs in a public multicultural site, so that good people can essentially social pressure the slurers into simply not saying slurs. This was possible with centralized social networks, but with decentralization is not possible as the nature of decentralization means that those kind of people now can create their own bubbles of hate instead of having to behave to be in the public spaces.
I really am not convinced that for the sake of the not-serial-killers-yet racists we have to let them call people slurs everywhere. Choosing to commit hate crimes is purely in the realm of irredeemable pieces of shit and society barring them from calling black people slurs on social media shouldn’t be considered a causal factor to it.
No they aren't irredeemable, or at least weren't always.
This doesn't respect the power of the radicalization pipeline and let's others escape accountability for their part such as avoiding conflict when their friend says a racial slur or joins an incel forum rather than providing a less extreme take.
The cost of freedom and liberty is the occasional tolerance of offensive things and ideas.
Small price to pay for a functional democracy comprised of unprecedented individual liberties.
But since some of the least-creatively-programmed amongst us want to use the "n-word" as an example (how surprising,) let's.
When and who get to decide which buzzword becomes a slur today? Tomorrow?
There are black Americans who prefer the word "negro," instead of the latest white-savior siccophant, acting as a virtue-signaling intellectually degrading euphemism.
Basketball Americans do not need your saving, thank you Mr Mayonnaise Man.
The parent's point is by separating everyone has a different mainstream imagine they believe everyone else normal lives in. Some of those bubbles may deem your bubble groupthink a certain way.
We had segregation at one point. I'm not sure that benefited everyone equally. Why return to that?
Woah, how did we get from “we don’t call black peoples slurs here” to “WHITES ONLY drinking fountains”?? White people arent weird troglodytes unable to be around a black person without slurring them. Calling black peoples the n word is not an essential part of being white!
You are helping the troll string up a straw man, no one has mentioned blacks aside from him.
And the left is completely ideologically unable to be around a black person without first acknowledging their privileged presence by an oppression tirade of apologizing blithering woke-double-speak.
The left and the right are equally racist for similar reasons, for example; they both think blacks should had gotten the vaccine first.
Dude I’m literally just saying that I don’t get how calling black people the n word is some kind of bubble. Basic human decency is a crazy social filter I guess. I feel like this jump is hysterics.
There’s a difference between thinking an argument is bad and being offended by it. (For what it’s worth, I think GP’s response is also worse than it could’ve been. On the other hand, I’m not seeing any accusation of trolling—i.e. of bad faith—in GGP’s comment.)
> But your comfort comes at a cost, which is that people you disagree with aren’t exposed to disagreements with you.
Whats the alternative? That most shared discourse happens in a single space? I think its fairly clear that that doesn't work so well when everyone has write access to that space: it either dissolves into q conflict zone, or bubbles form within it, or both.
Before social media there was less of a problem because of gatekeeping by traditional journalism and state regulation, and because print media moves too slowly to permit high-freqency positive feedback loops to form.
I'm not suggesting going back to the situation before social media, but I'm not convinced that "comfortable bubbles" are the main problem. I suspect that the frequency and scale of discourse are at least as important.
Bubbles are safe until the day you realize a bubble that would like you dead has now grown large enough to vote in a like minded government in your country. Then nothing is safe.
Jesus Christ the hyperbole. Name a single example of a country where a government that "wants certain people dead" has been voted in recently, other than such countries where this has been happening for decades anyway without social media even existing.
That's the pint isn't it? Social media is relatively recent however I'd say all those countries you tried to discount essentially had real life bubbles of various sorts.
Social media has been around for 15+ years. That's 3-4 election cycles in most countries. And the way I see it, the same kind of people are getting voted in that have been for decades. Yes, that includes Trump, who is just Reagan with a fouler mouth.
Myanmar has been in a nearly continuous civil war for decades. It's a failed state and always has been. That has nothing to do with social media.
And no US government in recent history, including the one before the current one, had killing people on their agenda. That's just complete and utter horseshit.
> You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.
There is a real risk that avoiding topics or people one finds offensive can make a person less resilient. Its a totally reasonable response to the internet where you have the opposite problem of being exposed to more than you otherwise would have, but creating too tight of a bubble can have downsides.
What you described as a safe space can quickly become, ironically, an intolerant one, albeit not for you, as you self-selected by joining.
I think OP is addressing the paradox of tolerance, hence the call for differing but not hateful opinions. There’s a fine line between the two and cloistering oneself among likeminded people seems to inevitably lead to some form of intolerance.
You didn't read more than the headline, did you? Directly from the abstract:
"When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division."
So the paper is supporting exactly what I'm saying. That in your local community you need to engage with differences of opinion to successfully navigate local social structures, but that online with an expanded network you can interact with only like minded people.
Yes, the overall bubble is larger online than in real life, but as a result it allows for self-selecting subnetworks which align with confirming your biases and further radicalization rather than compromising with differences of opinion.
I disagree with your interpretation of the stable plural patchwork that you’ve represented here as supporting your claim. However, the nuance in difference of our opinion isn’t that important in the grand scheme.
For your last two paragraphs, I think you are actually describing social sorting - which the paper asserts as the underlining mechanism for which polarization happens online. The filter bubble is colloquially known as not seeing differing opinions online, yet as the paper states is untrue. Online we counter more diverse opinions. That’s what I wanted to point out.
> I'm sure most people have noticed how large family gatherings have shifted over the last 15 years, and how some family may no longer even be invited as a result of social media driven shifts.
So because of social media bubbles, people split their families into bubbles too? If even in a real life setting, where no algorithm curates who they interact with, people choose to segregate despite of family bonds, then that sounds more like a people problem than a social media problem to me.
There's definitely families out there who can get together despite holding diametrically opposed political opinions, even discussing them at the dinner table without getting overly emotional about it and needing to un-invite people from later gatherings. I'd call that a normal, functioning family.
This is normal human behavior, per Schelling. Social media has made everyone's opinions more visible to others, which often turns out to be antithetical to maintaining friendly relations.
People have always grouped together into communities with extremist views in the physical world. And I am not even talking about fringe elements. Many sects of all major religions for thousands of years have thought the entire outgroup is going to hell.
The problem with social media is not that. It is the feed algorithms that make expressing any extremist position the only way to get other people to talk to you. Fix this problem and many of the problems will go away.
Unfortunately, as it is a social coordination problem, the only way for this to happen is government regulation that either bans feed algorithms altogether, or ensures that users individually have full control over the algorithm for their own feed.
This is exactly what's happening. I never thought I'd make a positive comparison to twitter but twitter threw everyone into one big melting pot. People could block each other but by default they had to listen to a lot of differing opinions before they blocked anyone.
In fedi borders are being drawn and they're creating these little bubbles of opinions. So you know that within your border your opinion will never be challenged because the admin already took care of that for you.
If I were to find any glimmer of hope in that it would be that certain instances will be more inclusive and perhaps some borders will be drawn around that, but I'm not sure.
I actually ran a node since 2017 but left in 2022 because of this very reason.
humans can't be trusted to not censure information they dislike. corporate or private people will all follow their own self interests. there is no version where this ends well.
Humans have dealt with serious society-wise cultural issues rooted in base emotional desires like these many, many times before, and evolved beyond them.
We can still develop common sense and a culture that is highly cautious of these attempts to censor everything, the stuff motivated by an ever expand hyper sensitivity to anything in shades of grey of something they don't like.
We've experience half a decade where being censor-happy has become the norm, rather than merely cleaning up communities of the fringe edge cases that are truly bad. As usual with humans a good idea leaned on taken to the extreme, a hammer seeking nails. Definitely not the first time humans attempted something like this.
The constant negative outcomes of these impulsive behaviours usually build up ad nauseam, and almost always result in cultural backlash which eventually turns into a new common sense. Democracy was built of a similar reaction to negative base desire for isolated hyper centralized authority. I'm confident a similar shift will happen in reaction to the hyper-ideological "everyone I disagree with should be banned from commenting" safe space movement. At least as long as the force of government doesn't turn it from merely cultural to criminal or regulatory as it already starting to in some countries.
I think this is largely moot because just about every social media site will either allow you to select your communities or algorithms will filter for you based on your behavior.
By fragmenting you move off of a global platform with family and into a silo of like minds. That change means there is no need to pollute the global newsfeed with opposing views. Everyone can agree on a common dominator and family will start getting invited back to dinner.
Right, because we all know the antivaxx member of the extended family never brings the topic up in person...
People radicalized have their entire identity structured around a need for confirmation.
When you only talk about a specific topic 24/7 online, what happens in person is that you still bend over backwards to tie every possible subject into that topic. A QAnon believer sees it everywhere and points it out to family. A flat earther is going to make some comment about NASA at dinner guaranteed.
It existed previously in cult behavior, but that sociological structure has now been distributed from small local gatherings to global reach online.
Sorry, I don't know much about these, but how does anyone know what other communities you're part of? Is it difficult to have per-community pseudonyms?
France specifically lists political affiliation among protected categories, while post-socialist countries flat out prohibit hiring decisions on anything unrelated to the ability to perform the job (and arguing “cultural fit” qualifies would be a difficult proposition, were the rejected hire to actually go to court).
Governments may be allowed to be more discriminatory for national security reasons, and AFAICT security clearances are in part a backdoor to get this to be permissible in private employment as well.
(Of course, it’s a different story if the political organization in question is actually banned, but in most civilized places that’s a very high bar—I’d argue that’s one of the qualifications of the moniker, even.)
Thing is, with current social media, bubbles are quite limited. Social media likes interactions and comments and the best way to gain those is by exposing totally opposite info to a person with certain views. This will also drive toxicity way up. The fediverse is more like some local cozy communities. Yes, there are some bad groups of ppl, but generally it's ok to be part of a smaller community compared to being exposed to constant hate, rage by social media algorithms to gain more interactions
The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is. And I would suspect that most readers of Hacker News only know about Mastodon. The Fediverse needs the same kind of evangelical missionaries that made the free software movement such a big deal.
> main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is
More awareness won't help while the churn is so high. The Fediverse seems to be happy staying small, actively disdaining the sorts of user-friendly moves that would give them mass appeal (but in the process, perhaps, destroy something its current users find special).
I still think p2p is the way to go. When I get some time, I want to spin up a little p2p app around sharing ad-free news and commentary. (Articles + photos + threads.)
It can all be ephemeral, because 99% of the use is in the short-term. I rarely if ever access old tweets or Reddit threads.
The reason why these things don't take off with non-nerds is because the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks. That's it. There's nothing more to it.
Over the weekend there was a post about XMPP and somebody asked for a client with the same level of UX as Telegram. There were a few replies, but none of them were what I would say were anywhere near the same level.
For example one of them had an option to choose between three different methods of encrypting chats, and it was one of the most prominent UI features in the chat window. That's great if you want to feel like James Bond and encrypted chat is your main use case, but 99.9% of people are just sending memes and photos of their cats and don't even know what encrypted means.
Element is doing quite well in this department, but last time I tried (admitidely a couple of years ago) there were still some edge cases.
This point is confusing to me because there are so many clients available. Not only in different projects (Misskey/Firefish/Sharkey, Akkoma/Pleroma, glitch-soc), but also from the various compatible clients in the web and mobile (Elk, Semaphore/Enafore/Pinafore, Ice Cubes, Fedilab). Many instances also tweak their frontend to make UX adjustments, which is a lot more difficult in closed source projects.
> the UI and UX of open source tools almost always sucks.
One interesting outcome of Reddit changing their API pricing was long-time 3rd-party Reddit apps shutting down. Some of those added Lemmy support to their existing UI and importantly thought through new user behavior (like showing a default instance vs forcing users to sign up).
There's still work to be done, but if we're talking about the different between the Official Reddit client and the (now defunct) Boost for Reddit, the latter had better UX. Now that Boost only supports Lemmy and the Reddit app keeps getting enshittified the UX argument is harder to make.
The mastodon web client seems pretty similar, qualitatively, to twitters web client. Granted cross-instance search is not a thing but in terms of the timeline and how you interact with it it's largely identical.
It depends on what you mean by emphemeral because if you mean thr data's existence I would be against it. When I'm new to a domain or topic, I reference old threads all the time. I save links for other people and as reference points for me to dive into later.
Yeah a lot of stuff is what I wouldn't care about 2 minutes after I read it, but the protocol can't really know what any given person will want to come back to.
The Fediverse is not a single entity. Anyone who thinks it can be improved, can improve it. There are lots of different systems that are part of the Fediverse. It's not all Mastodon, and some of them have a completely different approach.
Yes, the appeal the Fediverse is that its lack of mass appeal keeps it away from the inevitable Eternal September or Enshitification or at least delays it.
In a small way, we can have the Internet of old back, the one where in order to participate in communities online, you weren't driven by algorithmic feeds setup to push ads in front of you constantly, or just generally shit posting about whatever pop culture moment.
I don't really want everyone to come, just the people who would have shown up in the early days of the internet when it was hard. The clout chasers and tabloid purveyors can stay right where they are.
The Mastodon communities in general have been vehemently against Threads' ActivityPub integration and even go as far as pledging to block Threads preemptively and threaten to alienate instances that won't do so.
I understand their concern (I still, however, think it is extremely overblown), but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Even me, a techie, hesitate to sign up for some random instances ran by people I don't know, and with the risk of it getting shut down at the mercy of said people. Right in this thread, you will also see people that advocate for keeping it niche. That is completely fine too, but the Fediverse not taking off is partly self-inflicted and one could even argue that it is in fact the goal.
You could run a battery optimized, opportunistically available mastodon instance from your phone, but Apple and Google won't let you. The amount of wasted compute in everyone's hands is staggering.
Something like https://www.manyver.se/ ? It is available on Google Play, Apple App Store and F-Droid.
It seems they have had some issues with Google Play and the App Store with their weird catch-all policies, requiring integration with Google/Apple login etc. but they have managed to work around it for the time being.
How is the relevant to the conversation? Sure, we have very powerful processors in many devices in our home that are idle much of the time. What, exactly, is your point.
Don't be too sure of that. Plenty of instances have preemptively blocked Meta and it's likely that if and when Threads goes AP, more will follow. Some of us still remember Eternal September and would like to avoid a repeat.
But by then there should be well in excess of 200-300m people on Threads.
Many of them will want to converse with Mastodon users and vice versa and I am sure there will be instances available that will be happy to allow that conversation to happen. Because ultimately it's all about users not instances.
And that's fine, but chances are that any instances which would federate with Threads would probably get defederated by many of the instances which refuse to federate with it. We've already seen this behaviour in fediblock drama, where merely being able to see content from "bad" instances is enough to get your own blocked by an entire union of censorious Mastodon admins.
If I'm on instance A and my friend is on instance B and she is talking to someone on Threads (instance C) and instance A blocks instance C .. it just means I won't see posts from instance C. So maybe my friend on instance B gets into a conversation with someone on instance C. In my view I just don't see the C side of the convo. No harm, no foul.
A lot of the fediblock stuff is not 'well they won't defederate from the BADPEOPLE so i'll defederate from them too!'. In fact I'm not sure I've seen an example of that actually happening. You often see grousing and calls for it, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it happen. Most of the block lists i've seen are simply instances of 'free speech warriors' who refuse to moderate calls for violence from their userbase, instances that are straight up 'we are nazis' here, or instances that are extremely sketchy porn.
> Free software became successful because it rendered things mostly obsolete ie commercial Unix and proprietary compilers.
Free software became successful in as much as it reduced the cost for companies selling other things to consumers. Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server. Linux enabled them to have a free operating system to run all their data tracking for ads. Free software reduced the cost for Apple to develop the he software that powers iPhones and Macs.
For the most part, the end user actually doesn’t use the free software, rather it is a part of something else they pay for.
> For the most part, the end user actually doesn’t use the free software, rather it is a part of something else they pay for.
That's surprisingly true even when the FOSS alternative is a perfectly suitable drop in replacement for a popular proprietary program. How many people pay for Microsoft Office instead of just using LibreOffice? When FOSS became more popular than the proprietary competition, it was only because the FOSS product was 10x better (think Firefox and Chrome vs Internet Explorer or VLC vs Windows Media Player and Quicktime) not because users actually chose FOSS.
Another example that proves this is how the single biggest increase in Linux desktop market share was likely due to a gaming handheld called the Steam Deck that is actually a Linux laptop. Linux allows Valve to sell gaming hardware without paying license fees to Microsoft or creating their own operating system.
The reality of FOSS is a far cry from the ideals of Stallman, ESR, et.al. that were the original rationale behind FOSS licenses.
> How many people pay for Microsoft Office instead of just using LibreOffice?
How many people pay for Microsoft Office instead of just using Google Docs/Sheets/...? LibreOffice doesn't replace Office for the same reason why Sheets doesn't replace Excel despite being free. Huge difference in functionality if you're more than a casual user
Same applies to most free alternatives to industry standard software. FreeCAD isn't a replacement for Solidworks, GIMP isn't a replacement for photoshop, etc
> Linux allows Valve to sell gaming hardware without paying license fees to Microsoft or creating their own operating system.
From reviews of Windows-based gaming handhelds (ROG Ally, etc.), the cost of a Windows license is likely secondary compared to just how badly the stock Windows UI and power management (and incessant forced updates) suit the form factor, and Microsoft don’t look like they can be bothered to accomodate this comparatively small market (at least judging by their public behaviour so far).
That’s not necessarily to say that this was Valve’s original motivation. I think it’s just as likely they were setting up a fallback position for when Microsoft tried to push them out of game distribution using their Xbox platform. But right now it wouldn’t make sense for Valve to switch back even if that problem disappeared overnight.
I think MS won't bother but instead build an xbox portable on the same type of platform with a tweaked version of whatever bastardized windows runs on xbox. Then maybe they will license the software stack to your ASUSes and whomever.
> "Would Google or Facebook be viable if they had to pay Microsoft (or Sun) a license per server."
Google and Facebook could afford to pay for expensive servers, even more expensive datacenters to house them in, and fat compensation packages to their employees and execs, so obviously yes. Plenty of industries exist that have high capex costs and manage to get off the ground just fine. Continuing to give away free software to startups with millions of VC dollars raised that are growing to billion dollar businesses no longer makes sense.
> The main issue with Fediverse is the vast majority of people don't know what it is.
Who knew what the Internet was when it started spreading into the mainstream? People don't need to know what something is or does to start interacting with it, it either needs a smooth enough onboarding process that people can easily experiment, or it needs some compelling value that they've heard about from others to make the extra effort worth it. Not sure where the Fediverse is on either of these points.
I imagine I don't know what "the Fediverse" is because I'd assume it to refer to a singular network (hence "the") but Mastodon is definitely not any kind of a single network.
One of the things I hear repeated in startup circles is that a product needs to be 10x better than the thing it’s replacing to have a realistic shot at displacing it. I honestly don’t feel like even if every single social media user in the world was exposed to the fediverse that it would be compelling enough to cause a critical mass to switch. What does it do better than the sites users are already on?
I wonder if school kids could be those missionaries. Especially with the difficult signup, it could create like an "elite" social circle of people that made it... Leading to word-of-mouth advertisement because everyone is helping their friends choose a server and signup and dealing with the quirks.
The Fediverse is something that we already tried in many different fashions and it was never mass-adopted because it doesn't have the features that people want.
It's the API equivalent of people asking for iPhones while nerds keep on throwing Raspberry Pis at them and pretend that they're the same thing if you squint hard enough.
It is not the same, it will never be the same, you will never get the masses to adopt it, so if you want to do the hobbyist thing go ahead. Just don't be upset when nobody gives a crap about your federated platform and you're forever 5 years from being adopted by the masses regardless of the date.
Limewire, the filesharing software was installed on one-third of computers worldwide in 2007 [1]. The problem is that software-engineers have lost their way. Limewire was a one-click install. Mastodon requires twenty arcane steps. Once you let average-joe one-click install and host, Mastodon will very rapidly rise.
The popularity of discord servers and subreddits, or for that matter closed facebook/telegram groups, speaks otherwise. People want control over their communities.
Sorry I thought we were talking about why federation will or wont succeed
success of reddit and facebook feel like counterexamples if they can offer for free the privacy controls that most people are satisfied by (you certainly have very little control over your subreddit or your discord - all your shit is plaintext and can get deleted tomorrow if the service provider determines their best interest diverges from yours)
I probably agree with you, in that if self hosted solutions were one click installs and modest cost they would be more popular, but I can't tell.
The reason to switch is that once you get over the initial barriers to entry (having to choose which server to join being a lot bigger barrier than most Fediverse activists seem to realize), the experience is SO MUCH BETTER. You get posts from people you've followed, in the order they were posted, and when you've read them all, you're done. No adverts, no infinite scroll, no wading through 75% "you may be interested in this soft-core porn" posts to see stuff from people you actually followed.
Email succeeded because there wasn't anything better, and of course it's become baroque in the meantime as the need for security and other features have been added.
What worked 50 years is not going to work today just because it's technically similar, the environment has changed and it's foolish to ignore that.
There is still no replacement for email though. It still very much work today and is the only solution to send message over the Internet, regardless of the person you want to reach. Non federated networks will never reach the adoption of email.
You're missing the point; it did indeed succeed and is now embedded in our digital infrastructure because it got there first. But it does not follow that launching something else today using the same model will be able to get the same uptake, because there are many competing offerings.
I don't see many competing offering. I can think of XMPP, Matrix, I'm sure there are a few others but it's definitely not many.
You're right that the environment changed, but not for the best. Many people would jump on a federated messaging network, not because it's federated but because they won't need to use dozens of app and accounts to communicate. It is more the business incentives that are not there.
Email surely has succeeded because SMTP was the de-facto communication protocol when Internet developed, but it is still successful and relevant because it is still the de-facto communication protocol.
Yes you do, you just aren't acknowledging them: centralized services like Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on. You are thinking of 'competing distributed technologies' but consumers are thinking of 'way to communicate with people' because most consumers do not care how the underlying technology works or what philosophical principles it is based on.
First movers in a market or technology space have an advantage because the costs of switching to something else rise over time, creating economic inelasticity. Go read up on preferential attachment and consider the fact that success is accidental or lucky as much as merit-based.
From a federation standpoint, it arguably is. If you try to host your own private email server from your garage, you're going to struggle with the big email providers not accepting your emails in fears of spam. And trying to debug your way around this is extremely tricky because the email filters are black boxes, again in fear of spam.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mastodon also went the distrust-by-default route if it gains in popularity, at least for the big instances. Looking at the server moderation for mastodon.social, there's 256 different Mastodon instances which are completely blocked from reaching mastodon.social.
I've been running my own email server for myself and a dozen or so friends since 1998. It hasn't been a problem. I had to evolve it over time and set up DKIM and DMARC. Spamassassin, greylisting, etc have helped me cut down on my incoming spam. It hasn't been a ton of work, maybe a day or two a year to deal with a new version of whatever that needs to some config changes.
I've been running my own mastodon instance for me and a few friends as well. It's been fine, we federate fine, no bans that I know of, no reports about my users. I think more smaller instances is probably better for the health of the network than a few huge instances. Especially if those instances are free to users.
Large instances need more moderation than a couple of admins can handle, I am concerned that instances like msdn.social or whatever may not be sustainable from both a 'actual costs' standpoint (bandwidth, hardware, etc) but also from a moderation standpoint.
In terms of my instance, the costs are very low, the mastodon software itself is frankly kind of painful to maintain, it's designed to run in a way that is scalable but that makes it a bit too complicated for a smaller instance..
I hope we see some more interesting experiments in moderation, tools like spamassassin for mastodon to automatically score and flag local posts for moderation review.
It's early days. I think we may just end up with what we see in email like the blackhole list. Have an instance full of nazis you refuse to moderate, your instance ends up on the list and everyone who subscribes to it will just defederate automatically.
The big barrier to adoption is people and content.
Mastodon has been an okay twitter replacement with its feature set, it’s just missing people.
Threads appears to have succeeded by bootstrapping their platform with major accounts, brands and popular personalities. This isn’t a thing more feature development can solve.
It's missing people because 98% of people can't get past the 'pick an instance' stage, when it's not at all obvious why you should pick any given instance or what the repercussions will be.
Imagine if you had to pick a particular node to access Facebook, or select a particular data center before you started shopping on Amazon. Consumers just want to find people and exchange a mix of public and private messages, they do not want to be bothered with the dogma of federation.
Mastodon isn't for everybody just like Twitter never was for everybody. Millions of users joined Twitter and silently left, because they didn't know what to make of it.
But the Fediverse could certainly offer services that fit the needs of the sciences. Wordpress can be connected to the Fediverse. There are other, more long form services.
Fediverse has a wrong model of news aggregation - this has been talked here many times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549218 My take is that it conflates what is civil and what is on topic.
I don't the answer to rent-seeking publishers is Mastodon. It's sites like Arxiv and libgen.
Mastadon is the answer to Twitter.
In general, I think a lot about hyper efficient marketplace companies. Like craigslist which is still have less than 50 employees.
Suppose we had a goal to connect consumer to producer and have the lowest fees, provide a well ranked marketplace that consumers and producers could trust.
1% fee w a $100 cap. A super app like WeChat - Umbrella to Uber, AirBnB, Expedia, MLS, Amazon.
With rise of AI, it could be possible. "The most efficient way to provide for human wants"
That's just like, your american opinion man. Outside of the states we see very little problem with it, and actually twitter made me think of twat all the time.
Folks, a perfect & ideal new way of life is not going to spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.
The main issue with the fediverse is the pervasive naysaying. Merchants of FUD are abundant. They all have their "the main issue" why it's hopeless. Few bother sparing even a second to contemplate the possibility of success - however faint it is against the meteor of doom which surely is careening through the sky right at us & will obliterate us all momentarily that they see.
There's so many criticisms & critiques, and so much lowly & pervasive nattering of fediverse & alternatives. I think though that what's important now isn't getting everything right & tackling each and every problem first. What's important now are strong solid bases for innovation. We need early adopters & innovators trying things.
We need to grow our capabilities, to figure out how to iterate again, after being well served by free with surveillance systems. The nattering can be constructive, once we have a base. I think we are losening things up, greasing into fluidity capabilities that have been ossified into place by titan sized ultra-captive industry. Making the connective online space fluid again is more important than anything. We can find wins, and the titans will keep stumbling & making errors. Innovation from the edge is going to shed some blood, but it will also allow iteration & evolution, will drive future wider forms of meta-moderation that will help us all suss & grok each other in ways that these highly centralized walled gardens can never be open enough to allow.
The paradigm here, of connectivity being participative and evolvable and changing: that seems like something we forgot a while ago, and in the hours of such discontent about so much being decided for us, I think the commonality should be more important than the quibbles. No one is leaping to defend the creaky status quo. We haven't figured out all the safeguards and onroading we need to get to the world scale that the titans are at now, but it sure seems to me like we have some viable starting places to work from now. We can iterate and change, socially direct ourselves, and that hope for iteration and ownership is what is at stake here. Scant criticism is on offer that has constructive alternatives, offers any rays of hope.
My opinion is that it's hard to make the Fediverse work content-wise. The Big Techs have very expensive systems to do content moderation. I (kind of) trust Instagram, or X, or whatever to prevent my daughter from seeing gore or weird porn stuff. It's hard to trust these other platforms. But I'll change my mind if good arguments come up :)
The thing is, I've never really bumped into that stuff on the Fediverse myself. And it's not something that was super common on communities before social media too. You don't need a huge budget and moderation team to keep a pleasant community, it usually doesn't become an issue until your site/service becomes a massive deal in the first place.
I assume it's better these days, but Mastodon avoided adding proper search for years because the core devs knew there was plenty of questionable content or there and making it discoverable would put many hosts at legal risk.
I'll see if I can find the links, it's been a while since I last saw them, but there was a very active GitHub issue on the main Mastodon repo back in 2017 or 2018 related to search. It came down to concerns over content that is considered acceptable in some cultures and child pornography in others.
Have you actually used federated social media? In my experience, it's more heavily moderated than any of the big centralized platforms. Like, to the point where one of the major reasons I still use the big centralized platforms is to get away from overbearing Fediverse moderation practices. None of this should be surprising when you consider that each of the little servers which make up the Fediverse are themselves tight-knit curated communities which selectively federate with other tight-knit curated communities. I prefer that my kids participate in the intentionally crafted spaces of the Fediverse over the three major algorithmically disorganized marketing machines any day of the week.
It makes a lot of sense to have Mastodon instances that only accepts verified under-18 people from a single country. Far far easier to moderate such communities.
I don't understand why you would get downvotes. Maybe it's because you're making a general point, non-specific to the topic at hand (Fediverse). Or maybe it's because Capitalism is the dominant ideology around these parts (Earth).
It's obvious to many, who've seen through the motive of greed, that collaboration yields more "economic" results. Economy can be a synonym for efficiency, but in modern usage is the definition of a caste system where groups exist primarily to extract the blood of those doing the real work.
But people practice doublethink, equating lord-serf "economies" with effectiveness, because greed (the motive to serve ones own interests) == good, and because profit (the act of taking excess value generated, for oneself) == good. Because somehow a selfish motive makes the work legitimate, because that's how "the world works". Or because there are examples of useful work having happened under this system.
Until they suffer for it many won't be able to see the problem, but luckily the vampires get more and more brazen, to the point where even people living life "the right way" have began stuggling in many cases. So when the previously-sheltered upper castes begin to bleed out into the ever-gaping maw of moloch [0], there will be change in perception. The Capitalists are insatiable (luckily [?]), which I think will eventually undo the idea. It will take more blood, and more time, but I feel it's starting to happen.
All this to say, that you are not alone in your vantage. And here's Ginsberg excerpted, on what I interpret to be this exact topic (which granted, is only my personal interpretation).
"Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!"
Well it used to mean old ladies. In this context, he's referring to left leaning people who disproportionately dye their hair wild colors vs. conservative people.
It's a stereotype of feminist/leftist/"woke" activists who dye their hair, likely deriving from the baleful image of Zoe Quinn that lives rent free in the heads of all modern red-pilled douchenozzles.
Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users.
Take Twiter as an example. It's rapidly deteriorated under Musk's stewardship [1]. Bias aside, quality is down to support a subscription models with what many now call the "blue check reply guys": low-quality replies from "verified" users being boosted when thos esame people couldn't otherwise get organic engagement.
What would be the benefit to a user of federation? Federation at what level? Is it just other companies? How do you create a feed with federated content? Are you copying it between nodes? Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?
All of those things are real problems/ Yet the value proposition for users is at best hypothetical. A service can still degrade. It can get swept away by whatever the new social network is. Will that be federated too? Most likely not because it's easier to scale that way.
Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.
> Federation is an example of solving an imaginary problem by creating a bunch of very real problems. Tech people care about the idea of a federated service to avoid a walled garden but this always ignore the practical implementation issues and the lack of a value proposition to users.
Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side:
1. We want to write software, not to wrangle with the laws of a hundred countries.
2. We don't want to deal with providing infrastructure for millions of users.
3. We don't want to run a community in general. Our passion is software, we don't really care what they talk about.
On the user side, the value proposition is lack of lock-in. That if you like the system, you'll eventually find some place where you fit in.
> What would be the benefit to a user of federation?
If Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place.
> Can I, as a user, set up my own server like I theoretically can with email? How then do we police content in such a world? What about bad actors spamming as we get with POTS and email? Who enforces things like law enforcement requests and content moderation?
People federating with you can decide to stop dealing with you in that case. Federation doesn't mean links can't be broken, or never established in the first place.
> Twitter may well die. Who cares? It'll get replaced by something else. Federation just isn't going to happen with these philosophical arguments given all the practical problems.
No system is perfect, but IMO a federated system, if done well enough is more resilient. In a federated system, the hope is that something like Twitter would be just one of many providers. Thus if the leadership goes nuts one day, it has to content with that there's 20 other nigh identical providers, and that it can over time be marginalized if it keeps being crazy.
Also, ideally federation means each community can be more focused, and have its own culture and local rules that make sense for it, but may not make sense for anyone else.
> Federation IMO solves problems on the developer side:
I couldn't disagree more.
First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation.
Second, IMHO it's not even true. It's a bit like how you split a monolithic into microservices. Now you've created a bunch of versioning and orchestration problems where you have to deal with network issues. Federation means talking to third-parties, dealing with them being unreachable or behaving badly. It's a whole new class of problems.
> f Twitter were federated with other services, basically you'd have a way to reach select Twitter users from a saner place.
There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.
> First, nobody cares about this. This has no value proposition to users. It shouldn't even be a topic of conversation.
Did you quote the wrong part? Obviously, value proposition to developers isn't a value proposition to users a lot of the time.
Second, this is a dev-centric forum.
> There's a ton of hand-waving that goes along with this statement. It's like if you tried to cut out talking to Verizon on your POTS exchange. Well, technically you can do that but then you can't talk to the customers on that service and they can't talk to you.
It's exactly like that, yes. That's the very point: that if say, Verizon starts doing something unpleasant like spamming, they can find themselves cut off from the rest of the system.
Meanwhile, unlike with POTS, any alternative is accessible to Verizon users, so they could move over with minimal pain.
The ideal is that in a federated system, there's always alternatives, and no instance is too big to fail.
The biggest problem with federation is easily visible in e-mail: the server “owns” your address and therefore moving in very hard. It’s not much better than any other silo in that way. Mastodon is a bunch of small social sites in a trenchcoat.
There are ways to make identity floating and separate from the server, at least in theory, but ActivityPub (the protocol under Mastodon and many other things) does not implement anything like this.
I'm confused by this comment. It's written as if federated social media is a hypothetical technology someone is proposing. It isn't. It's a real technology with dozens of interoperable implementations, thousands of running servers, and millions of users. A precursor of the currently popular ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon launched 15 years ago with Laconica and has been under continuous development since.
I always thought the idea of federation from the users perspective is something of a middle ground between small community forums and social monoliths like twitter. Small-ish communities that for the most part see content that is part of that community but is not entirely isolated from other communities either. Also means that if somebody comes along and screws up one instance it just gets defederated and the people that want to move do so.
I'm not sure how much you actually know about this stuff, but this take reads like you fundamentally don't understand the subject.
Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up. We can all agree that as user count goes up, abuse and moderation scales as well.
A centralized platform takes all of that moderation load at once. You need a team of people or some crazy moderation software that doesn't work. Abuse runs rampant as the company doesn't want to invest in proper moderation. We see that on twitter, Facebook, tumblr, all of them.
The fediverse aims to solve this problem by limiting scale. Smaller communities are easier to moderate. We see this with forums and chat rooms. When the community is small, they tend to self-police more. People tend to self-identify with that community and actively protect it.
But small communities are small and don't reach far. So we connect these small communities into larger networks. The implementation details of that are IMO pretty much irrelevant, but to answer your question: posts are duplicated throughout the network. Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.
Bad actors aren't much of a concern. If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you. Individual servers have the option to refuse connections from other servers or domains. Server admins actively network with each other to warn of malicious servers. So far it's been incredibly effective.
As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users. You also have extensive filtering options so that you can effectively moderate your own timeline.
And of course, there's also the drama between server admins blocking each other and harming users by cutting them off from part of the network. The solution I chose was to start up my own server. It took a weekend and operates exactly the same as the big instances I've been on.
When a server shuts down, users can move elsewhere. You can keep all your follows and followers, but lose your post history. That's obviously not ideal, but what were you able to keep when MySpace closed down? It's not perfect, but you can still keep going. Plus there are limited workarounds, but that's not important.
The fediverse has problems, but not the ones you pose.
Ask yourself how one scales a website to tens of millions of users. It's pretty complicated, right? Lots of servers and load balancers and whatever else.
But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand? That's much more doable. That's just a single machine. The magic of federation is linking ten thousand websites run by volunteers that each host only a thousand users into a more or less cohesive network.
No matter which node in the network your account belongs to, you get roughly the same experience. No one has to spend millions filling up a datacenter. Most servers are run on donations from users or out of their admin's pocket. It doesn't cost too terribly much unless you're serving thousands of users.
When one server goes down, even a very large server, the network stays intact and absorbs the load and the users as they migrate. When a server with tens of thousands of users shuts down, we don't see a dramatic drop in total network users. Nearly all of them just move. This makes the network very resilient. No one person can do any meaningful damage to the network as a whole.
Fediverse is far from perfect. And I agree that it won't be a monetized ad- and celebrity-friendly platform like Facebook or twitter. But that's fundamentally misunderstanding what and why it is.
The fediverse is the next logical step from hundreds of small isolated forums. People built and use federated services because they want small communities driven by and for people who simply want to talk to other people. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not going to grow to encompass billions of users because that's simply not the goal.
The goal of the fediverse is simple: give people a place to talk and share with each other that is controlled exclusively by people who want the same thing. No money, no tracking, no corporations, just people talking to other people.
Everyone I know on mastodon is perfectly happy with the way things are. We see a very stable network with slow and steady growth. That's pretty much all we want or need.
> Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.
> Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.
> The server is basically unusable for 30 to 60 seconds until the stampede of Mastodons slows down.
> Presumably each of those IPs is an instance, none of which share any caching infrastructure with each other, and this problem is going to scale with my number of followers (followers' instances).
Which URL is the one getting hammered? The HTML blog post? Or some ActivityPub resource? Why do all requests need to hit the database instead of being served by a (micro) cache?
Is there anything besides the inbox endpoint that actually needs to be real-time dynamic?
> Most of the problems you pose exist with every social media platform, and only get worse as scale goes up.
It's the opposite. We have monolithic services because all of these problems benefit from scale. Is it easier to build one system for site safety and the ability to report illegal content or to build more than one?
> Each server caches copies of all incoming posts to serve them directly to their local users. There are downsides to this approach, but the positive is that it crudely balances server load across the network.
It doesn't load balance anything. It just multiplies the work, particularly given that any such service is going to have a long tail of low-distribution content. Are you going to replicate that preemptively? Or cache-on-demand? If it's the first, it's more work. If it's the second, it's not clear it actually works and certainly adds propagation delay. By this I mean, you can't really produce a feed of content you don't have, for example.
> If you start a server that just blasts spam into the fediverse, the network will quickly drop you.
Famously, POTS has no issue with spam because of this.
> Bad actors aren't much of a concern.
Just like POTS, just like email, just like SMS.
> As a user, you also have the option to block servers or other users.
Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would.
> But what about a website for a thousand users? Ten thousand?
But it's not. You still have to deal with all the traffic from the rest of the network. Otherwise, what are you displaying to your users?
> Fediverse is far from perfect.
It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex.
> Blocking servers makes as much sense as blocking a country on Twitter would.
That's not really the case. Blocking a user is done when the user is mallicious, blocking a server is done when the sysop is malicious, the server is host to bad behaviour, used for spam, etc. Domains and IP's are blocked in SMTP all the time, and the fediverse is just email with social elements attached to it.
The founding generation of the fediverse may operate with definitions of “sysop is malicious” and “bad behavior” that make little sense to most of the world. For example, back when centralized blocklists were still in vogue, some insisted that servers that failed to ban discussion of libertarianism, ought to go on the blocklist. For whatever reason, some of the founding generation see libertarianism as beyond the pale, as equal to fascism or hate speech. Even as someone who has been annoyed for decades by the libertarian idealism occasionally encountered on nerd forums, that strikes me as a bizarre policy.
>It's completely unworkable, offers no value proposition to users, is more expensive to implement and is way more complex.
And yet we still have thriving communities with tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are all pretty happy and satisfied with the way things are.
Because you don't understand what the value is doesn't change the fact that a ton of people do find it valuable. Calling mastodon a failed platform is laughable when we have so many people who enjoy it. I mean that literally, it's a running joke and we all laugh at takes like this. We even have memes about it.
The value proposition is actually quite simple: it's small, it's decentralized, theres no algorithm, it's wholly independent of corporate or advertiser influence, and it's full of people who value those things highly. It is the antithesis of centralized corporate social media, built by and for people who find the modern corporate web intolerable.
What you're complaining about is ActivityPub. It's bad, everyone knows it's bad, we talk about it all the time. There's a great deal of discussion and effort being put into improving it. It comes with some frustrations and odd behavior, but it's largely irrelevant to most users.
The fediverse in general has quite a lot of active users, and that count is growing slowly and steadily. Clearly these people find value and utility in these platforms. Claiming it's an unworkable platform with no value is objectively incorrect.
> No matter which node [...] you get roughly the same experience.
How do you mean this? Besides HN, I'm on some big guys, a few discords, and some private groups. Some of the big guys delegate moderation to private participants in each sub-forum - of course. NO TWO of these have the same rules. Not even close. Some have fundamentally different basic rules of conduct. Many of the moderators enthusiastically want to block "the bad guys" but they mostly agree to each other's label on that in spite of their rules being all different. Basically if someone was lynched by some other group, that's good enough for them.
I'm willing to be amazed that it works but for now I do not believe that two of these systems actually will agree long term to use the other guy's forum rules.
When you move an account between servers, you also move your following list. Your new account follows all the same accounts and your home timeline is identical between accounts.
Of course the local and federated feeds are different, but those are local to the server and will always be unique.
What you're describing is drama, which is pretty easy to ignore.
My previous server got wrapped up in some ridiculously inane large-scale drama that I couldn't avoid. So I started my own server and moved everything over. I still see all the same posts from the same people and they still see mine. It's all exactly the same except for the local and federated feeds.
As I read you, when you switch server, you still see your favorite people's own independent writings (the kind of thing HN posts link to). And perhaps their own local responses? And you give up the discussion threads or groups that are between the members of this or that server and moderated by the corresponding server people? These discussions are just among one server's members? Isn't that a rather small group?
I think the answer to that isn't inertia or greed. I would argue that the tools of federation aren't necessarily suitable to that specific problem. There is a difference between tweets and feeds compared to peer-reviewed papers in magazine-like journals.
That is, Mastodon does solve a kind of problem that is related to closed groups of individuals collaborating on a moderated topic. And it allows those closed groups to broadcast their work into a network and to selectively include elements from outside networks. You could probably use those raw tools to create something that might sort of work for scholarly societies.
But it does feel a bit like trying to shape the problem to fit the solution (put another way, if you have a nice new shiny hammer, suddenly a lot of problems start to look like nails). I think the article is trying to suggest that federation is a tool that is flexible enough to fill that role, but I believe a significant amount of infrastructure would need to be built on top of federation to achieve such a role. And also, a significant culture and process change would have to take place within academia.
Federation might be a part of a solution to the problem, but no where near the whole solution.