@aud @aral @eatyourglory @greenWhale > And in the meantime, you expose tons of people to immediate danger (LibsofTikTok, etc).
I feel like there’s a divergence in social network philosophy in the Fediverse community that is becoming hard to reconcile.
Many believe that the primary goal of social media is to proactively shield vulnerable users from any possible forms of abuse or trauma. Even if that comes at the cost of proactively defederating whole instances that aren’t strictly aligned with our approach to moderation or with our ideology. Even if that means proposing to proactively defederate all the instances that run Pleroma/Akkoma software just because many of their contributors are perceived as too liberal (yes, somebody actually went as far as seriously proposing that). Even if that means harming discoverability, availability of content, or splintering the Fediverse into smaller bubbles and reducing its potential reach.
I personally belong to the camp of those who believes that the primary goal of social media is to enable people to connect as easily as possible to others and discover content with the least amount of frictions, and give users enough power and tools to granularly decide what content they want to see.
I want to minimize the harm to vulnerable users, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of everything else.
The user is in charge. The user can block/suspend/mute/report anything they don’t like. Sure, in extreme cases drastic decisions ought to be taken, and a whole instance with 100s/1000s/10,000s of users needs to be defederated. But such extreme cases IMHO include things like poa.st, Gab or X itself, where the tree is truly rotten at its roots, where the admins themselves endorse violence/prejudice, and/or where, picking a random user out of their base, it’s statistically very likely that that user is an absolute jerk/sociopath.
IMHO that doesn’t include Threads. Sure, Mark’s behaviour is something that we should keep a constant eye on. Sure, the higher the number of users, the higher the probability of bumping into jerks. But it’s just up to us to filter/mute/block/report them and move on. We don’t throw the whole platform away because of the sporadic jerks, because on such a large platform there are actually also people (like many of our real-life friends, or relatives, or journalists, scientists and politicians) who would add a lot of value to my feed, and the cost of losing all that content to me is much higher than the benefit that I would gain from making the Fediverse completely/proactively impermeable from the Libs of TikTok.
It’s like taking a public bus in a busy city: the busier the bus, the higher the chance of bumping into some scum who throws racial or homophobic slurs to other travellers. In such conditions, depending on the magnitude of the offense, most of the people would either:
- Move to another seat
- Directly address the offender and call him/her out for being a jerk
- Report the offender to the bus driver (or the authorities)
The alternative would be to stop taking public busses, and inviting everyone to stop taking busses as well, because the risk of bumping into potentially traumatizing confrontation with a sociopath is non-zero, and maybe criticize the bus operator for not preemptively preventing a potential fascist from taking the bus.
Which of these two approaches sounds more reasonable to you?
Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations.
This isn’t true. After announcing support for Fediverse sharing for US, Canada and Japan, I’ve actually noticed that a lot of people on Threads started talking about the Fediverse. Many were wondering what it was. #Fediverse was among the most popular topics discussed on the platform. I saw even some people open up Mastodon accounts to test how the integration works.
To be clear, I hate both the management of X and Meta from the bottom of my heart. But credit is due where it’s due. Musk used to mock “Masturbodon”, preemptively ban any Twitter accounts with a Fediverse handle in their profile, aggressively shut down one after the other all the APIs used by services like Birdsite to bridge tweets to the Fediverse, and basically prevented anybody from even talking about the Fediverse on its platform. Threads, on the other hand, invested a lot in building this integration, lets people talk about the Fediverse freely, it doesn’t mock it nor it’s aggressive towards us.
Sure, it doesn’t mean that I trust them. It doesn’t mean that I support their way of developing this integration (through meetings with ActivityPub luminaries covered by NDAs rather than truly building in the open). It doesn’t mean that I don’t see risks in the future. But I don’t feel like it’s fair to put X and Threads in the same bucket when it comes to their approach towards the Fediverse just because they are both big and both run by very unpleasant human beings.
Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.
The alternative to “users on Threads will only see federated content through Threads” is “users on Threads won’t see anything outside of their bubble at all”. If they see your posts, there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll click on your profile and maybe follow up on your instance. If they don’t see your posts, this chance is much lower.
You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs.
I can’t make a plan that is better than theirs if they have all the content and all the users.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of years trying to convince friends and relatives to do the jump.
The questions I get from them usually aren’t along the lines of “is the protocol/source code open or closed?”, nor “what are the odds of bumping into jerks on that platform?”, nor “how will moderators/admins proactively prevent me from seeing potentially disturbing content?”
No, most of the questions I get are along the lines of “can I still follow this celebrity/politician there?”, or “can I still talk to my relatives and friends from there?”, immediately followed by “how easy is it to use?”
If the answers to all these questions are negative, then we’ve lost a user. It’s a war that we can’t win. If however there is some form of permeability between large corporate platforms and smaller federated platforms, and those who feel that it’s too hard to onboard on the Fediverse have an “easy path” to interact with its content, the offer becomes much more compelling.
But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).
You can’t possibly scrutinize the funding sources of each single corporate entity that decides to join the Fediverse. And, even if you do, you’ll probably find some stinky hedge fund or VC money everywhere.
For as much as I would love a Fedivese that is completely made up of no-profits and volunteers, I know that we’ll never get traction that way. If a business joins the ranks, then we get more attention and more content.
The Flipboard case is a good one. But I could also add Wordpress, Tumblr, and many other companies that recently have either built an integration with the Fediverse, or are working on building it. I personally don’t see how they could threaten the Fediverse either. If the number of jerks on the Fediverse increases when these companies integrate their products, we can just block the jerks. If the number of jerks goes out of control, or if the company proves to be malignant in its intentions, we can block/defederate the domain. But I don’t see how the existence of businesses in our space could threaten our space. Eventually, users and admins have a lot of granular control, and they can decide what they want to see. The existence of businesses who use the ActivityPub protocol to publish their activities isn’t a threat to the Fediverse any more than the presence of businesses who use HTTP over TCP/IP is a threat to anyone who wants to run their own website.
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