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   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 16:14:27 JST Alexandre Oliva
   I'm growing worried with fediverse trends that, rather than freedom (control over one's own life), promote power (control over others' lives).
   I've long been uncomfortable with deletion/edits, that effectively mess with my ability to treat and archive my past feed and use it as reliable memory. being unable to save it elsewhere, to be able to search it or refer to it later, or being regarded as cheating or abusing the system merely to preserve my own memory, seems power over myself that I'd rather not grant others. I'd much rather deletions, edits and whatnot, of posts I've seen before, be visible and advisory, not an Amazon's 1984 book-burning move.
   likewise, enabling me to control who can respond to my posts seems to place too much authority on one party, and grant me power over others that I don't deserve. I can understand my not wanting to *see* their responses, but blocking them from responding seems outrageous. why do I get to decide what others get to do? why don't they get to decide it, or have a say? why don't my followers, or theirs? that seems to lead towards authoritarian control and isolated bubbles, rather than to respectful and rich cross-polination of ideas.
   to those concerned about abuse, enabling posters to prevent responses from abusers would also enable abusers to prevent reactions from victims and their supporters.
   what am I missing?
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     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 17:09:01 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • screwlisp
     yeah. I'm not advocating for deleted/edited posts to remain visible to the public, or even to new followers. just that they remain visible to myself if they ever were. so that I can rely on my feed like I rely on my memory. having others mess with what appeared before in my feed is too much like having others mess with my memory, and that makes me very uncomfortable. nobody should be entitled to demand me to forget all I remember about per, IMHO, and as much as my computing devices are an extension of my being, that enables me to do more than my body alone could, demanding this extended me to rip off memories feels abusive and oppressive to me.
   • Embed this notice
     screwlisp (screwtape@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 17:09:02 JST screwlisp

     in reply to

     @lxo did you consider mastodons who want to be able to speak ephemerally sometimes? I think I heard it called right-to-be-forgotten. Also it's kind of a strike against data mining. People who were there were there, and the scraping that happens later is trying to ingest a fragmented mess. I'm advocating for the devil here.

   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 17:16:49 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • :mima_rule: Mima-sama
     > show which responses you yourself approve of
     
     that's exactly why it feels like power over others to me. it shouldn't be for me to say whose responses appear in *others*'s feeds. that's too prone to abuse. we all know social media is being used to spread misinformation, and IMHO it is very important to be able to follow up to such misinformation, ideally reaching whoever got the initial post, offering contradicting evidence. we'd be setting ourselves up for horribly manipulative abuse if we enabled spreaders of misinformation to prevent dissent.
     
     now, I'm also quite sympathetic to the notion of avoiding and containing toxic behaviors. as you point out yourself, preventing followups doesn't stop people from responding by other means.
     
     now, when it comes to collective moderation, maybe there's something to be explored about enabling posters to set *advisory* filters, that followers could choose to adopt or disregard. that seems superior to preventing followups IMHO.
   • Embed this notice
     :mima_rule: Mima-sama (mima@makai.chaotic.ninja)'s status on Friday, 21-Jun-2024 17:16:50 JST :mima_rule: Mima-sama

     in reply to

     @lxo@gnusocial.net I see reply controls more as a way to control how one's post appears canonically to other people, since I consider the comment/reply section to be an important part of the post. It's just a convenient way to show which responses you yourself approve of. A comment section full of toxicity and unconstructive responses would be kinda embarrassing to show to other people, don't you think? :sagume_think:
     
     I disagree that this would prevent people from responding. They can still do so; they just have to accept that it will be separate from the post and I will not platform it. In traditional webpages that'd mean the response will be a simple link, and the linkback will not be shown by the OP. In microblogs that'd mean a quote post which will not be shown in the original post's list of quotes (if the software implements that). Freedom is still preserved in both.

   • Embed this notice
     simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 27-Jun-2024 01:35:34 JST simsa03

     in reply to
     "what am I missing"
     
     I guess you underestimate a bit the distinction between the roles of user and of admin/operator of an instance and the different legal constraints that go with both.
     
     Whatever gets "published" in the Public feed on an instance needs to conform to the legal standards of the country the servers of the site reside. May that be laws of libel, of controversial content, or other possibly criminal activities. At least in principle, the operator of the instance can be held legally responsible for the content appearing on "his" or "her" site. (Whether an instance should or could even be seen as some possession or "real estate" is a question I'd rather set aside for now.)
     
     As far as I know these conditions of legal responsibility do not necessarily apply to the content that appears in the Whole Network feed via federation. Here the laws of the servers' country as well as the orginial licensing conditions of the federating site "from where" the content stems seem to apply. But when federated posts from various sites mix in conversation threads this can create the situation that e.g. in an abuse situation (across instance) the addressee of the abuse cannot properly counter should his or her counter post violate rules of his/her instance or even the legal conditions of the ocuntry (far fetched, admittedly). Think also federated bots, spam, unwanted content as further examples. In such cases and cirumstances blocking and muting appear to many a practical solution.
     
     To me instance blocking is a borderline case to which I came to grudgingly agree even though it undercuts federation and creates bubbles of sub-diverses. But individual blocking and muting seem viable and reasonable to me. Of course this is no answer to the more foundational questions you raise. But on a practical level, I can see their benefits.
   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Sep-2024 06:07:49 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • w96k
     I agree P2P is better. individual instances would be a way to address that, but we seem to be going the opposite direction, in which instances' royalties hold power over their subjects
   • Embed this notice
     w96k (w96k@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 24-Sep-2024 06:07:50 JST w96k

     in reply to

     @lxo

     Not so related to your post, but I stopped to like fediverse idea, because client-server architecture. It looks to me like fedi is more about internet feudalism than connecting people. It's often no difference if you grant your data to commerce guys or random guys on the internet, anyway someone controls your data and can ban you, do whatever admins want. The idea of fediblock is wrong to me, because it abuses such admin power (even if it does it in a "good" way). P2P is better.