Notices by John Goerzen (jgoerzen@floss.social)

@grimalkina @creachadair TIL you have a podcast! Subscribed. I've long appreciated your thoughtful commentary.

@vagrantc Thank you for the thoughts. The being able to reply to specific portions part was one of my goals. I have found that when I post a link to a blog post, I get a lot of reposts and favorites but very little conversation. I am really here for the conversation so I wondered if this might be better. But I definitely don't want to be annoying!

On #Meta, #Facebook, #Censorship, and #FreeSpeech, a thread.

I have long been an advocate of free speech and encryption, and have personally been censored by Facebook for writing about Mastodon. Yet I am very much not in favor of the changes they are making. Why is this?

As I reflected on this question, I reflected back to the early days of #SocialMedia. And by that I mean the 1980s and 1990s.

1/

As digital communication opened up, people could build their own communities. Free from the type of monetary pressures that existed before, free from a lot of outside oversight. Many people, for instance, didn't know how to access a #BBS or even have the equipment to do so. So self-expression could be unleashed, and was.

But if there are absolutely no rules, then whenever a group gets big enough, troublemakers will show up and ruin it for everyone. 2/

The #Debian project had to grapple with this. It took it awhile to learn that allowing poisonous people to run rampant caused more harm than good and drove away would-be talented developers.

But there were never absolutely no rules. Perhaps the owner ("sysop") of a #BBS would ban you for insulting their cat. Perhaps they let just about anything go, including the poisonous bits.

3/

In most areas, you had a choice among multiple BBSs. If you didn't like the vibe at one place, you'd call another. Sysops liked callers, so they learned pretty quickly that they'd lose out if they were bad at moderating.

#Usenet didn't offer the same choice of providers for most, but there were usually real life consequences for behaving too outlandishly there.

4/

Some BBSs let people from minority communities such as LGBTQ+ thrive in a place of peace from tormentors. A lot of them let people be themselves in a way they couldn’t be “in real life”. And yes, some harbored trolls and flamers. each BBS, or Usenet site, set their own policies.

These had to be harmonized to a certain extent with the global community, but with BBSs especially, you could use a different one if you didn’t like what the vibe was at a certain place. 5/

With the rise of the very large platforms — and here I mean CompuServe and AOL at first, and then Facebook, Twitter, and the like later — the low-friction option of just choosing a different place started to decline. You could participate on a Fidonet forum from any of thousands of BBSs, but you could only participate in an AOL forum from AOL. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. 6/

As social media became conceived of as very large sites, it became impossible for a person with enough skill, funds, and time to just start a site themselves. Instead of neading a few thousand dollars of equipment, you’d need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and employees.

7/

All that means you can’t really run Facebook as a nonprofit. It is a business. It should be absolutely clear to everyone that Facebook’s mission is not the one they say it is — “[to] give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” If that was their goal, they wouldn’t be creating AI users and AI spam and all the rest. Zuck isn’t showing courage; he’s sucking up to Trump and those that will pay the price are those that always do: women and minorities. 8/

Really, the point of any large social network isn’t to build community. It’s to make the owners their next billion. They do that by convincing people to look at ads on their site. Zuck is as much a windsock as anyone else; he will adjust policies in whichever direction he thinks the wind is blowing so as to let him keep putting ads in front of eyeballs, and stomp all over principles — even free speech — doing it. Don’t expect anything different from any large commercial social network either. 9/

The problem with a one-size-fits-all content policy is that the world isn’t that kind of place. For instance, I am a pacifist. There is a place for a group where pacifists can hang out with each other, free from the noise of the debate about pacifism. And there is a place for the debate. Forcing everyone that signs up for the conversation to sign up for the debate is harmful. Preventing the debate is often also harmful. One company can’t square this circle. 10/

Beyond that, the fact that we care so much about one company is a problem on two levels. First, it indicates how succeptible people are to misinformation and such. I don’t have much to offer on that point. Secondly, it indicates that we are too centralized.

And on that point, #Mastodon is a solution. You can join any instance, easily migrate your account from one server to another, and so forth. You pick an instance that suits you. There are thousands of others you can choose from. 11/

Some #Mastodon instances aggressively defederate with instances known to harbor poisonous people; some don’t.

And, to harken back to the BBS era, if you have some time, some skill, and a few bucks, you can run your own Mastodon instance.

12/

This thread is an experimental abridged version of my blog post at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10737-censorship-is-complicated-what-internet-history-says-about-meta-facebook. I abridged it manually; no AI was involved. I am curious if people find this format useful or if they'd rather have a simple link to a blog post. (I note that Cory Doctorow does both, incidentally).

/end

@dangillmor Thank you, Dan. You are one of the few that hasn't already acquiesced. I can remember pretty clearly the downfall of my previously-favored media. NPR, who "both-sidesed" its own reporting on Roger Stone after he was arrested. WaPo, for obvious reasons. NYT and its normalizing. What does it say that the most incisive op-ed about this moment is from USA Today? https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/11/06/trump-wins-2024-presidential-election/75942805007/

Wow! Vintage Computer Festival Midwest is the largest vintage computer festival ever, anywhere. I've seen: old IBM System/36 mainframe (running its disk pack!), an entire analog telephone network for the show (complete with DSL), AT&T Unix workstations, CP/M, a DEC vt100, and just about every PC type you can imagine. And it was fun to fly myself to Chicago! #vcfmw #vcfmw19 1/

The DEC vt100 wasn't the first terminal, but it was one of the most successful early ones. And the System/36 was an early and influential IBM mainframe. #vcfmw #vcfmw19

@fu I love used bookstores. One of my favorite places to visit when traveling, in fact. Even for newer books, I often don't see what I'm interested in at the library. The library might have stuff about how to use Excel or Python, but not a book about how Facebook's data collection impacts mental health. I do read a fair number of ebooks, which aren't included in my numbers. 2/

@fu Generally, I find that the libraries I have access to are inferior to independent bookstores (used or otherwise) for serendipitous discovery, and to online bookstores (again, used or otherwise) for specific targets. I mean, there are probably few libraries in the world that still have Kermit or UUCP manuals, or obscure biographies from a certain small town in Kansas, or a German songbook published in Ohio in 1890. If I don't keep them, I may never be able to read them again. /end