@evan My deepest concern is that we will lose our understanding of consent and how well we have supported our all our fellow travelers. There are so many communities that could be lost. It’s so easy to forget and it’s loss would, unwittingly, change the fediverse in a wholly bad way.
Feeling safe? Most people are not aware that they are de facto kept hostage by their instances, that block other instances because of political ideas and use their number of users to pressure other instances into following the same policy, like mastodon.art does.
Why I cannot revert blocks made by my instance only for myself?
Don't tell me "move to another instance" because there is not an instance that doesn't block political ideas and it is not blocked by those other instances.
@alexl@evan that will by definition never happen here and can't happen here. I am an instance of one, so I can block any instance I choose if it is filled with people who I don't want to interact with. this is intentional fragmentation. this is a good thing. now it gets difficult when the instances are big. that issue mostly needs to be solved by making it even easier for small instances of friends to be set up with as close to zero friction as possible
I don't see how it would be a good thing, centralized social media's "soft" echo chambers are a social plague, I can't imagine Fediverse's "hard" echo chambers if they were to scale...
@alexl@liaizon@evan The thing is, everyone in the same room (i.e. Twitter) didn't lead to more productive discussions, just a lot of people talking past each other and a lot of badgering / sealioning aimed at making it harder for others to have nuanced discussions.
It didn't work - a certain amount if segmentation is necessary if we want to actually have worthwhile discussions.
Now, there is a valid concern about instance admins using their position to push an undisclosed political agenda, and there's probably something needed in terms of governance/norms to address that - but the simple fact that moderators on most instances have found it necessary to defederate a few instances is hardly evidence that this is a rampant problem (in fact, it's what you'd expect to see from moderation working as designed).
There's been a never-ending moderation war between instances for as long as Mastodon has existed, and the fact that many people ignore it completely makes it all the more worrying.
Some came up with the United Federation of Instances that is the liberal faction: https://ufoi.org/
While Mastodon.art & friends are the authoritarian faction, the "we know better than the others what's good".
@kainoa@StryderNotavi@evan I like the idea of smaller federation unions of servers with similar ideologies. one of my servers recently joined a small anarcho relay group and that sorta functions as the same idea
@kainoa@liaizon@alexl@evan It sounds reasonable enough right up until you get to the dispute resolution process.
Ar which point you realise every complaint raised will die quietly, mired in bureaucracy. There's no way such a heavy process can respond effectively to abuse in a timely manner, and the abusers will have no trouble exploiting that fact.
It's true, the fediverse/FidoNet paralells are there -- as far as they go. 35,000 systems in the "big" FidoNet, at it's peak, and countless private/other/far away ones.
But there were no global-legal issues to worry about, there was no radar to fly under or into. And I built no site ("instance") blocking tools, but the nodelist (more or less /etc/hosts but assembled from distributed and some centralized components) was flat text (CSV more or less) so you could mess with it and everyone did, that was the joy and the horror.
The environment was much simpler, needless to say. So the skeletal parallels where there, and though there was a heirarchic "routing" paradigm, to manage the cost of connections, the system was quite intentionally flat, explicitly queer-anarchist. That part wasn't exactly popular with some folks but fuck 'em.
@evan@tomjennings@alpacaherder I just fucking love the interactions here between people who have been working on this stuff since a baby or less! remembering that these issues are neither new nor uncharted is both inspiring and scary
@liaizon@tomjennings@alpacaherder honestly, I hadn't thought about the social web being related to BBS networks until now. It's not an exact topological match, but it's a definite inspiration.
Two of the creators of OStatus (me and @zcopley ) know each other from BBS networks in the Bay Area in the early 90s.
@evan@liaizon@tomjennings@alpacaherder@zcopley One where I've seen a lot of parallels being done is on social parts like moderation. But I'm also seeing almost regular meetups although not many server-based ones probably due to the internet but that still happens from time to time.
This is the big reason that I'm interested in AP vs other protocols. It has a history of being community driven.
There are certainly improvements I'd like to see to the protocol, the server software, and the client applications, but the most important thing is the motivations of the community building AP.
I don't expect the software I use to be perfect, but I want it to be built for the right reasons because that inevitably results in something that serves users better.
@TheSteve0 so, main takeaway: we're going to build cool things on top of AP and AS2, and they're going to change how the social web works for everyone, but the fundamentals are going to stay the same. You can count on that stability at the bottom (well, middle... well, upper middle) of the stack.
@evan@TheSteve0 However, extensions are often not available on other instances. For example, the very cool LaTeX rendering on Mathstodon doesn't render on other instances.
@evan Unfortunately, that's what a lot of people who come here fail to understand first. They got too used to social media and social networking as kind of a given. As a product of something external, not as a product of you and your group of friends.
> I'm here for the long run. I'm going to keep doing what I can. Thanks for doing what you're doing. I see you. Thanks.
Rekindled that old fire, huh. Thanks for what you're doing. We see you too, although for a long time, we haven't.
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