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pluralistic

@pluralistic@mamot.fr

By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C)
@doctorow.

Archived at pluralistic.net

I post long threads. If you don't like these in your timeline but want to read them, I suggest unfollowing me here and subscribing to my RSS, or my newsletter, or any of my various long-form feeds. Links at https://pluralistic.net.

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pluralistic, to random
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The classic trilemma goes: "Fast, cheap or good, pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma goes, "Large, diverse userbase; centralized platforms; don't anger users - pick any two." The Moderator's Trilemma is introduced in "Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media," a superb paper from @arozenshtein U of Minnesota Law, forthcoming in the journal Free Speech Law, available as a prepub on SSRN:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674#maincontent

1/

pluralistic,
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By moving subsidiarity into technical architecture, rather than human policy, the fediverse can move from antagonism (the "zero-sum destructiveness" that dominates current online debate) to , where your opponent isn't an enemy - they are a "political adversary":

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-administrative-agon

Here, Rozenshtein cites @320x200 and @rra's "Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss":

https://test.roelof.info/seven-theses.html

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pluralistic,
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And centralized platforms are more nimble. The operators of centralized systems can add hundreds of knobs and sliders to their back end and them at will. They act unilaterally, without having to convince other members of a federation to back their changes.

Centralized platforms claim that their most powerful benefit to users is extensive content moderation.

12/

pluralistic,
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Rozenshtein says there are "reasons for optimism" when it comes to the Fediverse's ability to police this content, though as he unpacked this idea, I found it much weaker than his other material. Rozenshtein proposes that Fediverse hosts could avail themselves of , 's automated scanning tool, to block and purge themselves of CSAM, while noting that this is "hardly foolproof."

28/

pluralistic,
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Reddit is poised to go public, meaning those owners will include activist investors and large institutions that might not care about your little community.

You might be happy about Reddit banning /r_TheDonald, but if they can band that subreddit, they can ban any subreddit. Policy works well, but fails badly.

18/

pluralistic,
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Fediverse applications are frequently designed to be - that is, to prevent spectacular spreads of information across the system.

It's possible - likely, even - that future Fediverse servers will be operated by commercial operators seeking to maximize attention in order to maximize revenue.

24/

pluralistic,
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It can be readily complimented by discipline through regulation - for example, extending today's burgeoning crop of data-protection laws to require servers to furnish users with exports of their follow/follower data so they can go elsewhere.

There's another dimension to decentralized content moderation that exit and voice don't address - moderating "harmful" content. Some kinds of harm can be mitigated through exit.

26/

pluralistic,
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But the whole Fediverse "is substantially more speech protective than are any of the major social media platforms, since no user or content can be permanently banned from the network and anyone is free to start an instance that communicates both with the major Mastodon instances and the peripheral, shunned instances."

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pluralistic,
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A good case-study here is , a Fediverse server by and for far-right cranks, conspiratorialists and white nationalists. Most Fediverse servers have defederated (that is, blocked) Gab, but Gab is still there, and Gab has actually defederated from many of the remaining servers, leaving its users to speak freely - but only to people who want to hear what they have to say.

22/

pluralistic,
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But the users of these servers will still have the freedom of exit that they enjoy on today's volunteer-run servers - and so commercial servers will have to either curb their worst impulses or lose their users to better systems.

I'll note here that this is a progressive story of the benefits of competition - not the capitalist's fetishization of competition for its own sake, but rather, competition as a means of disciplining capital.

25/

pluralistic,
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Traditionally, centralization has been posed as beneficial to content moderation. As Rozenshtein writes, a company that can "enclose" its users and lock them in has an incentive to invest in better user experience, while companies whose users can easily migrate to rivals are less invested in those users.

11/

pluralistic,
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This is true meaning of "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach." Willing listeners aren't blocked from willing speakers - but you don't have the right to be heard by people who don't want to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Fediverse servers are (thus far) nonprofits or hobbyist sites, and don't have the same incentives to drive "engagement" to maximize the opportunties to show advertisements.

23/

pluralistic,
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Large platforms - think , , etc - are very unresponsive to users. Most famously, Facebook polled its users on whether they wanted to be spied on. Faced with overwhelming opposition to commercial surveillance, Facebook ignored the poll result and cranked the dial up to a million:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-ignores-minimal-user-vote-adopts-new-privacy-policy-flna1c7559683

5/

pluralistic,
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If a server tolerates hate speech or harassment, you can go elsewhere, preferably somewhere that blocks your previous server.

But there are other kinds of speech that must not exist - either because they are illegal or because they enact harms that can't be mitigated by going elsewhere (or both). The most spectacular version of this is (), a modern term-of-art to replace the more familiar "child porn."

27/

pluralistic,
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> For this to happen, different ideologies must be allowed to materialize via different channels and platforms. An important prerequisite is that the goal of political consensus must be abandoned and replaced with conflictual consensus...

So your chosen Mastodon server "may have rules that are far more restrictive than those of the major social media platforms."

20/

pluralistic,
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Commentators called this a mark against federation: "You can't rely on random, thin-skinned volunteer sysops for your online social life!"

https://mastodon.lol/@nathan/109836633022272265

But the mastodon.lol saga demonstrates the strength of federated social media, not its weakness. After all, 450 million Twitter users are also at the mercy of a thin-skinned sysop - but when he his platform, they can't just export their data and re-establish their social lives elsewhere in two clicks:

9/

pluralistic,
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As @tarleton writes, “Moderation is central to what platforms do, not peripheral... [it] is, in many ways, the commodity that platforms offer":

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300261431/custodians-of-the-internet/

Centralized systems claim that their enclosure keeps users safe - from bad code and bad people. Though Rozenshtein doesn't say so, it's important to note that this claim is wildly oversold. Platforms routinely fail at preventing abuse:

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/sexual-assault-harassment-bullying-trans-students-say-targeted-school-rcna7803

13/

pluralistic,
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Mastodon.lol shows us how, if you don't like your host's content moderation policies, you can exercise voice - even to the extent of making him so upset that he shuts off his server - and where voice fails, exit steps in to fill the gap, providing a soft landing for users who find the moderation policies untenable:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

10/

pluralistic,
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And they also fail at blocking malicious code:

https://www.scmagazine.com/news/threats/apple-bugs-ios-macos_new_class

But even where platforms do act to "keep users safe," they fail, thanks to the Moderator's Trilemma. Setting speech standards for millions or even billions of users is an impossible task. Some users will always feel like speech is being underblocked - while others will feel it's overblocked (and both will be right!):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/right-or-left-you-should-be-worried-about-big-tech-censorship

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pluralistic,
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With one more click, users can import that data into any other Fediverse server and be back up and running with almost no cost or hassle:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/

Last month, "Nathan," the volunteer operator of mastodon.lol, announced that he was pulling the plug on the server because he was sick of his users' arguments about the new game.

8/

pluralistic,
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And platforms play very fast and loose with their definition of "malicious code" - as when blocked , an ad-blocker that gave you a simple feed consisting of just the posts from the people you followed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

To resolve the Moderator's Trilemma, we need to embrace : "decisions should be made at the lowest organizational level capable of making such decisions."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

15/

pluralistic,
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Internal memos from the companies reveal that this strategy is deliberate, designed to keep users from defecting even as the service degrades:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

By contrast, the Fediverse is designed for ease of exit. With one click, users can export the list of the accounts they follow, block and mute, as well as the accounts that follow them.

7/

pluralistic,
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For Rozenshtein, "content-moderation subsidiarity devolves decisions to the individual instances that make up the overall network." The fact that users can leave a server and set up somewhere else means that when a user gets pissed off enough about a moderation policy, they don't have to choose between leaving social media or tolerating the policy - they can simply choose another server that's part of the same federation.

16/

pluralistic,
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A decade later, Musk performed the same stunt, asking users whether they wanted him to fuck all the way off from the company, then ignored the , which, in this instance, was not :

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-business-8dac8ae023444ef9c37ca1d8fe1c14df

Facebook, Twitter and other are designed to be sticky-traps, relying on high to keep users locked within their garden walls which are really prison walls.

6/

pluralistic,
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In Albert Hirschman's classic treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, stakeholders in an institution who are dissatisfied with its direction have two choices: (arguing for changes) or (going elsewhere). Rozenshtein argues that Fediverse users (especially users of , the most popular part of the Fediverse) have more voice and more :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

4/

pluralistic,
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Rozenshtein asks whether Reddit is an example of this, because moderators of individual subreddits are given broad latitude to set their own policies and anyone can fork a subreddit into a competing community with different modeations norms. But Reddit's devolution is a matter of policy, not architecture - subreddits exist at the sufferance of Reddit's owners.

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