Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.
And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.
I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.
Big surprise for me was how much mastodon.social is growing (especially given the tension about its dominance).
It's current trend is to grow by the equivalent of the 23rd largest instance per month while most (ie largest) instances are growing by 2% per month (ie a few thousand, which, guessing, would be something like the 300th largest instance or so ... ie small).
It always amazes me in how in discussions of the future of #ActivityPub services that moderation is generally an afterthought.
Okay, we add nomadic identity, how does that impact the ability for servers to moderate, given all moderation tooling is built on user + server identity?
Okay, we add the ability to put people on lists without following, how does that impact moderation and privacy?
@thisismissem This sort of thing drives me nuts. I've never moderated an instance or contributed to its codebase in any capacity, so my observations come with the "this may only be true in a very limited sense" warning, but...
It feels like a lot of people view the task of building a social network to be a solely technical endeavor, with no consideration for how any particular feature or system affects the social dynamic. Or maybe it's just a few admins and contributors that feel that way, but it seems to permeate the experience of using the network. sigh I don't know. I see people bouncing off Mastodon and leaving for BlueSky and I get pretty sad about it. Sorry for venting in your direction.
But many of us would rather agency over instance moderation.
I’m always focused on giving users as much control as possible over their own experiences, so shifting the balance to them and away from instance moderation is inline with my preferences.
Different people have different preferences in that question, but for a lot of us, such a shift is what we’d rather.
During my one year activity on the #Fediverse I've now seen at least four instance admins quitting from being an admin or shutting down their server. Half of these cases were admins being dickheads and the rest of them were mostly about users being dickheads leading admin getting burned out.
Both outcomes are unfortunate, but the latter makes me sad. Why do we have to harass and doxx an admin here for such pseudetical reasons like extensive open text search feature? I don't get humans sometimes.
I repeat: We are not free from toxicity on the Fediverse. Be kind. Make a chance.
@rolle People who have never been sysops do not understand what an awful slog it is.
To have the technical skills to keep your shit running AND the people skills to deal with the inevitable assholes AND the patience to deal with the well-meaning but clueless people
Btw, I've gotten really harsh criticism for just saying "Be kind"... that won't stop me from saying it. We can always be kind and I can say "be kind" out of kindness. Encouraging to kindness is not rudeness and I can't wrap my head around it why would it be anything else than focusing on the positive side of things.
There are always people who focus on negativity, pessimism and hate. Whatever hits me, I choose to smile. #Positivity#Kindness#Attitude
Mathematical italic capital h mathematical italic small e mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small l mathematical italic small o.
WTF?
Oh, I just said “Hello” to you in italics.
(That’s similar to what someone who uses a screen reader hears when you use fancy non-alphabetical Unicode characters to simulate italics or boldface on your fediverse posts. So please don’t do that.)
Perspectives is a tab that will showcase social media posts in their search results. This will give -- you guessed it -- "perspectives" on current events and other matters as well.
While Google is positioning this generating results from all social media, this also has massive implications for the #Fediverse.
I've been saying for a long time that if we Fediverse developers didn't nail search soon, Google will eat our lunch.
Well, it looks like they've just set down at a table and are studying the menu right now -- because I completely expect that the Fediverse will be present on that Perspective tabs, especially since the Fediverse is now generating 1 billion+ posts each month.
What is the next logical step for Google?
If I were putting on my Google product development hat, I'd push for full text search with near-instant results. This is very easy for Google to do. Their engineers could probably build it fast.
Meanwhile, the Fediverse is practically giving away Fediverse search to Google -- Google is what most people use to find posts on the Fediverse right now.
Are we just going to allow Google to extend their search monopoly into the Fediverse, and without a fight too?
ITT: open-source, #FediVerse, and how it can influence private sector and create change.
Note up front: I'm going to use words like "decommodify", "consumerism", "capital", and "rentierism" a lot here, because I need the vocabulary. I am not a Marxist or some other kind of radical, nor wholesale anti-capitalist, and certainly not a revolutionary. I'm a social democrat, progressive, and reformist. Keep that in mind if you reply to me.
Something else to note: the profitability of surveilling users, collecting their data, and selling it is steadily declining. The whole adtech world is constantly climbing uphill against a landslide.
The takeaway from all this is that for-profit social platforms will eventually create a crisis for themselves. They degrade, trying to squeeze more and more profit out of an increasingly arid source, until they eventually do something stupid and blow their foot off. [13/n]
Two tactics that have actually succeeded in being an impediment to OSS have been carpetbagging (showing up and using organizational weight, presumed prestige, etc to shove out a project's leadership and take over), and de-inventing (my term: what Google did to XMPP, RSS, and is currently trying to do to email). Google has tended to employ both of these in its quest for hegemony.
If Facebook knows what they're doing, this is what they are planning to do. [17/n]
Meta joining the Fediverse is like AOL joining the internet: something that will bring a mass amount of people in, create some friction, but ultimately make the net better as more people federating on #Mastodon, #kbin, #lemmy, #pixelfed and other parts of the Fediverse make open protocols that much stronger.
And it's not like it's hard to keep away from Meta either: just defederate from them, even fork the software to break from any ActivityPub changes they inspire that one doesn't like, and create ones own parallel MetaFreeVerse.
But one should do that in the full understanding that one is going to be left with dramatically fewer people to talk to by doing that, whereas the remaining bulk of the Fedi is going to have potentially millions more people added to it to talk to.
The one thing I do think the AT Protocol is better at than #ActivityPub is data portability. Being built-in at the protocol layer so that you don’t have to do the migration shit (which doesn’t bring your posts) is better. It just is. I think ActivityPub has more potential overall for the social web beyond just Twitter clones, but that part of #ARProtocol is better.
I think data portability is incredibly important and the fact that Mastodon hasn’t prioritized that, to me, is a failing. And I say Mastodon, not ActivityPub, b/c AP does have some options there. But Mastodon wasn’t designed that way, no matter what people want to pretend. It just wasn’t. My followers/following list is only part of my data. My content is equally important.
@dansup Anyone who, in 2023, votes No or Undecided on this might want to refresh their knowledge about Meta's business practices by reading the damning 74-page report by Amnesty International on Facebook's role in the 2017 Rohingya ethnic cleansing in Myanmar:
@Aakerbeere Das hört sich für mich nach Hosting und nicht nach Tracker an. Sie hätten natürlich auch einen anderen Hoster nehmen können z.B. Amazon, Microsoft oder Telekom.