This was posted on X as a reply to someone's tribute to their dad. This is why people want moderation and server blocking beyond everybody having to block after they see this crap. I agree mods can go too far by blocking for opinions and even misinfo (cause some things might later turn out to be true), but if you want your server to be widely federated, you need to police for this shit. Or please just be honest and say you don't want most decent people to ever embrace federation. #fediblockmeta
As Raymond Chen was fond of saying, imagine if everybody did this. Freedom of speech doesn't exist because of content that everybody likes. It exists to protect content that someone *doesn't* like, because not everybody likes the same thing, and because without freedom of speech, eventually someone with power - someone who doesn't like the things that you like - will come in and force what *they* want onto you.
"But this particular content is universally bad! Nobody should like it!", you might say, because you literally didn't comprehend the previous paragraph. There are people out there who would say exactly the same thing about abortions, transgenderism, climate change, and women's suffrage. I guarantee there is someone out there who thinks *those* topics are universally deplorable and should be censored. Who are you to decide what everyone else may see, when that other person can't?
This is a problem that is fully solvable with user-level content filtering. Letting users choose their own level of participation for themselves is the ONLY equitable way to do it. Everything else is just forcing your own sensibilities onto others.
I've been over this a lot and it's complicated. Free speech has never meant you have to subject yourself to other's speech. IRL people can leave and be protected by cops, but we can't so easily avoid assholes on the worldwide fedi where people can change accounts and search. IRL even in public spaces we don't let people scream "die slur" to disrupt us. We block at the server level for spam. We can do it for harassment. What you want will give us mostly assholes w/ no personal info/pics.
> IRL people can leave and be protected by cops, but can't so easily avoid assholes on the worldwide fedi
What the hell are you talking about?
Somebody stalks and threatens you IRL, you are in real danger. You have to run like hell until you find a safe place while you wait the 15-20 mins for a cop to arrive, and that even assumes access to a phone to call them.
Getting away from someone online is literally as simple as closing a browser tab. There is NO COMPARISON.
To even think they are remotely the same means you have lived the most SHELTERED life of any human being in history, where all of your basic needs for food and shelter and safety have been guaranteed from birth, and the ONLY thing left to whine about is whether or not the room you willingly visit every day contains someone with different opinions than you.
It is, in fact, *too* easy to disengage from an online forum, in some respects. It gives rise to trolling - the ability to engage with a room and say the most horrible things you can think of, and then immediately disengage without any fear of being punched in the face for your disrespect. This is unprecedented in any society before social media.
I suppose this is the kind of behavior you're complaniing about. But you seem to assume that it is only available to the perpetrator, and never to the victim.
Online threats are NOTHING like IRL threats. You can always log out. To say otherwise is to disrespect the people who face real threats that they can't get away from with a simple disconnect.
they are very different threats. IRL is much more dangerous (but people can also be found IRL pretty easily if they post like normal non dark fedi users usually do). my point was that IRL you can have a public discussion and you probably won't ever see the person who called you a racist or fag ever again if you walk away. on fedi, you can be found forever unless you give up your account. real people with public info don't want to do that. the harassing anon can easily switch accounts.
The ironic thing is that the very people pushing for socialism/communism in the USA are going to find out first-hand what it's like to be scrambling for basic needs, once they achieve their goal and collapse this "evil" capitalist economy.
would having universal health care make us socialist? What social programs do you want to get rid of? I doubt there's much more support for communism than there is for ancapism.
To remove even more friction, we could have "moderation feeds" that users can subscribe to.
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IRL is objectively more dangerous since people can physically harm you, whereas online they can only hurt your feelings, yes. But online it is harder to get away from assholes since there are no police. He was talking about frequency and ease of exit, not level of danger (William, please correct me if I'm wrong).
@Hyolobrika @ryan @wjmaggos That's why running your own instance seems mandatory, did that since the beggining 😁
but even after using diff email servers for decades, most struggle to understand what we are doing here or why. ours is the simplest ask and maybe the furthest we'll get most people to go. it has to be decentralized to diff servers to accomplish the basics so why not also use that to handle moderation? having people run their own servers is great but most won't do that. threads wants to be gmail. hopefully most use locality based servers for their personal accounts.
I think the protocol should be trustless. #Nostr does this. And @silverpill is building it on #ActivityPub
@Hyolobrika @ryan @tisha @silverpill
wouldn't some standards and norms about making account transfers work better fix this? doesn't nostr lack moderation generally?
>doesn't nostr lack moderation generally?
seems so IME, but it doesn't have to. that's due to the values of the designers, not any technical limitation that says you can't have independence from admins without getting rid of even optional moderation
This looks like the paper, by @cblgh: https://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=9020253&fileOId=9020270
@Hyolobrika @ryan @tisha @silverpill
so aren't you saying that both approaches aren't better or worse but depend on implementation?
imo we have to get mass adoption on a minimum viable project (along with which should come an understanding of the value of decentralization) and then the market will provide the pressure for massive innovation. I see full federation on threads leading to orgs and corps establishing their own servers being our best path rn. why Meta is doing this, I have no idea.
@Hyolobrika @ryan @tisha @silverpill
so eventually...we are always fucked. no decisions turn out to be great forever. I think they can be made better.
@wjmaggos @Hyolobrika @ryan @tisha
>wouldn't some standards and norms about making account transfers work better fix this?
The solution I'm working on is similar to an account transfer, except your current account doesn't disappear. You can have multiple accounts on different servers but on the protocol level they are single account.
Even if widely implemented, that wouldn't significantly change moderation practices.
@wjmaggos @Hyolobrika @ryan @tisha
It is already implemented in streams, by the way
@wjmaggos @tisha @Hyolobrika yes, most users do not actually seek out or want what you are projecting that they want, @ryan, but if the experience of moderating your own instance gives you the "information freedom" you want then there you go, problem solved, have fun.
people can and do move instances or create their own when they disagree with how things are run here at chitter, for example. we are not a dictatorship and we enforce no borders.meanwhile our users (and the users and moderators of other instances!) often express appreciation for our moderation choices, which are not arbitrarily punitive but in fact based on a pretty simple rubric, about which we are very open, and solicit and incorporate feedback if and when it needs to be changed. to run it any other way would be doing our users a disservice