Comment on Why Decentralized Social Media Matters
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 3 weeks ago
Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let’s take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you’ve never interacted with and there’s nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn’t actually break any rules and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn’t work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.
The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn’t a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can’t just disappear because one company turned it off.
Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers…but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.
Then there’s the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won’t allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don’t want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don’t hide that you’re the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for “alt accounts” lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.
Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.
Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that’s needed - if you don’t like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don’t call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.
I agree with your assessments and lemmy definitely has a major issue with mods abusing their power “because they can.”
The answer is to create new instances that don’t allow abuses of power. We shouldn’t be afraid of being ‘defederated’ from the abusive instances. Eventually, they will have their own echo chamber while the rest of us can converse without fear of censorship.
The answer is to create new instances that don’t allow abuses of power. We shouldn’t be afraid of being ‘defederated’ from the abusive instances.
Unfortunately at this stage it seems that most of the people using Lemmy want extreme moderation and censorship. They want no disagreement, no challenging their opinions and ideologies, and as such they wouldn’t join an instance that allows actual free speech and difference of opinion. If you know of any instances with a decent amount of people let me know, cause I don’t know how much longer I’ll bother with Lemmy given how they call everyone they hate fascists…while banning everyone who doesn’t participate in their circle jerk.
If you want a place with no bans, then start up your own instance. Nobody can ban you. Sure they could defederate from you, but they couldn’t ban you.
If you want a platform that can’t ban anyone AND can’t block anyone, well you could make your own platform but I wouldn’t expect many to join you because nobody wants that.
We have the freedom to say what we want. We don’t have the freedom to force people to hear it though.
The point is that everyone else can still ban you. I’m not sure you even understood my original post if that’s your response.
Here we don’t have the freedom to say why we want, because you’ll be banned instantly for saying many things that aren’t even controversial unless you’re deep inside one political side.
I haven’t had that experience here. I’ve had some unpleasant dustups with some leftists here but beyond having comments removed for being pro capitalist by .ml admins, I haven’t had any issues with moderation. Sure I’ve been heavily downvoted but I’ve never gotten banned.
Most people don’t care about decentralization
I think that’s largely not the case for people that are currently on Lemmy/Mastodon, but I think you’re right that it prevents larger adoption. I’m okay with that, though. I don’t need to talk with everyone. There’s room for more growth, probably especially for more niche communities, but at least for me Lemmy has hot critical mass.
Everything else I either like the things you dislike or disagree that they are problems.
Power hungry mods can
Power-hungry people will do stupid shit, power corrupts. The more diluted the power the better.
The issue is that before mass social media was a thing, people would just block someone they deemed annoying. Nowadays people whine for the mods to block undesirables.
Oh, that’s so much worse than Reddit, since there are no power hungry mods there /s
Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.
What’s “actually going down” on Reddit these days?
Completely missed the point I see.
As you mentioned, Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause so this is in no way related to decentralization. If you want zero moderation then you’re free to join one of the instances that have that as a guiding principle, but that is almost inevitably where all the nazis end up, which is why the rest of us avoid them.
Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause
And they now have a huge problem with bots & admins who ban “without just cause”. Except to them it’s no problem at all, it’s the desired shift towards more “marketability” I guess.
I feel like you didn’t even read my post, as every sentence you wrote was already addressed.
Where did you address them? You just claim that
almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are
Without any explanation for why that would be the case whereas I have not have at all had the same experience. Therefore, I don’t see how it relates to federated social media at all.
Furthermore, you just state that
some of us just want a place with zero bans and which unless you break the law with your speech, zero bans and moderation
And to just “block them and move on”. Honestly, I don’t want my time using social media to be spent having to personally block multiple accounts (by people who will probably make more accounts) because they’re racists, misogynists, foreign bot farms, etc. Furthermore, I don’t want my content and my comments to be used, knowingly or otherwise, to prop up comment sections and threads that are spreading disinformation and bigotry.
If you want that, that’s fine. Go to one of those places. But from what I’ve seen, they are usually where nazis end up congregating, which is one reason why me (and at least some other people) prefer to avoid them.
I addressed them first by saying that with decentralised there are just *more * mods who can and will ban you unfairly and with no recourse, and other mods/admin who literally get to decide what instances you can even see in the first place. Most of them just defederate from any instance that doesn’t highly censor views they don’t like. Many already decided to defederate from any meta instances that ever join the fediverse ffs.
Lemmy moderation is even more authoritarian because of how Lemmy started in the first place, and then because of the mods who moved from Reddit to here. They hated that their power was taken away on Reddit so they jumped ship and now get to make their own rules without having to answer to Reddit admins.
If you don’t ban people they don’t need to create multiple accounts. You just block and move on and they’ll continue doing their thing while you don’t see it. Win-win.
You’re a typical “everyone I disagree with is a Nazi bigot” who craves censorship and authoritarian leadership because you can’t handle people having differing opinions by the looks of it. You talk as if “Nazis” are everywhere lol. If you can’t even be in the same virtual space as a “nazi” without losing your mind the issue is with you.
There’s the interaction model and there’s the technical organization.
The interaction model you’re describing as good existed in unmoderated Usenet groups (personal kill lists to avoid reading something) and in Frost (vulnerable, abandoned, sad, I liked it more) and FMS on Freenet.
However! As yesterday I was reminded, things to ban include not just “wrong” opinions, but also executable binaries with probable trojans inside, murder\rape\CP materials, spam, bots, stolen credentials.
The problem of self-moderation being hard doesn’t exist. Today giving the user control over their communications came out of fashion, but just like for e-mail clients local Bayesian filters existed, one can do today - with even some local AI tool probably, somehow everyone pretends that for such purposes said family of programs doesn’t exist.
At the same time ultimately someone should do the filtering. What you are describing is your own preference in filtering, some other people have other preferences. Expecting people to self-moderate posts with stolen credentials when they are the criminals those are posted for - would be stupid.
So - it’s hard to decide. Fundamentally a post with CP image and a post with Gadsden flag are the same. They even have a similar proportion of people willing to ban them, bigger for CP, but one can’t just treat some point between them as a constant, for which a post reputation system should be designed, to collectively stop propagation of the CP image, but for the ancap flag image to still be propagated by enough nodes. That point will move, there might be a moment when CP becomes more acceptable for users in a segment of network (suppose there are many CP bots and we have temporarily failed to collectively detect and ignore bots), or there might be a moment when ancaps are so hated that they are flagged by bigger proportions of users than CP. One is still a violation and the other is still not.
So - to avoid solving the hard problem, one can have a system similar to a multi-channel ( posts propagated all practical ways, #1 store-and-forward nodes - network services like news servers and nostr relays, #2 Retroshare-like p2p exchange between users - I’m ignorant in computer science, so my own toy program does this not very optimally, but rsync and git exist, so the problem is solvable, #3 export-import like in a floppinet, #4 realtime notices network service like IRC ) Usenet, with a kind of necessary mechanism being used as a filter - a moderation authority signing every post as pre-moderated, checked, banned and so on. The moderation authority shouldn’t be a network service, it should be a participant of the system, with its “signature posts” being propagated similarly to the material posts, because otherwise both the load on the moderation authority service would be too big and the moment it went offline you’d lose a lot.
Then on every kind of posts exchange a storage server or a notice server or a user can set up whether they propagate further everything they have, or only material posts pre-moderated or not banned by specific moderation authorities, and all signature posts, or only said authorities’ signature posts.
However the user reading a hierarchy in such a system sees its contents they should be able to decide by themselves, using logical operators and the moderation authorities chosen.
If we assume that almost everyone almost everywhere doesn’t propagate things flagged as CP\gore\fraud, it would be hard enough for a typical user to get them, even if their setting is wildcard. While the “wrong” opinions they will get.
Then they can add users with those opinions to a personal kill list. Just like in olden days.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
You had me at first, but you lost me here. “reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence” is not a correct description of what’s going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.
Sure, “some” certainly want that, but that’s not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn’t take the time to finish reading.
Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. “Unless you break the law with your speech” really isn’t the point you think it is.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 3 weeks ago
What in your opinion is going on at Reddit right now?
I mentioned politics explicitly. I didn’t hide that. I mentioned it because politics has taken over almost all social media, especially Reddit and Lemmy.