For those who are unaware of the author, Drew Devault is the founder and CEO of SourceHut, a project hosting service that's recently been championed by the Software Freedom Conservancy as an alternative to GitHub (along with Codeberg) in their new Giveup Github campaign.
Now with that out of the way, what he says shouldn't be surprising. People are fickle and are quite quick to entrench themselves into cliques and dogmas. There's no such thing as a service or group for everyone. If he's been on the net as long I think he has, he would know that people haven't radically changed since the BBS days.
I don't know if the author didn't think the following quote through while typing it, but I could only chuckle at the irony on display:
"[The Fediverse's] moderation tools also do a pretty good job of keeping neo-nazis out of your feeds and providing a comfortable space to express yourself in, especially if your form of expression is maligned by society."
What's false about the last statement? It is true that in some fediverse spaces, the moderation tools may be overused, but it still turns from the unusable mess twitter is - especiallhy when a nazi decides to QRT you, a move twitter almost never considers targeted harassment, even if it results in the same - into a comfortable space. Even if, incidentally, less people have access to it.
Not all social media needs to be constant exposure to other people's viewpoint (especially given that "other people's viewpoint" often is a euphemism when marginalized groups that tend to find the fediverse cozy are concerned).
If having to pick between flawed corporate moderation and flawed human moderation, the flawed human approach is often better for this group of people.
I didn't claim that what author said was false (or, for that matter, true). I claimed that his statement was ironic for considering the exclusion a particular minority group as a benefit in an article lamenting the dogmatism that comes with ... excluding minority groups. Whether what he says is true or not, isn't something I can determine as I make a point to avoid dogmatic Mastodon instances.
Personally I find neo-Nazism as repugnant as the next reasonable person, but the quote illustrates an intellectual evasion of the fact that an intolerant Fediverse is a largely self-inflicted problem. The Fediverse has now speedrun through 30+ years of Internet history only to replicate the problems of so-called Big Tech. People are now arguing to moderate/censor spaces that existed to get away from the moderation/censorship on the regular Web. But, as the author should have seen one can't have it both ways.
> Not all social media needs to be constant exposure to other people's viewpoint
I agree with you in this aspect, but I'm of the opinion that instance owner/admin/mod should not be tasked with determining that. The job of a moderator is not to "rescue" people from what they hear, say, or read.
> If having to pick between...
That's a false dichotomy. All moderation is human moderation. Whether it's done directly by a human being or via neutral net is irrelevant to that fact. Somewhere along the line, a human being made a decision to remove content or set the parameters for the removal. If Reddit is any indication, individual moderators people can be petty and cliquish.
> People are now arguing to moderate/censor spaces that existed to get away from the moderation/censorship on the regular Web.
On the contrary, I go to the fediverse to escape the lack of moderation on other platforms. Or rather, the way they're moderated. See the last point.
> The job of a moderator is not to "rescue" people from what they hear, say, or read.
I think the Fediverse needs better discovery mechanisms for instances and how they generally run things, but I am entirely okay with deferring judgement to another party or run my own server (done both, currently on chaos.social). If neither works for you, the official instances are a good middle ground.
> That's a false dichotomy. All moderation is human moderation.
You misunderstood. When I talk about "corporate moderation", I am referring to moderation choices being driven by corporate interests. Which is usually: as fast as possible, kafkaesque appeal process, whatever is agreeable to most of society is agreeable with us (including rainbow capitalism, but not too queer or angry or kinky please) and, most important for me, entirely devoid of context. I get banned for a week for telling a newspaper to "cease existing", but those telling me to "join the 41%", a veiled way of telling me to kill myself based on a misread statistic about the prevalence of suicide among trans people, get away.
I'm not sure how this relates to the fediverse itself; as in, how does the technology affect the way people behave. I'm not sure federation ever claimed to be a balm for these sort of social media ills. What federation wants to accomplish is, well, decentralisation in the ownership of the servers; no?
Some people have claimed that putting the entire world in a single social network causes various problems and thus splitting social media into smaller communities, as in the Fediverse, should be better.
> It’s a feed of other people’s random thoughts, often unfiltered, presented to you without value judgement — even when a value judgement may be wise.
You expect the platform to make the value judgement? If I subscribe to a feed, whatever the platform - twitter, rss - it's because I trust the author that feed to make that value judgement. If I wanted someone else to make that judgement, I'd subscribe to their feed instead.
My point is not to suggest that the platform should be making value judgements, but that the user remember that it's not doing so. The authors you trust are ultimately just people, and people are flawed, and the medium exacerbates those flaws.
"The medium is the message." Twitter-like systems are prone to failure modes: emotionally unpleasant or intellectually barren interactions.
So how do you foster civilized online communication? This is primarily a social problem, not a technical one, although the structure of a system (like the Fediverse) is defined by technology.
The two online forums I know of personally that are pleasant and productive (HN and Permies.com) both have strong and consistent moderation by small, highly-dedicated teams, which then fosters a self-reinforcing culture that values, protects, and promotes norms of civil interaction. Interestingly, both were started by "big men"* (Paul Graham and Paul Wheaton, respectively) who rapidly gathered a critical mass of community. They also both have an entrepreneurial aspect. HN is paired with YC, of course, and Wheaton runs a kind of Permaculture incubator in Montana.
- - - -
*Big man
> A big man is a highly influential individual in a tribe, especially in Melanesia and Polynesia. Such a person may not have formal tribal or other authority (through for instance material possessions, or inheritance of rights), but can maintain recognition through skilled persuasion and wisdom.
The title feels a bit bait-y to me. As the author points out in the post, the issues stem from social media as a whole. The federated nature of the particular implementation has little to do with the harmful behaviours social media can draw out.
The Fediverse is not a "Twitter clone", it's more like a set of standards that can be used to build pretty much anything in the broader "social/BBS/blogging" space. If you don't like Twitter-like dynamics, don't participate in them.
Now with that out of the way, what he says shouldn't be surprising. People are fickle and are quite quick to entrench themselves into cliques and dogmas. There's no such thing as a service or group for everyone. If he's been on the net as long I think he has, he would know that people haven't radically changed since the BBS days.
I don't know if the author didn't think the following quote through while typing it, but I could only chuckle at the irony on display:
"[The Fediverse's] moderation tools also do a pretty good job of keeping neo-nazis out of your feeds and providing a comfortable space to express yourself in, especially if your form of expression is maligned by society."