The Beeb’s own post is here:
It’s worth reading the actual report, if only the conclusion. It’s nowhere near as sensational as many of the hit-job articles citing it.
lack of centralized moderation is a problem because you can inadvertently boost hate when they reply to your posts (if they go viral) and you have no way to moderate the hateful replies for anyone but yourself, unlike most other systems.
Good article on the issue:
Ow! When people use green text, I wish they’d stick to the phosphor green of old terminals, rather than the green of exploding radioactive barrels.
Good ideas, but that seems to tie things to nodes that are always online and reachable from everywhere (strongly favoring the small number of large instances model), as well as making every user an administrator of their own post trees.
Also… Do I really want to enter a debate with someone when, as the original poster, they have total control over which replies appear or which are tossed into the bit-bucket (like a careful point-by-point with references of how they’re wrong)? Yeah, nope!
The main problem with these message formats is that everything is floating adrift in timeline space. Tags are a piss-poor substitute for sigs, newsgroups, places, etc, that locate things, as well as mark rule boundaries like types of moderation.
If someone wants to have total control of replies, give them a clearly marked space where that’s true. (They could be called “blogs” or something.)
If the choice is that or allow coordinated attacks to be carried out against vulnerable populations then I will choose the former every time. Additionally, instances that aren’t available have the same availability problem in having other instances reach their posts to begin with. This isn’t FidoNet or UUCP, if you can’t manage an instance that can stay online 24/7 then you have already accepted that folks won’t be able to read your posts when you aren’t online anyway unless they were already cached.
What stops you from creating your own post in reply? Why does your reply deserve access to the reach of the originator without them having any say about it?
Sorry, IMHO that is an opinion coming from a position of privilege that doesn’t take into account the way vulnerable populations are treated today online. Demanding a free space where you have no ability to moderate hate from piggybacking (and being amplified by) your message is an excellent way to create a free space that no vulnerable population would ever set foot in.
I think the problem that comes with federation is that it’s no longer one host with the ability to eject unruly guests, to make a bad analogy. The loudmouth lout who is harassing guests at your party isn’t at your party, but using connections to other parties, and the offended guests have to ask you to ask their host to shut down the lout. The other host may not respond, or even care.
So what to do? Cut off traffic from that lout entering your party, I guess? But that lout is still out there, telling guests at other parties his lies, whether you see him or not. The best you can hope for is that with smaller parties instead of one mega-event, he will have to keep moving as he wears out his welcome at different houses, eventually landing at parties no one really talks to (aka defederated).
Look, I don’t have an answer, I am just trying to wrap my head around how hard it is to moderate at scale, and that decentralized moderation also has its drawbacks. But cutting yourself off from the world is also not the answer.
I personally find the current culture at Mastodon nerdy, geeky, but very warm and welcoming. I get a feeling the community there is LGBTQ+ positive and accepting. The purists and scolds seem to be rare enough that I feel surprise when I do see one. I guess I haven’t hit my fellow neckbeards yet.
In any case, I really like Mastodon at the moment, and find it more positive, more welcoming than I found Twitter.
… at some point we have to review whether all this social media bullshit is “the world” or not 
And so it begins…
I’m not sure that even needs ActivityPub to work. (It probably does, but it’s basically two pages that point at each other.)
The amount of child abuse that’s acceptable is literally zero. That’s the ONLY acceptable answer. If child abuse appears, burn that shit down.
Absolutely!
But, that wouldn’t burn the Fediverse or all Mastodon nodes.
Likely it would only burn nodes that no one else federates with. (I can’t say for certain because the report doesn’t include the list of 25 nodes that they checked, or really any other data.)
That list did include nodes in Japan, and they do touch on that problem:
many large Mastodon servers chose to defederate from Gab, a right-wing social network. This is of course a blunt instrument; in the case of child safety, Japan has significantly more lax laws related to CSAM which has resulted in a cultural divide4 where most users in Japan are segregated from the rest of the Fediverse
Hrmph. Defederating isn’t a blunt instrument. It’s very sharp, it servers the connection, and probably eliminates scores of other problems.
The report:
Hm. Boost, viral, reach, influence.
I have a blog post assembling in the back of my head for why Twitter-that-was is a really shitty model to emulate.
I’m working on it, I might be some time.
FWIW after many months of regular usage, I have been surprisingly happy with Mastodon as an open source distributed Twitter replacement. My only beef is that, as an open source project, they still have a … pretty bad… user interface after ~8 years of development which is a difficult thing for me to forgive. Listen to your users’ feedback, and iterate & improve!
The web interface is indeed terrible for me as well. I don’t understand the use case where anyone gets value from having one narrow column of stuff to focus on, and two or three more columns of busily scrolling stuff you don’t care about
By turning off the “advanced UI” setting on your profile, you get rid of all those extra distracting columns, and can focus on one stream at a time. It’s much easier on the brain.
The Fediverse Council
The what now? read, read, read… Okay, whatever.
I only recognise the Elders of the Internet.
