Part of this is that I’m new, a Reddit refugee, and still learning my way around.
Part of it was prompted by Beehaw’s choice to defederate with lemmy.world & other instances - there’s a clear disagreement on how to keep difficult people from dropping turds in the punch bowl.
And part of it is from watching the enshittification of Reddit.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to set up a nonprofit organization for the purpose of promoting independent distributed social media. Conceivably, it could fundraise to help keep servers alive, have some people promoting the Fediverse elsewhere on the Internet, lobby and keep lawyers handy to keep government from squelching free speech. Something along the lines of EFF or FSF.
There could be a mutual agreement among members on ground rules for users (for example, requiring all member instances to ban/block/delete hate speech). Or it can operate services like anti-spam/anti-hate blocklists so mods have better tools to keep the riffraff out. And it can serve as a venue to resolve disputes in a civil way.
And I say it needs to be a nonprofit so it’s enshittification resistant. For-profit companies are required by law to maximize profit for owners/shareholders, which makes enshittification inevitable. A nonprofit’s mission in life is to perform beneficial things for the community, be it stopping teen suicide, running an orchestra, or promoting independent social media.
Just my random brainfart, I’m sure half of this has already been done.
The design of the activity pub protocol (of which lemmy, kbin, beehaw, mastodon, etc. are built) is such that there could never be a central authority that controls the entire fediverse.
Consider the world wide web, which is the biggest federated service in history. There is no central administrative body that can exist for all websites because anyone can set up their own web server and host whatever they want on it. The same is true for lemmy instances.
The beauty of this system is that people who want a more curated experience are free to use instances that ban the kinds of behaviors or views that they find problematic. Compare that to Reddit where hate subs get removed only when they become a financial liability.
There doesn’t have to be an entity that controls the Fediverse, and in fact, there shouldn’t. What this nonprofit would be is a resource for admins, mods & users of social media.
No dictatorial control, more like if instances choose to, they could, for example, get certified by this nonprofit to become part of a group of instances that mutually agrees to a set of rules in order to help each other keep trolls under control. Don’t want to be part of that? Don’t have to.
Also, what I’m suggesting is a form of democracy for social media. This nonprofit would be controlled by an executive director and a board, which would ideally be elected by us. Much better than digital dictatorship under the thumb of Spez, Elon or Zuck.
The EFF doesn’t control the Internet, it does advocacy work. That’s part of what this organization would do. Or have some lawyers on hand for when the religious right tries to legislate us out of existence.
There is an analog to what you’re talking about for the internet, it’s iana/icann, and that evolved from user-groups, committees, early governance structures that existed to establish standards and resolve disputes (like two organizations trying to claim the same IP space or dns names). The EFF is a different thing, and more an advocacy group than a governance body.
If the fediverse becomes massively successful, I have no doubt that along the way it will develop formal governing bodies with representation from major instances voting things around abuse management. Right now though there’s just:
- The core devs team, a defined group that determines what features get added to the software.
- An informal loosely (dis)organized group of admins for the biggest instances, who talk to each other in an ad-hoc way to set norms.
If there was a proper governing body, it would be very useful to manage the Beehaw defederation situation. Not that they could force Beehaw or another instance to do anything specific, but they could set standards around registration verification (or lack thereof), cross instance moderation, vote to prioritize or fund development of specific moderation tools, and define coordinated sanctions for major instances that fail to meet the agreed upon standards.
I don’t think we’re ready for a formal group yet, especially because the personalities involved have such varied ideologies and in many cases deride the value of formal structures. Over time though, if the infighting doesn’t kill the lemmyverse… typically reasonable compromisers ascend in influence through individual negotiations until the ecosystem is in a place where there’s a critical mass behind setting up some minimal governance processes to resolve disputes rather than splitting the network everytime someone gets crabby.
To be fair, there are governing bodies that try to control the web protocols. They just can’t invalidate the old versions of the protocols.
Essentially. none.
Admins can block users on individual servers. If individual servers are causing problems, Admins can defederate them, which causes more issues then it resolve usually.
There, isn’t much you can do to ensure an individual problem-user stays banned.
I mean is there really a great way to keep a problem user banned on Reddit? VPNs, VMs, etc pretty much make it so a dedicated trouble maker can keep coming back unless I’m mistaken
Beehaw vets its users to try to keep the trolls out. On Reddit, there were some tricks like requiring minimum karma or minimum account age to post in a subreddit. But yeah, it’s impossible to keep a determined troll out. I’m thinking the best that can be done is to keep more eyes on the board, have better tools to identify problem posts & problem users quickly, ideally, deleting their crap five seconds after they post it.
One small secret reddit had-
Some users took pride in their account’s age, and/or karma. Here- well, that doesn’t really exist.
I can spin up a new account right now, and nobody would know any different.
Non-profits are not an antidote to corporate control. Non-profits rely on grants which are typically coming from corporations or governments, with strings attached. While there are a handful of legit non-profits, the majority of them are just ways for people with money to burn to expand their influence on various issues. Especially when they are focused on setting standards like this, as opposed to turning donations directly into meals / supplies / shelters etc.
There have been discussions of doing this on Mastodon as well, but they have been met with resistance. There are several instances which have incorporated themselves as one form of non-profit or another (depending on jurisdiction), but the centralization of block-lists or introduction of federation-wide governance bodies has not taken off for various reasons.
In general, it is good practice to look at the block-lists from a few instances you vibe with and use that as a starting point, but realize when it comes to politics, everyone is a crank and that simply copy/pasting their lists isn’t the greatest approach. A lot of instances are shit and belong on those lists (the bigots), but several end up there because people are allergic to nuance, while several are omitted because people think a subject is nuanced when it really isn’t.
Also, I wouldn’t worry about an instance getting too big at this stage. Some communities are big. Some communities are small. Some have irreconcilable differences. As we stumble upon these differences, there will be splits. New instances get started up every day. People will have disagreements about the way admins / mods handle things. This is how it goes. Having 100,000 homogeneous instances of equal size does not indicate a healthy network. The way these things split and group up is driven by culture and politics. The ideal place to land has nothing to do with the size of the instance, but your trust that the administration won’t cleave your community in half for arbitrary reasons.
Who gets to decide what is acceptable speech? Who watches the watchers?
Why is the world no longer ok with the fact that people hold differing opinions on things, and feel the need to segregate themselves away from people that they disagree with?
This was the fundamental problem with reddit IMO - the echo chamber was very real. The community guidelines and upvote/downvote mechanic were such that you basically ended up with a hivemind consensus on any given issue simply because any view not inline with that consensus was hidden, obliterated or banned. That’s not healthy discourse.
The same is true for any echo chamber, and the same will be true for people who elect to hide in a walled garden over at beehaw and pretend that there simply IS no differing opinion on their chosen issues.
The problem is, you only serve to delude yourself. You go about your life believing that the world is on your side, when in reality more often than not you are part of an extremely small minority.
I think the current solution of multiple instances will work fine and is far preferable to what you are suggesting, which is a simple duplication of the global censorship policies that kill any genuine discussion on reddit around hot-button issues.
With respect to how it works in the microblogging corner of Fedi, the tendency is to be actively collaborative, and aggregate some moderation resources, sometimes through backchannels, other times through a tag like #FediBlock - all of which have political implications that have been years-long meta discussions. The emphasis, at least among instances that want to moderate heavily, is on allowing users to feel undisturbed in their own space and not be challenged on literally everything they say, but to still expand that space where it makes sense.
I’m not sure the exact same dynamic will take place over here. The existence of many distinct spaces on the same instance mitigates a major initial problem Mastodon faced in its early waves: when you literally put everyone leaving Twitter on the same public timeline, old grudges spark up and they start campaigns to harass each other off the platform. That’s how it came to pass that Mastodon ended up with a ton of user privacy features, and over years, instances warring over ideology and trying to colonize each other, which of course ends in mutual blocking.
In our case I think there’s a good chance for small aggregator instances that just “do one thing well” to thrive and see a lot of external traffic, while not having to moderate their entire comments section, since you can opt to not federate that - not your site, not your concern.
I had an idea that servers could issue out “equity” or voting shares. Decisions like moderation teams, federation, or other choices could be voted on based on users stake.
These shares could have other uses as well.
