
Why I shut down wizards.town and left Mastodon - imartin2k
https://cherubini.casa/why-i-shut-down-wizards-town-and-left-mastodon-6d4e631346b3?gi=4c3cfacc42e7
======
ColinWright
From the article:

    
    
        So I opened up a server and started
        monitoring it.  I invited any kind
        of user in with a strict “no rules”
        policy.
    

That's admirable, but these days it's totally naïve. Seriously, how can anyone
with any experience at all of on-line communities believe that this could ever
end well?

    
    
        ... I would need to monitor what my
        users are saying at all times, ...
        goes against my hands off approach.
        So I’m closing the server ...
    

In today's world you either facilitate people doing some things that are
utterly vile, or you monitor, constrain, curate, and censor. You can't blame
Mastodon for this (although the author never explicitly said they did blame
Mastodon, I feel that it's the impression they want to give).

~~~
rexpop
The author also points out

    
    
      there were people on other instances who would be posting things that I could get into trouble for since my server holds a cache of the other servers.
    

And so his own moderation would be insufficient, in his eyes, to disculpate
him.

~~~
onion2k
Federating content on the public internet is a hard problem. That doesn't mean
it's unsolvable though. Currently the only working the solution so far is
massive human effort - that just puts managing a Mastodon instance outside of
the possibility of doing it on your own. If you want to run a server you
really need to recruit people to help. Mastodon makes it very easy to block
users on other servers, and entire servers, so it's really a matter of
_further moderation_ rather than being actually impossible. There's also an
effort by Mastodon admin to share a list of the potentially dangerous servers
so admin can block them if they wish to.

~~~
djsumdog
So does Mastodon cache everything, even people you don't visit/follow? ZeroNet
only serves sites you actively visit, correct?

I have been meaning to setup a Mastodon server, but haven't gotten around to
it yet. Can't you just chose to help cache/serve content for only people you
trust/follow?

~~~
detaro
Who is "you" in your question? It serves any content a user on your instance
follows (unless explicitly blocked).

------
Sir_Cmpwn
This issue seems overblown, and I'm not surprised. Child porn is a great
trigger word for making people approach an issue emotionally. I'd like to
challenge everyone to take a few steps back and look at it more rationally
instead. Many people who are concerned about their own instances probably does
not have to worry [1]. I disagree with anyone taking the moral high road here
too - I think it's disingenuous to call this "child porn" and illicit all of
the emotional hatred that it implies when no children are being abused and
it's legal to create, posess, and distribute in many countries.

The issue at hand is simply that it doesn't make sense for Mastodon to mirror
content posted from other instances. It could be CP, or it could be a
copyrighted work, doesn't matter. While this is clearly an issue to be
resolved, it's been overhyped and a resolution is underway. I think any court
would be friendly to a defendant who mirrored illegal content unintentionally
through the behavior of their software in the meantime.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornography_depicting_minors)

~~~
Jare
"Probably" and "I think any court would be friendly" do not cut it, not even
close, when your life could end up in ruins.

~~~
Mithaldu
In your opinion, what's the difference between a mastodon instance having such
contents because a user posted it; and twitter having such contents because a
user posted it?

~~~
snerbles
Twitter can afford an army of lawyers.

~~~
djsumdog
Not only that, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have
full time people dedicated to dealing specifically with illegal content. They
don't have many full-time employees (they can't as these positions often
require very specific contracts with the Department of Justice for handling
this type of evidence) which has resulted in at least two cases of employees
sustaining pretty bad mental health problems:

[http://mashable.com/2017/01/13/microsoft-employees-sue-
ptsd-...](http://mashable.com/2017/01/13/microsoft-employees-sue-ptsd-child-
porn/#DL5BmAA6wsq2)

------
aub3bhat
I think Mastodon is going to crash and burn just like 100 other clones before
it (remember the black and white artistic FB clone by hipster cycle
manufacturer, or App.NET), but in process its going to teach a lot of wide-
eyed naive optimists about the sad reality of human nature, and need for
things like moderation, rules etc.

~~~
djsumdog
And Linux will never be more than a hobby operating system. It's just a toy.
You can't run real servers and embedded apps off of it. /s

~~~
acdha
A better comparison is Linux on the desktop: I've been assured it's been about
to happen for the last two decades by programmers who thought the hard part
was writing a kernel when in reality it was all of “boring” work offering a
decent user experience.

Similarly, anyone who starts a social project and talks about tech is almost
certain to fail, no matter whether they're a bunch of OSS developers or
Google, unless they have put even more time into the actual key problem: good
user experience.

If you don't have a solid story for how people will find other people they
want to interact with, what reasons they have to interact in the first place,
and how you'll deal with abuse, nothing else will matter.

------
moron4hire
I've been a bit torn on Mastodon. It's a very interesting idea and a few
performance issues aside, quite an impressive bit of technology. That
federation works at all is a pleasant surprise.

I've had good conversations in the "fediverse". Engagement is super high. I've
had more comments, reshares, and off-site link follows from 70 people on
Mastodon than 700 people on Twitter. But I've also had a higher proportion of
bad conversations than on Twitter. I guess there is a bit of a hollowing out
of the middle that happens, as it takes effort to switch, so only people who
feel strongly about staying on Twitter are going to go.

There's also way too much meta-discussion on Mastodon. Childish phrasing like
"that bird site" instead of just saying Twitter. Too much back clapping about
how amazing the fediverse is. Too much hand-wringing about what any of it
means. Too much bitching about how blocking CP is "as bad as Twitter." Too
much complaining about GNU Social not getting its day and trying to say
Mastodon is just GNU Social (they are not the same thing, they have OStatus in
common). I largely don't talk _on_ Mastodon now because I just don't want to
talk _about_ Mastodon.

What I want right now is just my Twitter followers/followings with the 500
character post length of Mastodon. Use UX design to encourage brevity, but
enable longer form when it's desired.

~~~
Analemma_
> There's also way too much meta-discussion on Mastodon. Childish phrasing
> like "that bird site" instead of just saying Twitter. Too much back clapping
> about how amazing the fediverse is. Too much hand-wringing about what any of
> it means. Too much bitching about how blocking CP is "as bad as Twitter."

This is exactly the same problem Voat had. Unfortunately it's pretty much
inevitable whenever any kind of online space is explicitly founded as
"[existing service], but without moderation!". Almost by definition, the
people who are going to go there first, and form the basic norms of the
community, are going to be the people who felt the impact of moderation on the
old service-- i.e., trolls, immature brats, and people who want to post CP.

Freedom of speech is good, but it has to be a "background virtue": any online
community explicitly founded on freedom of speech is going to be a garbage
fire.

~~~
detaro
> _any kind of online space is explicitly founded as "[existing service], but
> without moderation!"._

I don't think that's a fair characterization of Mastodon. But that's how many
users see it, because that's how it has been advertised to them by media and
other users. (And some instances have taken it as a slogan or a goal, e.g.
apparently the authors)

~~~
s73ver
I agree it's not a fair characterization of Mastadon, but it's definitely a
fair characterization of some of the servers, including the one that the guy
in the story set up.

------
RunningDroid
I think this is where NNTPchan (and to some extent imageboard culture itself)
helps with working around legal issues.

On imageboards content is confined to relevant boards e.g. posts about anime
would go on /a/(anime) not /k/(weapons) unless they are weapon-themed anime.
In addition posting illegal/unsavory content (e.g. cp or gore) on boards it
doesn't belong is usually considered a ban-worthy offence.

The way NNTPchan specifically helps is by letting the server admin decide
which boards are permitted, so NNTPchan servers have the option to not handle
any content related to /loli/ or any other boards that could get them into
legal trouble.

~~~
lnanek2
Not to mention that the last time I worked on image board code there was a
list of auto-ban rules the server checked on posting, which included the MD5s
of child porn. Posters may be more sophisticated now, tweaking a pixel to make
the hashes not match, but there is software that can match the background
scenery now with the illegal part removed that can catch even that. We didn't
have an auto-ban list for drawings of it, though. That was up to the normal
human moderation.

~~~
cvwright
Microsoft has this service called PhotoDNA [1] that uses a perceptual hash to
match bad content in photos, even when the image has been modified. It sounds
pretty cool.

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/PhotoDNA/Default](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/PhotoDNA/Default)

------
badthingfactory
It makes me sad to think about how much better software could be if we didn't
have to worry about terrible people.

~~~
ericHosick
The world in general for that matter.

------
jack_jennings
In a nutshell—don't run a social network of any kind if you don't have the
financial backing for all the mess that comes with running a social network.

------
Grue3
It's insteresting because the Japanese instance the post is talking about
(pawoo.net, backed by Pixiv) is by far the largest Mastodon instance in the
world. In fact, 3 out of 4 biggest instances are Japanese. [1]

[1] [https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list](https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list)

------
zokier
I'm not sure why the author sees the only alternatives to be "run open no-
rules server" and "packing my bags and saying goodbye". Running personal
server for yourself and possibly few friends&family should sidestep most of
the legal/moral issues (I imagine), so why not do that?

------
kelvin0
TL;DR: It's a thankless job to try and remove urine from an olympic pool,
especially when there are no rules set for the swimmers.

------
ue_
This is rather tangentially related, and may be an unpopular opinion, but I
think it is silly that drawings of fictional characters who appear to be under
the age of 18, nude or engaged in sexual activity, is posing such a legal
issue. It's very strange and in my opinion ridiculous that such material is
illegal.

Though I can understand the wider application to materials not allowed to be
possessed, there isn't much that a single instance owner can do other than to
shut out the whole federation aspect of Mastodon, which would be a great loss
and simply centralise things again.

If the metadata could somehow be moved from the server to the client, or the
client chooses to whom to subscribe and post to, wouldn't that be better? Why
is it done on the server side?

Edit: it would be nice if people could please explain downvotes, so I know how
to better improve the posts I write. Downvoting itself is not helpful to this
understanding.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I didn't downvote you but I think the flaw in your reasoning here is that who
gets to determine what is a "fictional character." Perverts are never
satisfied so the train of 'fictional' porn goes from standard waifu/anime
stuff which is fairly tasteless and inserts itself everywhere[1], then a
character drawn just like the person's tween neighbor or celebrity but she has
a sword and red hair so its totally not her (wink wink), to photoshops of real
children playing and put into sexual or quasi-sexual situations, then video
edited with transplanted heads and such, etc. The line is too blurry to be
drawn so the common sense approach is to block all generated CP.

[1] This is the more common problem. You may have a good gaming or comics
group on steam or reddit or tumblr then your activity feed is all tween
looking girls drawn anime style in highly sexualized positions or literally
having sex with a slight blur. Then arguments for 'free speech' happen which
is incredibly polarizing and the non-perverts leave the community. Now that
community is dead and you have yet another zombie community of lolita-style
postings which are frankly wank material and nothing else. It really only
takes one person or poor moderation to kill online communities like this.

If you want to be upset, be upset at the people who do this. Not the people
who flee from it for rational reasons, which may or may not involve legal
risk. I can't even check my steam activity feed at work because there's always
a person or two who suddenly gets into overly-sexualized anime-style games and
posts screenshots. None of those girls look remotely 18.

~~~
ggggtez
The reason these images are frowned upon/banned have nothing to do with people
having bad moderation skills... It generally is a slippery slope argument to
child porn.

I think most people understand why photos of children are criminal. But is a
nude drawing of Bart Simpson the same level of crime? Depending on your
country (and in the US, your state) the answer may surprise you.

------
s73ver
Thus proving that moderation isn't something you can just ignore or leave to
the community. You need to be proactive, and doing that takes time, effort,
and maybe money.

