
Mastodon is big in Japan, and the reason why is uncomfortable - keehun
https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable-684c036498e5
======
coldtea
"Uncomfortable" as in "offends my American puritan-inspired sensibilities".

"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his
tribe and island are the laws of nature". George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and
Cleopatra".

(Slightly off topic: Feynman had a nice story in one of his books about how
the main in a Japanese guesthouse he stayed walked in while he was naked and
having a bath. She didn't flinch and just went on about her business like
nothing had happened, and he was thinking what a fuss/embarrassment etc that
would have caused if it happened in a hotel in the US -- when it's just an
adult being naked with another adult present. It's not like everybody hasn't
seen genitals before or it's a big deal.)

~~~
jerf
I've been waiting for the inevitable rhetorical attack that Silicon Valley's
slowly-but-surely increasing crackdown on everything that happens to offend SV
is itself a form of cultural imperialism. Without endorsing or rejecting that
argument myself, I think it's inevitable that we're going to start hearing it
soon. As the aspirations of SV grow ever more global more conflict of this
sort is inevitable. By that I mean that I don't even blame SV culture itself
necessarily, because the details of what SV culture is doesn't matter, there
is _no_ culture that could run a centralized global social network without
these _sorts_ of problems becoming ever-larger, the only difference is where
the flash points would be.

~~~
coldtea
> _I 've been waiting for the inevitable rhetorical attack that Silicon
> Valley's slowly-but-surely increasing crackdown on everything that happens
> to offend SV is itself a form of cultural imperialism. Without endorsing or
> rejecting that argument myself, I think it's inevitable that we're going to
> start hearing it soon._

As a non-American, I endorse the argument myself.

The US has a quite particular culture, and yet most of its population (from
all my experience) seems to consider it either (a) the pinnacle of human
culture that others countries should/do aspire, or (b) the natural state of
civilization (what things just "are", with everything else being
inconceivable).

Add to that the geopolitical force and might of the country, and the fact that
its companies control most of the internet infrastructure, and it gets
troubling that a country with very specific interests that it pursuits
globally, and where Janet Jackson showing some tit was considered a major
cultural "thing" the media and people wrote about for weeks, gets to decide
such policies.

>* there is no culture that could run a centralized global social network
without these sorts of problems becoming ever-larger, the only difference is
where the flash points would be.*

Well, the EU for one has a much broader range of cultures within nation member
states, and a much broader cultural and historical and geopolitical
perspective.

~~~
Kuiper
> _Janet Jackson showing some tit was considered a major cultural "thing" the
> media and people wrote about for weeks_

I've heard people who work in radio describe the Janet Jackson Superbowl
incident as a watershed moment. Not only did weeks of meetings and memos about
"standards and practices" follow, but to this day it remains a moment in their
careers that sticks out as a clear "before/after" point, a "life will never be
the same" event."

At first, I thought they were exaggerating and being facetious or joking, but
it actually was a major event for everyone in their industry: before the Janet
Jackson incident, every radio program at their station broadcast live. If a
caller on the air started swearing or saying "obscene" things, they would
chide the caller and apologize to the listeners. Now, every program broadcasts
with a 20-second delay, and they have a board operator with a "dump button" in
case anything "obscene" is said. (As one talk show personality sardonically
remarked, "What, are they afraid we're going to start _talking_ about Janet
Jackson's nipple?")

~~~
maxxxxx
In most countries this would have been a little side note and forgotten the
next day. The US is wasting a lot of time and energy on debating trivial
things while the real stuff is going on behind the scenes.

~~~
majewsky
As a German, I can assure you that our media are merely debating a different
set of trivial things.

~~~
maxxxxx
Like Promi Big Brother? I am German but have been living in the US a log time.
It's hard to understand how that show can be on front pages.

------
Animats
At last, something that could potentially challenge Facebook's world
domination. Somebody gets a federated social network running with a
substantial user base, and it runs into this.

The US position on child pornography comes from the Meese Report during the
Reagan administration.[1] The Reagan administration wanted to crack down on
pornography in general to cater to the religious base. But they'd run into
First Amendment problems and the courts wouldn't go along. So child
pornography, which barely existed at the time, was made the justification for
a crackdown. By creating ambiguous laws with severe penalties for child
pornography and complex recordkeeping requirements, the plan was to make it
too dangerous for adult pornography to be made commercially. But the industry
adapted, filling out and filing the "2257 paperwork" as required.[2] After
much litigation, things settled down, porn producers kept the required
records, and DoJ stopped hassling them about this.

So that's how the US got here. That's why it's such a big deal legally in the
US, rather than being a branch of child labor law. Japan doesn't have the same
political history.

Federated systems are stuck with the basic problem of distributed online
social systems: anonymity plus wide distribution empowers assholes. That's why
Facebook has a "real name" policy - it keeps the jerk level down.

[1]
[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015058809065;vi...](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015058809065;view=1up;seq=427)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protection_and_Obscenity...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Protection_and_Obscenity_Enforcement_Act)

~~~
DonbunEf7
Anonymity, global connectivity, _and_ the grant of arbitrary powers to fresh
accounts with no prior reputation. You need this third piece, but websites are
often too happy to gloss over it in favor of getting more accounts, more
eyeballs, more community, etc.

(As usual, posting from an anonymous account.)

------
rangibaby
I have lived in Japan since I was quite young (late 20s now) and don't see
what the problem with lolicon is. It's not my thing, but if someone enjoys it
that's their business, they aren't hurting anyone. That's just my gut feeling
on the matter, I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts.

~~~
wongarsu
Child sexual abuse is bad because it's traumatizing children (also sexual
abuse is bad, duh). But "curing" pedophiles seems to be hard, similarly to how
you can't "cure" homosexuals.

Child porn would supposedly be a safe outlet for pedophiles, at the cost of
possibly eroding social taboos around child sexual abuse. But the tradeoff is
irrelevant, because the production of child porn is usually exploiting and
abusing children, making it morally bad.

Lolicon doesn't harm any children. The only potential harm left is eroding
helpful social taboos. But that seems easy enough to fix: make lolicon legal,
but semi-taboo. If it's not seen as normal, it doesn't normalize anything, and
you have all the positives without the negatives.

So I will view you as weird if you enjoy lolicon, but I don't have a problem
with it. I would even advocate for its existence.

Somewhat related, I also can't really justify the US standard for child porn.
Nude pictures of 10 year olds are bad and should be illegal. But what is the
harm in nudes of 17 year olds?

~~~
nsaslideface
Children and young people getting a hold of lolicon comics, where pedophilia
is normalized through the story, can harm them for life. No one seems to have
the imagination to think about this.

Adults looking at it is of course harmless, but don't make it easily available
on the internet. If you do I'd say you're acting immorally and I support legal
repercussions. I know people who have been messed up when they were very young
and found it.

~~~
Freak_NL
There are lots of vices and tasks that adults can usually handle but minors
may not. Alcohol, tobacco, drugs (in as far as these are legal in a given
jurisdiction), voting, operating heavy machinery, driving cars…

In Japan sexually explicit comics are strictly 18+, clearly marked as such,
and are sold as you would sell liquor or cigarettes. Making sure children
don't have access to these is a matter of public awareness and parental
guidance — it seems to work pretty well there.

> I know people who have been messed up when they were very young and found
> it.

Messed up from lolicon (i.e., Japanese comics featuring minors in sexually
evocative situations) or messed from access to porn in general (or even actual
child pornography)?

~~~
nsaslideface
As I said explicitly, messed up from freely available lolicon comics and
content on the internet. The vices you list all require physical exchanges
with others or would usually be noticed by adults nearby, and so they aren't
really comparable.

~~~
Freak_NL
True, unmonitored access to the internet can expose minors to things that can
have an adverse effect on their psyche. But let's limit ourselves to freely
available online content. Singling out lolicon (or any other form of drawn
porn) seems dangerously inconsistent to me.

Violence, hate speech, gore, (adult) porn; even written fantasies containing
content that may stimulate forms of destructive behaviour — the list is
endless! Either you shield children from all of it (which is sensible for
young children, but not tenable for teenagers) or you educate, guide, train,
and accompany your child as they learn to handle an ever increasing amount of
freedom. Parenting and education are key here, not banning everything that may
harm a child's mind.

------
kstrauser
I own a Mastodon instance and love its federation options. For instance, I
could decide to outright disconnect from that instance (in Mastodon speak, to
"block" it) so that my users don't see it (and vice versa). I chose in this
case to "silence" it, which means:

\- My users can still talk to its users and see posts from people they follow.

\- Posts from that instance don't show up on my "federated timeline" (which is
a timeline of all posts made by my users and by the people they follow on
other instances; great way to find new interesting people).

\- I don't cache any media sent from that instance. The default is to cache
images locally: if a user on a tiny instance has 10,000 followers on a busy
one, the busy one don't make the tiny instance serve up 10,000 copies of every
image.

So again, my users can talk to their users just like normal, but no one on my
instance sees anything unless they specifically opt in to, and any content I
dislike never travels through my network or gets stored on my server. I'm
happy with that arrangement.

------
xg15
I'm all for decentralized communication but I don't think the example of the
article is particularly convincing and I wonder if the article is asking the
right questions.

So the uncomfortable reason why Mastodon is so popular in japan is that Pixif
operates a large Mastodon node which is used to share/discuss questionable
images.

Discussions about lolicon aside, does any of this actually has something to do
with the detail that Mastodon supports federation?

The article states that decentralisation is important to allow different rules
for different communities. However if, e.g. if Pixif disabled federation or
switched from Mastodon to something proprietary, would that change anything?
Similarly, Reddit is highly centralized technically but - currently - provides
freedom for each subreddit to define their own moderation rules (within the
restrictions of Reddit, the company).

I feel there is a difference between the "decentralisation" when talking on
the social or the technical layer and that difference should be kept in mind.

~~~
salmonellaeater
Reddit cannot allow lolicon or Nazi imagery because it's illegal in some
countries, and the company would risk fines by allowing it. Mastodon has no
such problem as long as the server is in a country that allows the content.

Mastodon also avoids the problem some Youtube creators are facing with
demonetization. If a video is controversial, Youtube may decide not to show
ads on it at all (nor pay the creator) because _some_ advertisers don't want
to be associated with the content. I don't know if any Mastodon servers use
advertising at all, but if they did they could be more fine-grained in
matching content to advertisers. A similarly federated video-sharing network
could serve controversial video creators.

------
CurtMonash
Images of all sorts of criminal acts are deemed acceptable, as long as no harm
is done to actual individuals during those images' creation.

I've never seen why child porn should be a exception.

That I would think poorly of somebody for enjoying certain categories of child
porn is beside the point.

~~~
zanny
We even have great long-running correlations between people consuming more
porn and domestic abuse and rape dropping. When you give people outlets to
less than desirable thoughts, they can vent their desires better than to have
them bottle up until they explode and hurt people.

Pedophilia, zoophilia, necrophilia are all some of the last fetishes that need
to be recognized as real, that you can't just eliminate them from society,
that actually expressing them is usually unreasonable (I guess a case could be
made someone could will their cadaver to get a necrophiles sex toy, and then
nobody is participating non-consensually) and that if we give people with
those fetishes more reasonable ways to cope with them than just the good old
Christian violent denial and eventual meltdown strategy used to deal with most
social taboos in western societies we might be able to actually cut down on
real violence and harm inflicted.

~~~
CaptSpify
> We even have great long-running correlations between people consuming more
> porn and domestic abuse and rape dropping.

Do you have sources for that? I've heard that studies have found the opposite,
but I've only heard that from less-reliable hearsay, so it'd be nice to have
something in response.

------
jancsika
> It’s a constant struggle for Tor to recruit “everyday” users of Tor, who use
> the service to evade commercial surveillance.

That doesn't seem to be a struggle at all. All kinds of users leverage Tor for
all kinds of reasons.

The struggle is to recruit everyday users who have the inclination, technical
expertise, and rhetorical skill necessary to defend the technology against all
kinds of fearmongering tactics.

There is a general lack of such people. If the same set of interests bent on
defeating Tor set their sights on TCP, you can bet that technologists would be
struggling to find ways to defend it that could resonate with the general
public.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
My understanding is that there's a huge difference between the proportion of
sketchy Tor _traffic_ (largely generated by bots?) and the proportion of
sketchy Tor _users_. People often seem to conflate these two things.

------
klondike_
This really shows the advantages to a federated social network. People have
all sorts of sensibilities about what is acceptable content, and a one-size-
fits-all moderation approach like on Twitter will never work for everybody.

------
SCdF
On the topic of Mastodon, I wonder if the reason it hasn't caught on so much
(outside of this use case) is precisely _because_ it's federated.

When a new social network comes along, I often sign up ASAP just to try to
grab SCdF, because I'm a human and vane. I will usually give it a bit of a
crack once I've done that, but the need to squat my username is a big (and I
realise, stupid) driver for me.

I've known about Mastodon for awhile now, but I don't feel any pressure to
sign up and check it out because there is no danger of someone else taking my
username. Worst case I could just host my own instance against my domain.

~~~
dredmorbius
Social media have a _tremendous_ number of factors contributing to success or
failure. It's hard to pin it to single factors.

Technology is almost _never_ the initial driver, though it's also quite
frequently a determining factor _at scale_.

The most critical key factor is probably in achieving a coherent and
compelling founding cohort. Both Usenet and Facebook effectively started at
selective-admissions academic institutions -- Usenet at UNC and Duke, then
spreading through the early Arpanet. Facebook, of course, at Harvard.

Usenet failed for numerous reasons, _including_ superior alternatives (largely
blogs and mailing lists), but also because for various reasons (cultural and
technical), _hostng_ Usenet feeds was both _not profitable_ and _an increasing
liability_. Spam, warez, pr0n, and various other activities created risks, and
there was no real option for advertising or other means of revenue generation.

(Universities hosted Usenet as long as they did in part because it addressed
an institutional need: communications and collaboration across distances.
There was _no_ effective alternative at the time.)

Facebook has managed to do what Usenet couldn't, which is to survive, so far,
the Eternal September. At 2.2 billion users, it's the largest single
integrated social networking system _ever_. Something I note with appreciation
despite pretty much despising the company and what it's doing.

As to Mastodon: I'm on it, I'm asctive. It's faded a bit since April as
initial interest is giving way, but it remains active. And GNU Social of
course rocks on (and rags on the New Upstart to Get Off Its Lawn....)

~~~
kuschku
> Facebook has managed to do what Usenet couldn't, which is to survive, so
> far, the Eternal September. At 2.2 billion users, it's the largest single
> integrated social networking system ever. Something I note with appreciation
> despite pretty much despising the company and what it's doing.

Actually, they didn’t. When parents of everyone signed up, Facebook started
becoming uncool, and most younger people don’t use it anymore (which is why
they bought Insta and WhatsApp).

Facebook is currently running massive ad campaigns in Germany (like, every
single billboard you see, every youtube ad you watch, every 5th TV ad is from
Facebook) to get users back .

~~~
majewsky
> Facebook is currently running massive ad campaigns in Germany (like, every
> single billboard you see, every youtube ad you watch, every 5th TV ad is
> from Facebook) to get users back .

Eh, what? I can't comment on TV ads since I only watch ZDF and Phoenix, but
I've yet to see a billboard ad in the city, or a YouTube ad for that matter.

~~~
kuschku
Where I live (Kiel) every damn bus stop has that facebook ad.

------
emodendroket
Lolicon can also refer to live action stuff where the model is of age but
looks younger. Also, the rules on this stuff in the US are quite murky and
vary by state, rather than being simply illegal across the board as this
article wants to suggest.

------
bryanlarsen
Porn is too ubiquitous and accepted on the common web to really drive
technologies the way it used to.

For example, bittorrent started with porn, but that's not what drove its
growth or made it successful. If the credit card companies didn't allow porn
transactions on their networks, bitcoin would probably be much larger today.
Tor is a similar story, I assume.

------
nihonde
Saying something with a few hundred thousand users is "big in Japan" is a
stretch, at best. There are 130MM+ people in Japan.

I mean, I have an iOS app that has about that many MAU, and I consider it to
be basically a failure.

------
SCdF
The big surprise to me is that Deviant Art is supposed to be about
photography!?

~~~
the8472
dA is mentioned as comparison to pixiv. Pixiv is not "about pornography", but
it allows 18+ content and so does dA.

Edit: I totally misread "photography" as "pornography" here.

To address the actual question: There are photography and crafts sections on
dA and you will find far less of that on pixiv. But I would not describe the
whole site "being about" that.

~~~
Laforet
I'm perplexed as to how the author managed to find the Pixiv sign-up page
offensive - if he hadn't mentioned it I would never have made the connection
myself.

~~~
the8472
Here's the uncropped image. I don't think it qualifies as lolicon, it
certainly is not tagged as such.

[https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_i...](https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=43409888)

~~~
Laforet
Thanks, as I though it is quite tame by any standard.

Perhaps when one goes out to find ghosts then one will see ghosts everywhere.

------
codedokode
> lolicon drawings are prohibited

> gory, bloody and violent pictures are allowed

They must have something wrong with their head.

------
ygaf
>It’s a constant struggle for Tor to recruit “everyday” users of Tor, who use
the service to evade commercial surveillance. Those users provide valuable
“cover traffic”, making it harder to identify whistleblowers who use the
service, and political air cover for those who would seek to ban the tool so
they can combat child pornography and other illegal content.

Wait - I thought people _weren 't_ meant to use Tor (thus its bandwidth) if
they didn't need it. Or are they recruiting not just any people, but those who
will contrive to browse all day / not download heavily?

------
Eridrus
Most people are on Twitter because of network effects.

Twitter made this a non-issue for lollicon users by banning them, but it's
also interesting to note that it sprang up due to support from an existing
website.

Most people (myself included) who are dissatisfied with aspects of Twitter are
not motivated enough to try to fix them.

------
mirimir
Well, it's not just pictures.

> “After the enforcement, there will still be high school girls out there who
> are going to want to earn pocket money, and the men who target these girls
> won’t disappear, either,” said an official from the Metropolitan Police
> Department.

> “The police come inside, so there are no more real JK girls at the shop.
> Most of the business is being arranged over the internet, through enko
> (compensated dating) services.”

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/07/06/national/crime-
legal/tokyos-new-jk-ordinance-takes-aim-schoolgirl-exploitation/)

Global Internet morality is unworkable.

~~~
etplayer
This is a separate issue, though it is a problem of course.

The fact that this is conflated with the idea of drawn representations of
fictional characters is saddening and only server so confuse matters.

~~~
mirimir
I'm not conflating anything. I'm saying that applying American sexual
standards to Japanese culture is problematic. If it's not uncommon for ~14
year old women to earn spending money as sex workers, why wouldn't pictures of
naked ~14 year old women be likewise common?

One could, of course, argue that Japanese culture is backward and
unenlightened. Indeed, I'm sure that many Japanese are convinced of that.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
> If it's not uncommon for ~14 year old women to earn spending money as sex
> workers, why wouldn't pictures of naked ~14 year old women be likewise
> common?

Japan has a culture of child idols too, who are typically pre-pubescent in
age. What you're getting at is the distinction between prostitution and
pornography is merely syntactic.

------
amelius
Sounds similar to the story of BetaMax versus VHS.

Edit: sorry for the brevity, pfooti below explains it well.

~~~
emodendroket
In what way does it sound similar?

~~~
pfooti
The story goes: BetaMax didn't want pornography on their platform, but VHS
allowed it. The porn industry went to VHS and this fact is widely credited
with being the reason why VHS won the format war.

However, this story probably isn't true.
[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3089/vhs-vs-
bet...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3089/vhs-vs-betamax-how-
influential-was-the-pornography-industry-in-the-format-war)

Hard to say.

------
reustle
I was expecting to read about the heavy metal band, Mastodon.

~~~
gaius
Likewise

 _Remember Mastodon? In April 2017, there was a wave of excitement about
Mastodon, a federated social network_

Never heard of it. Have heard of Diaspora and gab.ai tho'.

~~~
cyphar
It's effectively a GNU Social implementation, that has a much nicer TweetDeck-
like interface[1]. It got quite popular in the security community in April
(though I don't see as many people there as I used to), and some of the main
servers got DDoS'd purely through organic growth.

[1]:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon)

------
fundabulousrIII
Thought they were talking about the band and the decibel level.

------
whipoodle
Child porn and Nazi stuff have long been really bright lines in user content.
Recent events have revealed more acceptance of Nazis and adjacent groups in
our society than previously thought, so I guess I could see the taboo against
child-porn easing up too. Very sad and scary.

~~~
etplayer
The taboo against child pornography is not easing up; the reason why, to my
knowledge, it is considered taboo is beacuse its production requires child
abuse. However the production of drawings, comics and stories requires no such
abuse, as such, I can see no reason why fictional characters portrayed in
fiction should be seen as taboo. Either way, as far as I know the taboo about
these comics is not easing up anywhere, as it remains illegal (which I regard
as an unjustified affront to freedom of expression) and without much public
discourse at all in many Western countries and US states.

~~~
whipoodle
It will start with this, just like it starts with "well, Rommel wasn't that
bad actually..."

