I think it will be less of a problem then for example on twitter , because you can just mute/block/defederate instances that aren't able to control the spam on their instance. There is an incentive to stay small enough so that the mod team can keep up with the amount of work required to keep the community relatively spam free.
Unlike twitter there aren't investors that want to keep growing endlessly so the hard problem of moderation at scale can just be sidestepped by the admin by closing instance signups once they reach moderation capacity.
I agree, I think published feeds that list items or accounts to block (as an advisory) that anyone can subscribe to is the future of social media moderation.
Right now it's just instance admins deciding unilaterally for their users, which is terrible.
It's not terrible because you can choose your instance. Policies should be a big factor in that choice. If no instances suit you, you could as well host your own.
I do host my own. The admin of one of the most popular instances (17k users) has blocked my instance, preventing those 17k from seeing me, following me, or DMing me. (It also prevents me or any other user of my instance from following any of those 17k users.)
This is, quite frankly, a bullshit model that enables censorship. An instance admin shouldn't be allowed by the protocol to decide who you are allowed to read or follow.
It's just as bullshit when gmail automatically spam-folders anyone sending mail to gmail users who isn't part of the deliverability cartel. Most gmail users are oblivious to the fact that an ad company is managing their eyeballs and attention so completely.
>An instance admin shouldn't be allowed by the protocol to decide who you are allowed to read or follow.
I didn't downvote your comment but how would it even be possible using computer science principles to design a protocol that prevents admins from deciding what bytes go in and out of the machines they pay to run?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting but a simple reading of your complaint seems like you're asking for the impossible.
EDIT reply to : >One method is by end-to-end encrypting those bytes, and optionally some of the metadata as well.
If there's a hypothetical new ActivityPub version 2.0 protocol that encrypts everything so that the any and all instance operators are forced to accept messages and images of sexually abused teen girls, those admins will choose to _not_ to run that encrypted protocol.
In the end, you still haven't created a protocol that removes the ability for voluntary admins to decide.
Yes, a limited scenario of 1-to-1 communication where encryption hides a conversation between 2 people (e.g. Signal) from the instance operator can happen but a 1-to-many followers broadcast model like Twitter/Mastodon/etc with federating/forwarding messages like USENET is different. How would a protocol for 1-to-many force admins to accept those bytes?
EDIT reply to: >Yet people are still using freenet.
Yes, of course _some_ are running Freenet. But that doesn't address my point: you can't design a protocol that _forces_ humans (aka "admins") to accept any and all bytes. There are many that choose to _not_ run Freenet.
> to design a protocol that prevents admins from deciding what bytes go in and out of the machines they pay to run?
By designing a peer to peer protocol without admins.
> those admins will choose to _not_ to run that encrypted protocol.
Yet people are still using freenet. Regardless, you can run a protocol like this on top of AP, to the admin it will look as if people are just exchanging encrypted data.
> By designing a peer to peer protocol without admins.
You can't require a client app for a social media service if you want any adoption. It's extremely important to allow at least viewing the content via a regular web browser. And to allow that to be done natively and frictionlessly, without having to rely on protocol bridges.
I can send a link to a Mastodon post wherever to whomever, even if they have never heard about Mastodon. Can't do that with p2p networks.
Sounds like you run a single user instance? Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin?
That doesn't make any sense, perhaps you could clarify your position here. It seems like you're saying instance administrators shouldn't have much control over what their users see on the fediverse. That sorta defeats the purpose of it, at least the way I use it. If I have to let someone else decide for my users, that's hardly decentralized. I block single user instances as well, because they're usually a waste of time, but if someone reaches out and makes a case for a whitelist entry, I consider it. That's how it's supposed to be, and that aligns with the guarantees about content quality that I've offered to users.
Again, I'd love to hear a more detailed description of your policy ideas, I don't think I understand.
> Why should any instance be entitled to another instance's users' attention, against the will of the admin?
Because those users want to read and follow users on that other instance? The instance admin has no right to dictate what the users on that server shouldn't be allowed to read or follow.
Users should be in ultimate control of what they are allowed to read, not instance admins. Users should be able to opt in or out of filter feeds, whether published by their local admin or anyone else, at their own option.
This is a fundamental issue with federated networks, one that has come up with email and again with AP.
Well that's not an ISSUE with federation, that's just not how it works. What you're imagining is p2p, and there's plenty of options in that realm. Federation implies this structure inherently, in that an administrator runs an instance, and users can use THAT instance.
If you build a road on your property, you can decide who drives on it, at your own terms.
If a road is built with your contributions, there's usually a committee or collective decision apparatus that decides the rules. You don't always get your way in that case, but the road would be bigger than what you could enable on your own.
The issue is one of discoverability: they won't become aware of it in the first place as their instance admin has decided to censor it, making the decision for the user in advance that they shouldn't be allowed to read it.
What about when the admins of the most popular "social blocklist feeds" decide to put your instance on the block list? How is the cartelization problem solved there?
You can say that the blocklists will be voluntary but instance participation is already voluntary. Clearly that's not enough
This is why I wrote a while back that I think it should be sets of 'bouncers' that people subscribe to or whatever - and that those bouncers should have profiles that people can comment on, clone / fork / etc..
with public transparency (I, sure people could/would want and make private bouncers too) - and public comments, people could choose to change their blocker/bouncer - maybe revert to an older version and clone into a new one.
Would be nice to change your choice of censoring based upon your own belief/desire rather than being stuck with whatever some admin or big G decided to let you see without any transparency as to why x y and z are blocked.
I hope this a part of the future that can be built. I too am not a fan of the current censoring cartels.
Mastodon.art (11.7k users - NOT 17k users) blocked the sneak.berlin instance (1 user) because you wandered into the Admin's mentions and tagged other members of the instance to call them "rude as fuck" and lectured them on how to moderate their own instance when they announced other additions to the block list.
Now, looking through your instance, I don't see anything especially problematic that would make you unpopular to the Fediverse, but just from your attitude towards other Instance admins and your disengenous argument about your value to another instance's users makes me feel as though this suspension was 100% justified.
One of the fundamental purposes of Mastodon is to keep communities niche while curbing abuse. One of the fundamental benefits of Mastodon is that most of the polite instances get to participate in each other's conversations.
But you were not polite, and you harassed and insulted the people who run another instance, and while you would like to pretend that the problem you have here is that those 11.7k people no longer get to see your content, the real problem you have is that your bad behavior has permanently locked you out of 11.7k accounts that you proved yourself too impolite and meddling to be allowed to interact with anymore.
This isn't a flaw of the Fediverse, it's a feature. The system worked as it was supposed to. A rude person was made to shut up, and the users of the Mastodon.art instance won't even feel the loss of your single-account instance that isn't about art.
And this isn't even scratching the surface of the prevalence of far-right/Nazi instances that brigade people and launch harassment campaigns that fundamentally justify the use of these moderation tools.
Funny thing about mastodon.art, they block instances just for federating with other blocked instances, do not communicate the block to the admins of said instances, and even block "instances" that do not exist and never existed based on made up reasons.
It's interesting that you think that another Mastodon instance admin has any control of what thousands of people are "allowed to read". Your website is still online, isn't it?
You didn't get censored, you got disciplined for your behavior on a network you don't own. If the members of the instance that blocked you want to see your content, they can visit your instance directly. If they want to interact with you they can join another instance, or create their own.
Your free speech ends where mine begins online. Act however you want on your own server, but don't play victim when others decide that they don't wish to accommodate you.
MAJOR EDIT:
Looks like literally hundreds of instances have you suspended, and it is very justified.
My complaint is not that others don't wish to read me; my complaint is that others (instance admins) are deciding for thousands of others who have never met them what content they are allowed to choose to read.
You seem to have conflated the two.
Imagine if an email host started dropping all of your outbound emails to a certain domain, silently, without notifying you.
That would be a bad email server, and that admin's decision should be criticized.
> I got dozens of death threats when I built an AP search
Do you have any idea why? conspirologist in me says, this could be targeted attack by FB, Twitter to slow down decentralized movement. But I don't want to give my inner conspirologist take over my mind.
From what I've been reading, a there is a large contingent in the Fediverse that is against people being easily found. This is due to fears of of harassment and stalking.
I think this is not a sustainable view. It is trivial to write a crawler to find people's profiles using open APIs, and even more could be garnered if you scrape pages.
If you don't want to be found but must put stuff on the internet, the answer is to not federate.
Some people think that they can publish information to the unauthenticated web and simultaneously have that information remain, in some sense, under their own control. This belief is false.
There is a desire to be able to sort of soft-publish, accessible to the whole internet, but revocable in some way. That's not how publishing works from an information-theoretical standpoint, to say nothing of the internet.
A lot of people thought their data was being stolen or misappropriated when their own servers provided it to me via unauthenticated vanilla HTTP requests to public URLs.
It sometimes occurs to me that if search engines didn't exist, and you tried to invent them today, profiting off of a downloaded copy of the full text of other people's websites, you would be sued into oblivion.
I like decentralized systems but the community is fraught with risk. Hopefully that changes as it becomes less niche.