> The community can be built using an invitation based model, where a user shares the responsibility for moderating the other accounts they invited to the service. The moderation actions are kept public and presented in an anonymized layout.
This is an interesting idea, I wonder how it would work out.
Disclaimer: I couldn't visit the site, so all I have to go on is your quote.
It's definitely interesting, but my gut reaction is that it is a bad idea. If you invited somebody, that means (a) you know them somehow and (b) you want them to participate in the community. Unless you have a stronger bond with the community and are willing to risk your relationship with the invitee for it, moderation will be quite lax, I fear.
On the other hand, having the inviter sanctioned if the invitee misbehaves is also an interesting concept. The behavior in the community will probably be better, but people will be very cautious to invite someone, possibly starving the community.
It's not going to work by sanctioning the person that made the invitation. I want the tone of moderating actions to not be exceedingly adversarial.
My assumption for making the decision in allowing inviters to moderate their invitees is that theoretically they have a closer report to them outside of the website, and as such the moderating activity will happen out of band (ie, a face to face discussion, a private message, etc) and if that fails, they have the latitude of operating the moderation actions, like removing the offending post.
I believe that lobste.rs worked in a similar fashion. I know that I was invited by a community member, I don't know if I misbehave if that affects his reputation.
Perhaps a weighted scale would work. Alice could invite Zachary, taking responsibility for, by her choosing, 1 to 100 percent of his behaviour. Bob could invite Zachary too, also taking responsibility for 1 to 100 percent of his behaviour. Zachary could only begin using the service after 100 percent of his behaviour is accounted for. Then, when Zachary is reprimanded, Alice, Bob, and all others take a hit as well, weighted by their responsibility.
I might be willing to take 100% responsibility for my brother, but I would take about 20% responsibility for RMS and perhaps 1% responsibility for some guy I work with.
That's an interesting idea. This would probably curb bad behavior, when you get reprimanded from several folks who have an actual stake in it.
But - and sorry if I'm overly negative here - I see other issues: First, you wouldn't want to dilute the stakes too much. If my bad behavior is a very small problem for 100 people, they probably don't care too much and nor do I.
The more pressing problem might be that growth is now really heard. The easiest way is if someone takes 100% responsibility, but then you only get very similar people and no new ideas.
Or you need several people inviting the same person, so your community cannot grow exponentially (I think).
This might be a good approach if you strive for homogeneity and accept small growth.
Yes, the invitation model is borrowed from lobste.rs but penalizing the chain of people which resulted in a specific user joining the instance will never happen. The main reason being that it would be very difficult to model this behaviour using the ActivityPub vocabulary that the website is built on top of.
In this framing where you don't think you can trust the wider community, and you want to decentralize the moderation... why have a single global community? Why not present people with only the posts that the people they directly follow (and that those people follow, transitively) vouched for/shared/upvoted?
This also mostly solves the problem of bot upvotes/downvotes (you would have to follow those bots to be affected).
I agree with you mostly, but you're looking at a too individualistic picture in my opinion. Littr.me (or Brutalinks, what I want the software to be known as) encourages small communities which share interests, so ideally there will be no vastly off-topic discussions that you as a user need to tune out. So for an individual, all that is left is to find an instance where you share the interest(s) of the other people on it: cat pictures, tech news, gardening tips, etc. Basically each instance corresponds to a "subreddit", and at first all you will be interacting with is content from that niche.
However, due to federation, nothing will prevent you from participating in the discussions for other instances but you have to opt in specifically into those by either commenting yourself, following the author of the discussion, following the instance itself, etc.
Your could still have accounts for communities, replacing the "instances" of your current model. You could still follow littr.me and see everything they curated and avoid everything they moderated.
I'm not saying you should do this, or even that it's a perfect model, I guess I'm just surprised it hasn't been tried.
I am not familiar with the other aggregator then. The only other one I know is Lemmy, and while it does have the ability to create multiple communities on a single server (= subreddits), those communities appear the same to everyone. There is no following users, only communities. It's possible I missed a platform though (exciting!)
Federated services should be the future. It's sad that we all currently live in the walled-garden timeline.
This post is fairly high on the frontpage and seems to be suffering the consequences of interest. But a Slashdot/Sigh/Reddit/Hackernews clone in the federated space is awesome. Be sure to save for later.
In a sense, yes; however, in a federated service, your choice of "walled garden" can (and usually does) talk to the other "walled gardens" that use the same communication protocol, giving you access to a wider range of content than your one instance provides on its own. Also, with federated services, you can typically stand up your own self-hosted instance and fully own your "walls" yourself.
Yes, wasted resources, propagation delays, overhead... the future. There is a reason web based forums ate usenet's lunch, and email is a largely unusable mess.
Spam. That's why usenet failed and email is an unusable mess. Ignore spam and you'll end up the same. Web based forums dealt with spam but there is nothing inherently centralized about spam prevention.
> we seek out trustable sources. I'm not sure technology can surmount that.
Why should finding a trustable source be incompatible with using technology? It seems like precisely the sort of problem that technology can help with.
Of course, technology alone can't "solve" trust, but it can keep track of identities and claims and reputations, and even allow implementation of clever algorithms for discovering patterns and making recommendations.
Anyway, here is the plan for decentralized spam/abuse prevention that Matrix is proposing, which looks promising:
Lemmy is still a good project despite the fact that the developers used it as a platform for pushing their political cause. Dismissing them out of hand because their principles differ to yours is not great either in my opinion.
Personally I disagree with this stance in open-source, and I do take "freedom 0" seriously for my projects. At the same time I will be quite sad if they will end up being used by communities trying to disseminate unpalatable ideas.
That's why the mechanism for establishing federating links between littr.me instances will be specifically opt-in. An instance will "follow" another instance, and that other instance will have to "accept" the follow, for content from the second one to propagate to the first.
At the same time a user will be free to follow an instance and receive its content at any time, but it will not seep into the "federated" timeline that the instance presents to the other users.
This behaviour is not set in stone yet - it's the last major hurdle - that and the 502s everyone is complaining about :D - before I feel confident to launch the platform in a more public manner - and it's different from what the major players in the fediverse world do at the moment, which is accrete instances as their users follow other users on those instances. This, in my opinion is a little irresponsible and has everything to do with the chase for the "network effect" and users numbers, which I personally see as the main down-fall of every social network that has been launched in the past 20 years.
I laughed when I saw "HOA board" in the filter list. I'm not sure what to make of that, are they genuinely anticipating that only right wingers will post about HOA boards? That is... something else. I thought everyone regardless of political ideology hated HOAs. I've seen insane threads on HN about hating HOAs I'm pretty sure, and europeans confused to no end about it.
Well, I'm late to the party, but I'm the dev that made littr.me.
Apologies for the 502s, this unexpected bit of publicity happened while I was deploying some barely tested code using Go generics. :(
Looking through the comments, I'm humbled to see mostly positive sentiments and I hope that sometime soon I'll have a better show and tell which will include the federating mechanism that is currently not available.
