Discussion
I'm thinking *a lot* about "Implicit Feudalism" these days - the idea that mods and admins (in the #Fediverse and elsewhere) are like feudal lords, wielding the only true power in online spaces - the power to silence other's voices.
That leaves regular users to be like serfs - bound to the land with no real power to make change besides 1) petitioning their lord, or 2) maybe leaving the lord's estate (if that's even possible).
@shlee Yes. Great point. And another reason why it should be super-easy to self-host a Fediverse server and get out from under the thumb of a tiny tyrant who's compensating for something else IRL.
And why we need a better primitive than "instances."
Have you ever seen Mighty Networks? You can set up a self-contained network in just a few clicks. No Linux. No .config files. Just click, pay, and go. Fediverse servers should be THAT easy. Maybe not Mastodon, but SOMEONE needs to crack this.
again I love the deep thought re all this but I return to what are we mostly trying to do here and how do we accomplish that. imo (for the majority who want this place to grow) we want most people to feel like they can join most any server and communicate with most any other server and not be subject to abuse. stumbling on junk like you do browsing the web is fine, but we expect spam to mostly be dealt with. not hard to do if we didn't have a few loud people with a different vision :(
@wjmaggos Yeah. SPAM and abuse are certainly different, but possibly two different symptoms of the same underlying cause.
I'd love it if "servers" weren't the principal grouping for the Fediverse. It should just be my own organic personal connections, wherever they happen to be.
The big issue in accomplishing this is probably handling Server-level blocks. That would probably require blocks to to be implemented more as lists shared directly among users, instead of being controlled by mods.
maybe but it's already hard to get people to understand servers. I guess I see even less adoption if we ask them to handle more of this stuff themselves.
or if we get adoption, it's with very centralized block lists. I'd imagine the lists fracturing over who to block etc like religions do and most people won't want to keep up with the drama, meaning whoever maintains control of the original list decides moderation for most of fedi.
@wjmaggos ... meaning those "first mover" blocklist would become it's own implicit fiefdoms. Great point.
This feels like another case for Endorsements:
This wouldn't be a centralized "who to ignore" list, but a personalized "who to believe" list that would reach outwards in a web of trust. I could see it being used to sort my newsfeed by putting (just for example) my personalized 1st-degree, 2nd-degree, 3rd-degree endorsements ahead of other follows and boosts.
@benpate you can leave, but you can't take your possessions (toots) with you
@tmw The frustrating part is that we have the technology to make this happen, too. The Fediverse doesn't really deliver on the promise of open networks and freedom if all your stuff is hostage to the Lords of Servertown.
LOLA Data Portability (https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola ) is hurtling towards recommendation status, and as a spec it's very doable. (I did: https://emissary.dev/migration)
It's going to take some time for all of the apps to get it built, but it IS coming :)
@benpate oh neat, so the mastodon Powers That Be are on board with it too?
@tmw It's a W3C thing for now. I can't speak for Mastodon. They've been doing A LOT OF GREAT WORK recently, but I think they're also super busy at the moment.
This will probably get more traction with smaller projects first. I *do* hope it makes it onto Mastodon's radar, though. That's pretty much the tipping point for adoption on any change we want to make :)
@torstentorsten Thank you :) I'll check it out. I've been binge reading a bunch of books on the topic.
@benpate I'm very grateful for your efforts. It's not common for software-folks to think about these topics. (Hence the state of the software.)
Searching for a connection between what Ostrom considered to be the 8 rules for managing commons that she found to be intact for hundreds of years (rice terraces in the Philippines, irrigation systems in Spain, Swiss mountain villages) on one hand and digital commons on the other hand I think a good search term could be "Governing digital commons".
Maybe @p_tron has some more ideas.
This is deeper than simple "user education" -- that's just more *affective voice* that we should be DE-incentivizing.
So, how can we give regular people a more positive experience online, to have an *effective voice* in how the Fediverse operates.
I'm looking at structural improvements to our tools and protocols. I'd LOVE to hear what you all think of this, and how we can do better.
@benpate I think one thing is encouraging more real world entities to implement servers for their staff, members, customers or citizens. The ACM, archive.org, Vivaldi and SDF are good examples.
@benpate a second thing is encouraging big volunteer-run servers to become coops. Cooperatives are democratically operated and supported. Nivenly, social.coop, cosocial.ca, data.coop are all cooperatives.
@benpate I don't think it's a technical problem; it's a social and cultural one.
@evan That's always been the conventional wisdom, but I'm having second thoughts. Of course: some people are just awful and need to learn some manners.
But much of this this is just natural human response to being powerless in front of a faceless machine. We're fighting human nature instead of understanding and embracing it.
System-wise, it's the difference between "make it easier to add alt tags" vs "bully people who don't use alt tags"
@benpate sorry, I didn't mean it was an issue where people need to be better people.
I meant, users need to be in better control of the instances they're on. Having a real-world connection to the owner is one way; *being* an owner, even as part of a large group, is better.
Those aren't problems you solve with code, mostly.
@evan Thanks, I understand better now. Yes, I follow you, that some sense of ownership would fundamentally change how people view the network and how they interact on it.
It seems like any kind of "having skin in the game" would be a positive step forward. Because it takes time and work for someone to build up that ownership (in whatever form it takes) and they wouldn't want to lose it. So, they might make different choices to maintain their reputation as a member of XYZ community.
@benpate thanks. I have to admit, I took your first post in this thread quite literally -- how do we avoid techno-feudalism in the Fediverse? I might have over focused on that, less on angry words and lack of alt text.
@benpate on the topic of better behavior: I think ways to share blocklists of individuals would also help. Either user-to-user or server-to-server. We need better granularity than the shared server blocklists we have now.
@livingpixel @benpate my number one target! Thanks for the reminder.
My most recent blog post deals with this subject matter as well, and how we might make a paradigm shift to move away from this app-centric #fediverse where "users" (i.e. people) hardly have a say in its evolution. The efforts around the #ActivityPub API may be an enabler for this shift, but there are major social challenges to be dealt with.
https://coding.social/blog/prosocial-web/
Personally I don't think the app-centric fediverse has a healthy future or outcome.
@benpate@mastodon.social as a materialist I would like to say that the deepest structure is that the servers are run by an individual that have material power over it, and can shut it down, close registrations, and so on.
If instances are to be community ruled should be community owned and funded.
I think this can be achieved by opening instances as an action taken by already organized communities or by transitioning private maintained instances to community ownership by building a community in it.
Thw microblog paradigm is very poor for this. A community needs permanent spaces. Most Fediverse software don't have even privileged instance blog, knowledge base or forum to centralize It's presence and identity. There are no tools to differentiate from user presence and instance presence.
@cochise Yes. I like a lot of this. Community ownership / community funding. This goes nicely with getting "real world entities" (like Universities, ACM, etc) to set up their own *official* staff accounts here.
And yeah, "microblogging" kinda sucks at this. So, knowledge bases, forums, maybe a community-owned version of"Facebook Groups"?
And, could you tell me more about "User Presence" vs. "Instance Presence"? This sounds interesting, but I'm not completely following you.
@benpate@mastodon.social Mastodon and most of the other Fediverse software follow mainstream social media designs that want to make the platform invisible. This result in an interface where is hard to see the instance. In Mastodon while logged in, the "about" page where a user can access instance rules and other informations, is buried as the last item.
There is no easy access page showing the moderation and staff team built in, only the instance super admin account. No space or process to make suggestions or discuss the instance policies. A new user doesn't automatically follow an instance updates account. As there is no default solution, the instaces must create ad-hoc approaches.
If we see an instance as a community, the software needs to ease the community building by:
Most communities use a lot of other tools to achieve this. Some mastodon instances have a side writefreely blog, most moderation teams have a group chat at other services. Much like forums use pinned posts as an ad-hoc replacement for a knowledge base. My point is not exactly that we need to make all this funtion native to all platforms, but that their absence is a design choice that try to make the instance invisible and makes harder to the instance to become a community. This design is derived from big social media platforms that want to make the platform unnaccountable.
Because the serfs lack the power to make real changes to the Feudal structure, they often resort to *affective voice* which is the toxic in-grouping, name-calling, gatekeeping, shaming, and bullying that you see everywhere online.
We built the Fediverse on the models forged by old social media - copied their patterns and practices 1:1 - even down to its Implicit Feudalism.
But maybe we can do better. We certainly SHOULD do better.
@benpate it seems a little bit unfair. someone says “hey, I’m going to spend my time and money setting up a Mastodon community for people interested in XYZ. wanna join?” and people join. and that makes the former a feudal lord and the latter serfs?
@toddsundsted So, the model was originally created with respect to other commercial services -> the "old social media" we're trying to replace. It holds up better in that context.
The names are a bit harsh, but they still capture the power imbalance. And yes, admins and mods have tremendously more power than mere users. It's not quite life-and-death-like-the-1300's, but they CAN delete your whole digital life and all your connections without justification or consequences.
@benpate I take control seriously enough that I literally wrote my own server. but that’s not an option for most people. are you thinking of something like portable identity?
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@benpate There are real problems with egotistical/narcissistic admins. Who bully and abuse other admins/mods.
I am the admin and I handle uptime, and I've built a mod council that I don't influence to try and be more democratic.
I've always argued that instances should be transparent... but that's absolutely not how it's built