Imagine if back in 2021 when Lies.Social started, you could follow its accounts from Twitter. Ok, I get why that sounds hellish to most of you, but bear with me.
One consequence of this - one that may be non-obvious to people not steeped in #decentralisation theory - is that Twitter could refuse to host alt-right accounts without censoring them. Alt-right folks could migrate to Lies.Social while still communicating with those who stayed.
Still sounds hellish. I know. Again, bear with me
(1/?)
Because this is bit where the positives become more obvious to people who (like me) oppose the alt-right.
Because alt-right folks could leave Twitter completely for Lies.Social, without losing their existing social graph, there's a much higher chance that they would have. Effectively kettling themselves under one domain name that folks on Twitter could Mute with a single action, rather than playing whack-a-mole, or relying on the Twitter mods to decide for them who can @mention them.
(2/?)
The Twitter mods might decide to Mute the Lies.Social domain for new accounts, so communication with accounts there is opt-in (like ActivityPub federation is for folks using Ghost or Meta's Threats). Or they could ask whether people want federation with Lies.social during onboarding.
Obviously they wouldn't show posts from Lies.Social accounts to anyone who hadn't opted in. Ideally they wouldn't include them in their recommendations either way.
(3/?)
The political implications of this are more important than the technical ones.
If the decision to interact with alt-right folks or not is in the hands of platform users, then it's not censorship. By definition. So if people using Twitter could have still chosen to interact with alt-right accounts on Lies.Social, they couldn't credibly claim Twitter was censoring them, just by refusing to keep hosting their accounts on its platform.
(4/?)
So, Twitter could have suspended alt-right accounts with much less handwringing. Because it wouldn't have been making unilateral decisions about who can speak and be heard from on high. It's mod decisions would only have been about whether or not they could do it using Twitter's hosting, and get free promotion of their posts from its recommendation engine.
(5/?)
Here's the irony; opt-in federation with Bad Actors makes it ethically and politically simpler to can their local accounts on your own service. Even if it's a huge one that people many think functions as a de facto "public square". Because your platform itself is *not* the public square, it's just a big private building fronting onto it. Where people can stand while they give stump speeches into it.
(6/?)
Even better, this way of increasing the freedom to remove accounts results in less capacity for central censorship, not more. Because people can opt-in and check out domains accused of hosting Bad Actors, to make sure the mods are not suppressing certain account for other reasons (like posting comments that go against the interests of platform owners).
As with devs publishing source code, the freedom to check mods' work keeps them more accountable to the people using the platform.
(7/?)
