no server should have millions of followers. It goes against everything that makes the fediverse...well...diverse. The fact that servers can be held accountable is what drives the need for moderation, it's a tool in the arsenal of any decent admin. Threads takes a huge shit on all admins because they are monolithic.

Threads takes away tools for moderation from all servers, so that's why anyone with any sense should defederate now.

I don't disagree with your argument. The larger the server, the harder it is to moderate effectively.

On the other hand, discoverability, availability of content, and having a self-contained social platform that doesn't require us to open Facebook or Instagram, can only happen when we get a big platform plugged in. We can't expect to solve these problems by adding small instances of 10-100 users each to the pool. We've been trying this for a while, and it didn't really work.

If we want all of our friends, relatives and elected politicians to be on the Fediverse, then the best way is to have Mark let them take a walk outside of the fence he's built - and that's exactly what's happening now.

Eventually, I believe that higher adoption and ability to effectively moderate everything are mutually exclusive. We just need to pick which one we prefer.

“ then the best way is to have Mark let them take a walk outside of the fence he's built - and that's exactly what's happening now.”

Citation needed, badly. And in the meantime, you expose tons of people to immediate danger (LibsofTikTok, etc). Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations. Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.

Go prove some of these wild ass conjectures before you willingly throw minorities under the bus without a plan. You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs. Or a plan, at all. Yeah, some people might jump to new servers… but what’s much more likely is that Meta will utilise its new position in harmful ways. See: literally everything Meta has ever done

> And in the meantime, you expose tons of people to immediate danger (LibsofTikTok, etc).

I feel like there’s a divergence in social network philosophy in the Fediverse community that is becoming hard to reconcile.

Many believe that the primary goal of social media is to proactively shield vulnerable users from any possible forms of abuse or trauma. Even if that comes at the cost of proactively defederating whole instances that aren’t strictly aligned with our approach to moderation or with our ideology. Even if that means proposing to proactively defederate all the instances that run Pleroma/Akkoma software just because many of their contributors are perceived as too liberal (yes, somebody actually went as far as seriously proposing that). Even if that means harming discoverability, availability of content, or splintering the Fediverse into smaller bubbles and reducing its potential reach.

I personally belong to the camp of those who believes that the primary goal of social media is to enable people to connect as easily as possible to others and discover content with the least amount of frictions, and give users enough power and tools to granularly decide what content they want to see.

I want to minimize the harm to vulnerable users, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of everything else.

The user is in charge. The user can block/suspend/mute/report anything they don’t like. Sure, in extreme cases drastic decisions ought to be taken, and a whole instance with 100s/1000s/10,000s of users needs to be defederated. But such extreme cases IMHO include things like poa.st, Gab or X itself, where the tree is truly rotten at its roots, where the admins themselves endorse violence/prejudice, and/or where, picking a random user out of their base, it’s statistically very likely that that user is an absolute jerk/sociopath.

IMHO that doesn’t include Threads. Sure, Mark’s behaviour is something that we should keep a constant eye on. Sure, the higher the number of users, the higher the probability of bumping into jerks. But it’s just up to us to filter/mute/block/report them and move on. We don’t throw the whole platform away because of the sporadic jerks, because on such a large platform there are actually also people (like many of our real-life friends, or relatives, or journalists, scientists and politicians) who would add a lot of value to my feed, and the cost of losing all that content to me is much higher than the benefit that I would gain from making the Fediverse completely/proactively impermeable from the Libs of TikTok.

It’s like taking a public bus in a busy city: the busier the bus, the higher the chance of bumping into some scum who throws racial or homophobic slurs to other travellers. In such conditions, depending on the magnitude of the offense, most of the people would either:

1. Move to another seat
2. Directly address the offender and call him/her out for being a jerk
3. Report the offender to the bus driver (or the authorities)

The alternative would be to stop taking public busses, and inviting everyone to stop taking busses as well, because the risk of bumping into potentially traumatizing confrontation with a sociopath is non-zero, and maybe criticize the bus operator for not preemptively preventing a potential fascist from taking the bus.

Which of these two approaches sounds more reasonable to you?

Plus, you can literally go on those platforms and talk about the fediverse… wait, you can’t! Because they seem to be actively suppressing those conversations.

This isn’t true. After announcing support for Fediverse sharing for US, Canada and Japan, I’ve actually noticed that a lot of people on Threads started talking about the Fediverse. Many were wondering what it was. #Fediverse was among the most popular topics discussed on the platform. I saw even some people open up Mastodon accounts to test how the integration works.

To be clear, I hate both the management of X and Meta from the bottom of my heart. But credit is due where it’s due. Musk used to mock “Masturbodon”, preemptively ban any Twitter accounts with a Fediverse handle in their profile, aggressively shut down one after the other all the APIs used by services like Birdsite to bridge tweets to the Fediverse, and basically prevented anybody from even talking about the Fediverse on its platform. Threads, on the other hand, invested a lot in building this integration, lets people talk about the Fediverse freely, it doesn’t mock it nor it’s aggressive towards us.

Sure, it doesn’t mean that I trust them. It doesn’t mean that I support their way of developing this integration (through meetings with ActivityPub luminaries covered by NDAs rather than truly building in the open). It doesn’t mean that I don’t see risks in the future. But I don’t feel like it’s fair to put X and Threads in the same bucket when it comes to their approach towards the Fediverse just because they are both big and both run by very unpleasant human beings.

Anyone on threads will see federated content through threads: through the slats in the fence, except they won’t even see the fence. They won’t see me at my tiny server; they’ll just see a random post I made.

The alternative to “users on Threads will only see federated content through Threads” is “users on Threads won’t see anything outside of their bubble at all”. If they see your posts, there’s a non-zero chance that they’ll click on your profile and maybe follow up on your instance. If they don’t see your posts, this chance is much lower.

You want people off corporate social media? Make a plan that’s better than theirs.

I can’t make a plan that is better than theirs if they have all the content and all the users.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of years trying to convince friends and relatives to do the jump.

The questions I get from them usually aren’t along the lines of “is the protocol/source code open or closed?”, nor “what are the odds of bumping into jerks on that platform?”, nor “how will moderators/admins proactively prevent me from seeing potentially disturbing content?”

No, most of the questions I get are along the lines of “can I still follow this celebrity/politician there?”, or “can I still talk to my relatives and friends from there?”, immediately followed by “how easy is it to use?”

If the answers to all these questions are negative, then we’ve lost a user. It’s a war that we can’t win. If however there is some form of permeability between large corporate platforms and smaller federated platforms, and those who feel that it’s too hard to onboard on the Fediverse have an “easy path” to interact with its content, the offer becomes much more compelling.

But in another, the existing pro-capital/corporate legal environment in many regions of the world means any company deserves scrutiny (particularly of their funding source).

You can’t possibly scrutinize the funding sources of each single corporate entity that decides to join the Fediverse. And, even if you do, you’ll probably find some stinky hedge fund or VC money everywhere.

For as much as I would love a Fedivese that is completely made up of no-profits and volunteers, I know that we’ll never get traction that way. If a business joins the ranks, then we get more attention and more content.

The Flipboard case is a good one. But I could also add Wordpress, Tumblr, and many other companies that recently have either built an integration with the Fediverse, or are working on building it. I personally don’t see how they could threaten the Fediverse either. If the number of jerks on the Fediverse increases when these companies integrate their products, we can just block the jerks. If the number of jerks goes out of control, or if the company proves to be malignant in its intentions, we can block/defederate the domain. But I don’t see how the existence of businesses in our space could threaten our space. Eventually, users and admins have a lot of granular control, and they can decide what they want to see. The existence of businesses who use the ActivityPub protocol to publish their activities isn’t a threat to the Fediverse any more than the presence of businesses who use HTTP over TCP/IP is a threat to anyone who wants to run their own website.

actually, do you know what? You are a fucking asshole. You deserve to be told that, because valuing “growth” and “discoverability” makes you a fucking asshole. You say it’s not your responsibility to protect vulnerable people? You’re arguing it’s wrong to do so, you fascist piece of shit. The kind of internet you want, one where minorities are unsafe because you value convenience and growth, is a horrible thing.

You would literally not even be here were it not for vulnerable people. Fuck you, fuck your dipshit privileged mindset. I hope a pigeon shits in your mouth this weekend, you ignorant tech bro piece of fucking garbage. You block ME, idiot; I’m not the one out here saying YOUR life is acceptable collateral damage, WHICH IS WHAT YOU ARE ARGUING FOR. God. You really dove to a new low for this one, you arrogant jar of fermented piss.

Go take your “everything exists for me” mindset and jam it up your own ass.

you are not a friend to minorities; you are carrying water for white supremacy and capitalism and spilling it all over the rest of us.

Enjoy the taste of pigeon shit.

get your shit together and wash up your mouth with caustic soda before ever attempting to talk to me again. I’m just sticking rational arguments together without ever getting personal. I expect the same level of respect.

I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years. With my own money, with my own time, and even risking my own career and incolumity for people I didn’t even know.

And I’ve done so because I’ve been myself among oppressed minorities, and a target of discrimination for most of my life, and I’ve started from a quite low spot in life too. Just because I don’t constantly show off my trauma, or slam an oppressed minority badge of honor on everybody’s face and ask for everybody’s pity, it doesn’t mean that I’m a privileged white guy who had daddy paying all of his bills, and doesn’t know what it means to be publicly discriminated.

Don’t you even realize that YOU are the fascist jerk here?

You talk so much about protecting oppressed minorities from aggression and prejudice, and yet you are the one who’s dumping a full page of aggressive scatology upon a stranger who has probably gone through more shit and prejudice than you - and all just because I’m trying to have a civilized conversation about the trade-offs between discoverability/connectivity and sealed insulation from any possible source of injury.

You talk so much about preventive defederation, throwing the baby away with the bathwater if that’s the price to pay to make sure that nobody ever interacts with any potentially disturbing content, and you don’t realize that you’re just creating an unscalable and sealed safe bubble that does more harm than good. You probably wouldn’t tell vulnerable people to stay sealed in their houses only with their trusted friends around to avoid any contact or potential conflict with a potential jerk on the bus, at the mall or on the street. Yet that’s exactly what you’re advocating here, telling yourself the unforgivable lie that ascetic digital exclusion from the rest of the world is the best solution to strengthen the oppressed.

You talk so much about diversity, and yet you are the one throwing insults (including the f words) at somebody who is on the same ideological camp as you, but who just so happened to reach a different conclusion than you on a certain problem, and is trying to rationally consider all the trade-offs of a difficult problem. You like diversity only as long as everybody’s conclusions are exactly aligned with yours, and you bark like a rabid dog at anyone who deviates from the only path that you feel it’s righteous, and you’re so busy enjoying the nauseous smell of your ideologically inconsistent farts that you don’t even realize that your aggressivity and your inability to engage into a civilized discussion with someone who disagrees with you on a particular topic makes YOU the true fascist here.

Now just go back and re-read the messages you’ve sent me in this thread. Do you feel proud of them? Does your aggressive language show a good picture of you? Do you feel like your friends and family would be proud of you for showing such an ugly side to a perfect stranger on the Internet who just happened to disagree with you?

If you can answer affirmatively at all of these questions, then please proceed at blocking me before I do that with you. It means that you belong to that extremist minority of the minority that takes pride of its purist ascetism and does more harm than good to the world.

Otherwise, I expect an apology for your motiveless aggression.

@fabio

"I have done more for oppressed minorities, to grant everybody equal opportunities and to combat fascists in my whole life than an equality poser like you can even imagine in 100 years."

Lol. Lmao.

@greenWhale @aud @aral @eatyourglory