I am 100% behind people-driven, federated social media. But their argument is a bit strange.
Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them.
But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in.
The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.
In a federated social network, the "best" way to operate an instance is to be apolitical only if you want to be apolitical. But there is no mandate to do that.
The entire point of instance-based federation is that you can have "political"/biased/single-topic instances, and people that like that can chose to participate.
It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.
>It must be acknowledged that most people do not want to hear from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.
I'd phrase it differently. I'd say most people online are incapable of hearing from the complete spectrum of viewpoints.
Because moving around the real world, talking to strangers for various reasons, you will end up hearing things you don't like. There is no way to de-federate from them. You just have to deal with that. And people online have a tendency to be very spoiled on this front, to want to custom tailor the human experience so there is nothing negative in it. This is a fake experience and not at all representative of humanity.
Let’s be honest here - the “different viewpoints” we’re talking about isn’t just differing taxation policies.
I do not want - in real life or on the internet - to hear from pro-pedophilias or the pro-ana crowd. Any space that welcomes and encourages those people is not a space that I want to be in.
We “defederate” in real life all the time. If a bar in town becomes known as “the nazi bar”, I won’t go there. If my favourite cafe adds a shooting range to the side, I’ll stop going there.
I might frame it slightly differently: while we have built a federated medium for sending and viewing messages, we have not yet figured out the right conventions for how to run it so it becomes a thriving community. Those conventions are things like governance structure and user expectations. Once those are in place, a durable community can form that adapts to those over time.
Every medium has conventions of use that ultimately determine what it becomes. A medium without conventions is an experimental toy, which is what mastodon has been for a long time (and to an extent what film was before groundbreaking works like Citizen Kane). Now that it is going more mainstream, the conventions need to find their way into broad use. Specifically the tooling on mastodon really needs work. It needs cross-instance community notes, it needs higher level content mod tools, it needs financial structures to support operation, etc.
Basically, there's way more to social networks and community than some tech that delivers messages, and thats where the rub is.
Yeah we have a long way to go to creating a true digital town square.
Because in a town square setting you have to hear opposing opinions sometimes, and you can't silence the people, you can't de-federate from them. You can simply move away and talk to someone else, form cliques. And that is exactly what is happening in the fediverse, drawing borders, borders of opinion and political context.
I don't think it's healthy to dismiss large swathes of humanity though. I think it's better if we communicate and find middle grounds.
Which is easier to do when you're stuck with someone IRL. Online it's much easier to reach for that block button.
Agree. Instances are well-suited to smaller communities of people, but the idea of a broader town square with people that are sufficiently different from us I think requires rethinking the medium a bit. What we have doesn't cut it, and we keep assuming clunky and sometimes counterproductive tools like blocking (or blocking instances) are going to fix it this time.
For a town square product we need to build from the assumption of it not being small community, which I think is unlike how twitterlike products are designed today. That requires encoding different conventions & assumptions of how we interact into the product, because we've brought a UI (the tweet/reply box) that assumes familiarity with the people we're talking to, when there likely is none.
Something I've been doing as a hobby is putting together different ideas for how to improve this medium, and especially around this problem. We're squeezing the expansiveness of human beliefs and behaviors through tiny little tweet-shaped holes, and a lot is getting lost.
Because when you truly let the people decide what is politically correct to say online, we have already seen that bubbles are formed and borders are drawn. I don't know how many different fediverses there are out there, someone should do a project and try to map them.
But I can tell which bubble Mozilla wants to be in.
The best way to navigate the fediverse, as an instance operator, is to be completely apolitical. Even then people will hate you for not taking a stance, but I think you'll get away with a minimal amount of polarization.