this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024

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A social archipelago: Against social media colonialism (draft) (gils.nexus)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't usually self promo but I was interested in the concept of a social archipelago facilitated by closed federation/allowlisting, in response to a lot of the bigotry and spam that's on the Fediverse and how difficult it can be to moderate. I was also curious about how Beehaw/Lemmy users feel about allowlisting and closed federation especially since Beehaw's on the cusp of switching to an allowlist. What are y'all's thoughts on the concept of a social archipelago?

While writing, I consulted these two essays which introduce this idea, so I'll leave them here as "further reading":

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don't bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don't immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that's a problem for future Nath - maybe.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

This would accelerate the fediverse to becoming a monoculture of thought.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm concerned that people are already eager to bury the fediverse and unwilling to consider what would be lost. The solutions I keep hearing in this space all seem to hinge on making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

Same thing with reply policies. I can see the reason why people want them, but a major advantage on the fedi is the sense that there is little difference between posters. I think a lot of this would just recreate structures of power and influence, just without doing so formally--after all the nature of scale-free networks is large inequality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

making the place less equal, more of a broadcast medium, and less accessible to unconnected individuals and small groups.

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

How does an instance get into one of these archipelagos if they use allowlists?

By reaching out, I would say. It's most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I've seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I do not think it is a very good analogy. I do not see how this would turn into a broadcast medium. Though I do agree it can feel less accessible and there is a risk of building echo chambers.

Not so concerned on that--people being able to establish their tolerances for whom they want to talk to is fine with me. But if the system goes towards allowlists, it becomes more cliquish and finding a way in is more difficult. It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they're not handled another way.

It’s most likely a death sentence for one-persone instances. Which is not ideal. On the other hand, I’ve seen people managing their own instance give up on the idea when they realized how little control they have over what gets replicated on their instance and how much work is required to moderate replies and such. In short, the tooling is not quite there.

I run my instance and that's definitely not my experience. Which is of course not to say it can't be someone else's. But something, in my opinion not unimportant, is lost when it becomes harder to find a way in.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

It would tend towards centralisation just because of the popularity of certain posters/instances and how scale-free networks behave when they’re not handled another way.

Ah, I get you. That's true.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

The Fediverse is Already Dead

Eh... This take is one grumpy dude in a hacker space somewhere soap boxing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think the current technical limitations push us toward this archipelago model.

The thing is, bigotry and racism, to name only two, will exist on any social media, any platform where anyone is free to post something. And since those are societal issue, I don't think it is up to the fediverse to solve. Not all by itself by any means.

What the fediverse can solve however, is to allow instances to protect themselves and their members from such phenomenon. And my limited understanding, as a simple user, is that's it's not possible right now. Not on lemmy nor on Mastodon, if I trust the recent communications around moderation and instance blocking. Not without resorting to allow list.

This is annoying to admit because it goes against the spirit of the fediverse. But the archipelago model is the only sane solution short term IMO. And it will stay that way until the moderation tools make a leap and allow some way to share the load between instances and even between users.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

@CasualTee I think both models (i.e. allowlist/blocklist) have their own perks and drawbacks and are all necessary for a healthy and enjoyable internet.

The reason why this is the way it is, I think, is that most of us are both in a minority and a majority at the same time. Take for example me: I am a cis white Romanian, just like the majority of the people in my country. I do however tend to hold some more progressive views, which puts me in a smaller group (e.g. I do think that LGBTQIA+ folks should be allowed to marry each other and adopt children). I do support Ukraine and hope it wins the war, which is what most people do, and I also believe climate change is real, and that it affects our daily lives (you might find that surprisingly maybe that I call myself having a majority view like this, but most people like me are old enough to remember the snowy winters pre-2015). Yet I am totally decided to spend as much of my life possible without owning a car, and trying to do all sorts of things to be more eco-friendly. I am also an atheist, which, it seems, is not so much of a majority view, as most of the people declare themselves Orthodox (and many more are believers in a different religion - Muslims, Greek/Roman Catholics, Judaists etc.) - and the list goes on and on.

I am sure many of you find yourselves in a similar position, and again, that's okay. You don't have to fight against the wind if you don't have a reason to.

What the Fediverse tried, however, was to take the control of social media from the hands of the few, and put it in the hands of the many - and it is partly succeeding - it's just a much better way of managing the online social interactions, free of any censorship that would go against our views (and Beehaw is no exception, congrats, team! 😁).

Now that people are fleeing to the Fediverse, we're just gathering our tribe - and this is a natural phenomenon. You'll never talk and interact with anybody on this planet during your life, not even in your country or even your city if it's large enough. But you might have friends that have friends that talk to certain people or others, and so on. You might also agree to communicate with any of these people at some point, or maybe the way they view things is just too different from yours that you might choose not to see these people ever again.

Even back on Facebook I found some people that I was (and still am to this day) dead sure that they outright blocked me, even without doing anything bad. And I also blocked others myself.

So yeah, the Fediverse is more representative of life as a whole. And that's a great thing.

Not on Lemmy nor on Mastodon, if I trust the recent communications around moderation and instance blocking.

GoToSocial, to my knowledge, does have an allowlist mode btw.

And Hubzilla uses a different protocol, that allows for Nomadic Identity. Not sure if this will have any type of impact on moderation, however.

@kalanggam

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I think both models (i.e. allowlist/blocklist) have their own perks and drawbacks and are all necessary for a healthy and enjoyable internet.

I would tend to agree. I think both methods have their merits. Though ideally I'd rather have most instances use a blocklist model. This is less cumbersome to the average user and this achieves (in my opinion) one of fediverse goal of having an online identity not tied to an instance, an online identity you can easily migrate (including comments, follow, DMs, ...) if needed.

But the blocklist model is too hard to maintain at this time. There are various initiative to try and make it work, such as fediseer, and it might be good enough for most. But I think it's a trap we should not fall into. On the fediverse, "good enough for most" is not good enough.

Now that people are fleeing to the Fediverse, we’re just gathering our tribe - and this is a natural phenomenon.

I think there is indeed something of that effect going on as well, this is true. But I do not think this warrants a move to allowlist by itself.

I think the move to allowlist is mandated by the fact that building a safe space for "minorities" is hard. The tools to alleviate issues such as harassment and bigotry are not sufficient at this time to keep those communities fully open.

Which is a shame as I think the best way to fight those issues, as a society, is to have people express themselves and have healthy conversation on issues that are rarely brought up.

But we are not entirely giving that up by moving to an archipelago model. It just means that individuals would have multiple accounts, on different archipelago. The downside is that it makes the fediverse less approachable to the average person.