Martin Ruskov @mapto@social.cleverlibre.org

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@dashdsrdash Okay, found it. Content warning: the crux issue was CP, and the person who wrote this blog post is pretty clearly identified with political positions that, let us say, you do not share.

2017 Apr 3: Ansuz (personal blog): "Mastodon WTF timeline" by Matthew Skala
https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/335

The most interesting thing we can do with our voices is to open up spaces of discourse. And that's what I would most like to enlist you in.

I would love to see emerge on Mastodon, finally at long last, a discourse about social media platforms that centers social engineering as an actual thing. That is based on the ideas that we should be curious how things actually work and check our hypotheses against reality, that we should take responsibility for how our virtual built environment shapes the society that flows through it and the society in which it reposes, that there are things worth knowing here, things worth finding out, and interesting people to talk to.

Fundamentally I am hoping to *interest you* in the entire topic of social engineering, in this new sense that I mean it. Because if you are interested in it and if you talk about it with other people who are interested in it, and interest in it grows, then it will feed on itself and it will grow as a field.

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All of you.

This message isn't just for "the people in charge".

For one thing, this is a *federated* system. This means the odds that you, personally, might be a "person in charge" in some sense go way, way up. And if not today, maybe tomorrow.

Furthermore, some instances are straight up democracies. Everybody on them is a person in charge.

But much more importantly, you have a voice. And if you're on Mastodon you probably use it.

I am hoping to convince you to use that voice not just to call for remedies you are certain will work to solve problems you haven't really specified. I'm inviting you to engage with curiosity questions like, "I wonder what the pros and cons of this are?" and "I wonder what it is that is giving me that impression, and how I might check out whether or not it is true?" and "I wonder if there are any other social media platforms that came up with a solution to this?"

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This raises some very fundamental and quite interesting questions about what the role of moderation is on a social media platform. Is it the job of a social media platform to prevent people from using it to collaborate to commit crimes?

Historically, a lot of people who have put together social media platforms have insisted it is absolutely not the job of the platform – or the people who run it – to do that.

But if it's not the job of the platform to do that, whose job is it, when a platform, by its affordances, makes real world crimes – horrendous, very serious "real-world" crimes like actual genocide – not just more likely, but so much more likely they are effectively enabling a crime that wouldn't otherwise happen?

Why should our societies – our larger, meat-world societies – tolerate the building and operating of social media platforms that destabilize them and are detrimental to them?

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The social media world is filled with people just pulling ideas out of their asses and hoping it all works out.

Folks who have been around the block a few times in a governance role have started amassing a body of lore. Case studies, observations they made in the trenches.

At the very least, availing oneself of what they have to share is a good first step.

But if we were to take this seriously as engineering, well, that suggests a few things, doesn't it?

It suggest we get a little bit more sciency about this. It suggests we start imposing a little bit of rigor.

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