I think the splitting of mastodon into federated communities is a bad idea.
I think this because the communities are isolated and this naturally generates division and clashes among different groups of people.
While I don't currently see huge problems, I can see this getting worse as more people join the social network.
I'll take the Italian community as an example, since that's what I know best.
Italian mastodon is split into several different communities, the largest are generalist.
If I'm not mistaken, the largest three are: mastodon.uno mastodon.social mastodon.bida.im
The first one proclaims to be the official mastodon instance for Italy and many people from the other instances disagree with this.
I'll analyse this particular conflict, which appears to currently be the largest one in the Italian community.
I'll refer to mastodon.uno as the main instance and others/outsiders for all the other Italian instances.
Not all Italian instances are involved in this debate, but most of them are; there is maybe livellosegreto.it that stands a bit more neutral.
Other instances look down on the administrator of mastodon.uno and often criticise some of his actions.
The admin of the main instance condems the other instances for being anarchists/rebellious, it is true that some of these instances host some anarchists but that definitely is not the scope of those instances.
The admin of the main instance sometimes responds by blocking/silencing people at an instance level.
Going forward, this hate towards the admin migrates towards the users of the main instance.
Thus you will get people from the other instances discussing with each other about how bad the users of the main instance are and often insulting them.
More often than not these are just generic insults directed towards nobody in particular.
However, since most of the people engaging in these behaviours are being blocked by the main instance, most of the people that are being insulted are ignare about it.
You thus get a system in which according to the instance you choose you'll be induced into hating certain people or you'll receive insults solely for your instance choice.
It becomes normal to make jokes about mastodon.uno users, for no particular reason and new people joining get used to it.
Now, this is just a petty fight about the ideology behind instance administration and the discussion is mainly about some bold claims and practices done by the administrator of mastodon.uno.
However, this system could get much worse when instances with different ideologies get to clash with each other.
At that point you'll get real radicalisation of people.
I don't think there's a solution to this.
Defederating an instance might work only when it is getting started; defederating gab has no real effect since it already has enough people to self sustain.
Deciding to defederate a small instance is however hard and won't probably work, since people will be skeptical about closing their doors to someone who is just starting out.
All in all, I think the system is flawed and that no solution is available to avoid these problems from arising once many users join.
I offer no solution.
I've been thinking a bit more about this issue with #mastodon.
I think that the advantages of mastodon over other commercial social networks is overstated by its users.
There is a shared consensus that mastodon solves most of the problems of other social networks, mainly because it does not rely on a personalized algorithm that shows you different posts based on your preferences.
Since there is no central advertising system this prevents the rise of targeted advertisements and discourages profiling and tracking of users by removing the economical incentives that come with that.
Not having a suggestion algorithm that has the objective of keeping you connected as much as possible also reduces the circulation of divisive and overstated contents.
This doesn't prevent other issues that come with social networks however; mainly the spread of fake news.
The prevention of the spread of fake news on mastodon is delegated to the instance administrators and to the single users.
The users are expected to check what they read and not to share fake news; this clearly fails as demonstrated by other social networks.
Users are also expected to check what other users post and call them out when they realize that's fake news, this works to an extent at this moment, but I don't see it working on a larger scale.
Instance administrators are responsible of checking all things that happens on their server and all the stuff that comes in from the federation.
This might be possible on very small instances, but I see a trend of large instances forming and increasing in size.
In this instances you'll have the administrator and a few moderators volunteering to check what's going on.
Such few people definitely cannot keep track of everything going on and this will get worse if this gets larger.
If all facebook users were to move to mastodon, I imagine the majority of them would be split among the main 20 instances or so.
Moreover, at that scale you would get people interested in manipulating what information is available and what information is not.
This is very easy on mastodon; if someone wanted to do something like this he simply would have to open an instance and manipulate the content circulating around.
Since most servers are opened by volunteers with little funding, a company or a government could easily open a large instance and outcompete the others by having more servers that can handle more people and employees checking what content is circulating.
These instances could easily manipulate people and instill ideas through radicalization, which as I explained above is easily accomplished.
I think this is the main problem with mastodon and I prefer commercial social networks over it at a large scale.
This is because commercial social networks do have the economical power of checking what's going on and can be enforced to do so by governments.
Regarding the tracking of users, this is not a problem that can be solved in commercial social networks, however it is something that should be regulated by governments and its negative sides are opinable.
I think mastodon is currently a decent social network with nice people using it.
It would be nice if it stayed like that.
Mastodon users are increasing however and the objective appears to be to increase the userbase.
I prefer commercial social networks over mastodon.
I do not use commercial social networks, but I don't expect people to stop using social networks.
@rastinza Interesting thoughts. I agree that Mastodon won´t stay free of fake news. I don´t understand why you end with saying that you prefer commercial social networks but you don´t use it though. I believe that de-masking fake news is a matter of crowd-sourcing. It's above the heads of both government and companies. AI might come to the resque some day. Let's hope that it will become free to use in the fediverse.
@evonity @rastinza
Yeah I actually think it's healthy for people to eventually realise and think for themselves from training to see it and also from seeing not to trust others blind or at top level / and the same old small and big-time scams.
The root of many things is the everyday shit-show / back-talking of people and this basically is what need fixing lol - sad but true and completely human- just need evolution out of it and not falling for it over and over or people
and not feeding those things over and over as personal control / responsibility.
@evonity I'll expand a little bit on this point.
I do not use commercial social networks at the moment while I did use Facebook years ago.
Mastodon is the first social network I'm using in 7 years.
I do not use commercial social networks mainly because they're strictly linked to me and I mainly interact with my friends; most of the times I used to get into arguments or just waste time reading useless stuff about them and thus I decided to stop doing that and actually meet my friends or call them on the phone.
I still have that account that I occasionally open since I do receive messages from time to time.
I started using mastodon because I interact with people I don't know and I can actually find some interesting things.
I believe the stuff people writes on mastodon is currently more interesting that what I used to find on facebook.
Personally, I prefer using mastodon.
This doesn't mean that I believe it is a superior system.
I'm now thinking about the social network that most of the people should use.
I prefer the majority of people to be using commercial social networks.
I prefer this, because I have the idea (definitely unproven) that it is easier for them to control the spread of fake news and malicious groups intervervention.
They have failed to prevent it until now, but I still believe they can do it better than mastodon in the future.
I don't think de-masking fake news is a matter of crowd sourcing.
I believe it's impossible to address all fake news and conspiracy theories that are sprawling by analyzing and explaining the mistakes.
Also, you would have to get people to actually read and understand your explanation; which is not so easy.
Moreover there is plenty of people that got convinced about certain theories and won't believe whatever explanation you provide.
I believe the best way to fight fake news is a widespread education, but this is impossible in short times (such as 50 years) specially if you see that plenty of people share fake news in rich and educated countries; this will be even more difficult for poor countries.
Thus I believe it would be good to identify ways to block people from spreading fake news.
This is dangerous, because you're giving someone e.g. Facebook the power to decide what information is good and what instead should be censored.
I believe this should best be done by a government or at least strictly regulated.
Even with the best intentions, the biases of the people operating this censorship will get through, but I still believe this to be better than this spread of fake news.
I don't know how this issue can be solved, perhaps by giving more visibility to newspapers over other sources of information; whatever that is, I believe that large companies have more resources to find a solution and should be compelled by governments to find one.
This won't solve the problem completely, but it might help in reducing it.
For example: facebook was able to identify a Russian influence over the elections in the USA.
They did not prevent it and found it only after the fact; but since they were able to identify it, it could be possible for them to develop systems to prevent these kinds of things in the future.
Regarding AI: it could aid in doing something for sure, but AI itself is not the solution.
You have to be careful about what AI has been trained on and what it is doing.
Moreover, since there is no central authority in mastodon you cannot enforce an AI to do fact checking.
Overall, I believe that Facebook could better protect from fake news a stupid guy who just logs in and believes in everything he reads than mastodon, and this is what I want a popular social network to do.
Mastodon can work well as long as it doesn't become popular.
@rastinza I listened to an interesting podcast by Mozilla on the topic of disinformation the other day: https://irlpodcast.org/season6/episode4/
@evonity
Thanks, I'll listen to it later
@rastinza Very interesting.
The fake new is kind of a new thing for me to consider... as responsibility of individuals (who are getting better and understanding themselves much more but not being repeaters) or admin who could filter or even educate. This cover a lot of FreeSchool type checks or control points for people and admins to make decision / filter nicely.
So fake news interesting new topic - love to talk about that in audio probably.
And then yes Mastodon hijacking type stuff (perhaps bad label) but the usual mainstream tactics when they see anything good or popular or advantageous to undermine slowly knowing people trust something all in to start with.
For example and shock horror for me is that someone told me this what we're writing could be on google at the same time (was clear how other that talking about the 'opt out of search' which google doesn't have to respect much like they don't respect the 'do not track me' in browsers) so that was scary (I trusted you Mastodon I cry like in a movie!!!)
For sure Mastodon is decent in many ways and has more consideration that actually I'd like to talk about and encourage more audibly as medium more interactive than text-only people do as micro consideration (which perhaps get's lost unless it's on GitHub :> ).
Can you say more about the preference with commercial social networks over Mastodon and how that balances out - is just better for some more things you weight or deal-breaker type stuff (and if Mastodon had that would that make you more Mastodon weighted?)