Comment by prisenco

Comment by prisenco 3 hours ago

I'm a consultant that builds for startups. I'm not an entrepreneur myself.

If I were to build something like this, I'd use a services non-profit model.

Ad-supported apps result in way too many perverse economic incentives in social media, as we've seen time and time again.

I worked on open source decentralized social networking for 12 years, starting before Facebook even launched. Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.

krapp 3 hours ago

>Decentralization, specifically political decentralization which is what federation is, makes the problems of moderation, third order social effects, privacy and spam exceedingly more difficult.

I disagree that federation is "specifically political decentralization" but how so?

You claim that decentralization makes all of the problems of mainstream social networking worse and more intractable, but I think most of those problems come from the centralized nature of mainstream social media.

There is only one Facebook, and only one Twitter, and if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad. If you don't like the way moderation works with an instance, you don't have to federate with it, you can create your own instance and moderate however you see fit.

This seems like a better solution than everyone being subject to the whims of a centralized service.

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prisenco 33 minutes ago

To clarify, I don't mean big P Politics, I mean political in the sense that each node is owned and operated separately, which means there are competing interests and a need to coordinate between them that extends beyond the technical. Extrapolated to N potential nodes creates a lot of conflicting incentives and perspectives that have to be managed. And if the network ever becomes concentrated in a handful of nodes or even one of them which is not unlikely, then we're effectively back at square one.
| if you don't like the way Zuckerberg and Musk run things, too bad
It's important to note we're optimizing for different things. When I say third-order social effects, it means the way that engagement algorithms and virality combine with massive scale to create a broadly negative effect on society. This comes in the form of addiction, how constant upward social comparison can lead to depression and burnout, or how in extreme situations, society's worst tendencies can be amplified into terrible results with Myanmar being the worst case scenario.
You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience. You can always put up a website, blog, write for an op-ed position at your local newspaper, hold a sign in a public square, etc. The mere existence of a centralized system with moderation is not a threat to freedom of speech.
Federation is a little bit more resilient but accounts can be blacklisted, and whole nodes can be blacklisted because of the behavior of a handful of accounts. And unfortunately, that little bit of resilience amplifies the problem of spam and bots, which for the average user is much bigger of a concern than losing their account. Not to mention privacy concerns, which is self-evident why an open system is more difficult than a closed one.
I'll concede that "worse" was poor wording, but intractable certainly wasn't. These problems become much more difficult to solve in a federated system.
However, most advocates of federation aren't interested in solving the same problems as I am, so that's where the dissonance comes from.

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