If the goal is solidarity and community, creating a world where little feudal lords reign over independent territories and negotiate the terms of the interchange of ideas can hardly be the best answer. I very much understand that in times of rising authoritarianism such an escape into decentralised resistance is alluring to progressive political movements. But this is a temporary fix at best. It is not a progressive vision for what comes after. Decentralisation without social institutions that debate, define and – when necessary – enforce fairness and equality is a euphemism for survival of the fittest.
Imagine Mastodon had a governance system where all users, admins and minorities were equally represented. Imagine this system intervened in the practices of some admins. Right now I can only imagine the Mastodon community to react with an outcry about such an audacious attack on their free and decentralised kingdom. This reaction would be completely in line with libertarian impulses that are so very present in all things digital. Cyberlibertarians routinely invoke the “free internet” as a vague supreme ideal that has to be defended against any kind of collective, democratic governance. Their ideology is based on private control and decentralised market-based exchange. It has no use for community, solidarity and participation. It is founded on contempt for democratic intervention, a belief in the unique nature of the digital realm and the superiority of those controlling it. These ideas are very present in the Mastodon community as well. Most often this is not the result of an active ideological commitment to libertarian or right-wing views. It is, however, very open to being instrumentalised by these ideologies and it is reinforcing them – willingly or not.
This is basically an article arguing for a fedi equivalent of the UN.
Arguably the barriers to entry for running your own Fediverse software instance are relatively low, therefore users are at not that much of an admin mercy as with commercial social media platforms. People running their instances for others provide a service and they should be allowed to run them as they wish, in accordance to a tried principle of many self-governing communities where those that actually do things should have the most say in how those things are done.
I wouldn’t discount the value of instances being effectively little kingdoms either - it allows them to be ran with focus and purpose. We can’t afford paid admins / moderators and we need them not to burn out, therefore they need a degree of autonomy too. There are many benefits to be found in an instance where leadership simply aligns with your values and you can trust them to do the right thing most of the time, without Wikipedia worth of community rules. Everyone should be encouraged to find an instance like this but it requires thoughtful participation which circles back to the issue that most people don’t want to do this work. There are plenty of solutions that cater to them though.
I get the idea that the article takes a stab at the communities becoming dangerous silos but in the world where so much social media thrives on conflict and outrage, there’s a value in a safe space too. We need spaces for people with common beliefs to discuss things without being derailed by already discounted arguments from outside because there’s enormous value in proliferation of ideas happening on an open platform without resorting to closed off spaces.
The biggest issue that I see is that certain instances, such as lemmy.world, host an inordinate number of users and communities, meaning that the admins/moderators of lemmy.world have considerably more power over the Fediverse as a whole.
If users/communities were ‘detached’ from instances and could freely move around easily, this wouldn’t be as significant of a problem, but as it is - and especially considering how the lemmy.world admins have demonstrated bias in favor of zionism, for example - I think it’s quite a big problem.
Subreddits like r/worldnews have quietly suppressed anti-zionist sentiment for a long time, and lemmy.ml and lemmy.world have demonstrated similar problems but on a broader, instance-wide scale - though lemmy.ml is more about suppressing opposition to marxism-leninism (aka tankies).
In case of the Threadiverse lack of account portability isn’t that much of an issue unless you really care about karma which thankfully is discouraged systemically here. With Mastodon I kind of understand it because you need to port over friends who follow you but this has no equivalent in the Threadiverse. If you need to move you can just export your settings and you’re off on your merry way.
I’m not a fan of Lemmy.world either but they cater to people who don’t really care about what they chose. It’s not like they are trapped there. If they’re fine with Zionism then at least I know it based on their user handle, which is another benefit of those little kingdoms.
I’ve composed some really high quality comments and posts on this account which I would rather not lose if pawb.social somehow goes rogue.
But, really, it’s the communities being tied to instances that is a far bigger problem. Most lemmy.world users are anti-zionist and unaware of the admin team biases. It’s unfair and misleading to assume a lemmy.world user is zionist just from their instance, and plenty of communities have been created there which are the de-facto fediverse defaults for the topic, and thus subject to the whims of the lemmy.world admin/mod team.
Basically, community moderators are like vassals to the instance admins/moderators, who are functionally lords, who serve at the pleasure of the instance owner/host, functionally the kings.
It’s a really serious issue, and I think we should address it sooner rather than later by decentralizing away from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, but that’s difficult to do now that the communities are already established, and would likely be resisted by lemmy.world who have an incentive to maintain their position of dominance.
Piefed already does have a community migration system - But it’s long-term goal is to make communities completely modular, allowing a community owner to completely move an entire community from one instance to another. I have even called for it to also shift subscribers of that community too when a community moves.
Account shifting in the same way hasn’t been spoken about, but it sounds like a good idea.
I’ve composed some really high quality comments and posts on this account which I would rather not lose if pawb.social somehow goes rogue.
This content was backed up to multiple instances so it won’t be lost that easily. Fediverse platforms/protocols aren’t that great at archival so I embrace that this is more of a place of discussion rather than storage which traditional forums excel at.
Basically, community moderators are like vassals to the instance admins/moderators, who are functionally lords, who serve at the pleasure of the instance owner/host, functionally the kings.
The difference being that you can create your own kingdom easily because we have access to unlimited land and resources, making any attempt at control futile, which is something that kings have to keep in mind.
It’s a really serious issue, and I think we should address it sooner rather than later by decentralizing away from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, but that’s difficult to do now that the communities are already established, and would likely be resisted by lemmy.world who have an incentive to maintain their position of dominance.
I’m doing my part by not contributing any content to communities hosted on those instances but we can’t make people happy against their will. If you’re worried that we need to outcompete them in some popularity metrics remember that half of humanity is dumber than an average person ;)
The difference being that you can create your own kingdom easily because we have access to unlimited land and resources, making any attempt at control futile, which is something that kings have to keep in mind.
It feels like you’re glossing over the problem. If the lemmy.world admins start oppressing furries, for example, very few people are going to migrate away from lemmy.world to replacement communities on pawb.social, they’re just going to remain on the anti-furry lemmy.world communities, which will continue to grow and disenfranchise furries, and most users probably wouldn’t even notice the problem.
It’s all well and good to say “you can just spin up your own instance and create whatever communities you want”, but if nobody is going to read my posts and comments I may as well post them into a sewage drain.
I would imagine that in this hypothetical scenario furries would be able to move to a new instance and keep reading their own posts without further interruption. If they wouldn’t move then they weren’t a community and just a bunch of random people. Then again I’m a person to build a vampire castle and keep posting into the void because too much popularity is annoying.
Sure, the furries can do that, but that just creates essentially segregated communities, and there are far fewer furries than non-furries. It really feels like you just want to pretend this isn’t a problem, but I’m not sure why
the admins/moderators of lemmy.world have considerably more power over the Fediverse as a whole.
Allow me to present a counterargument in partial disagreement. Isn’t the greatest value derived not from the laziest among us, who can’t be bothered to read much or to think, but rather from those who offer the most in service? i.e. from the most prolific posters rather than a mere collection of lurkers and low-volume posters? LW being merely “large” isn’t the issue here.
And on that note, I do not have any firm stats but I thought that many highly prolific posters had moved elsewhere, at least part of the time? If I sort All by Top Week then about half of those accounts are on Lemmy.World, though e.g. TPM also has accounts on multiple other instances. Also, LW used to have ~80% of Lemmy accounts, whereas now it has “only” ~40% iirc, plus now PieFed also exists on the Threadiverse as well, so much progress has been made towards decentralization.
Of course, many people that remain may genuinely believe in the more “liberal”/centrist stance held by LW’s admin team, regardless of popularity of their post content, and speaking of, the latter likely reflects a trend towards the proclivities of the Threadiverse as a whole. i.e., purity testing leads to smaller and smaller echo chambers, and while necessary (bc of e.g. the Paradox of Intolerance), should also be kept in mind to be constrained if the goal is to have the healthiest network. The recent banning of ALL content from certain artists - not just looking at individual submissions for racism, misogy, or anti-lgbtqia+ tendencies but the entire body of work from that artist - from comics communities is one example: that action reduces the available content for consumption, but in ways that the overall community desires, thus striving to achieve the maximum balance of friendliness and welcoming feeling in community members, by excluding certain types of content that would have turned people away from the community entirely. People can speak more readily and freely in a safer space than in the cacophony of a more toxic environment.
Speaking of, don’t forget that somehow even facts themselves are debatable by some people, plus so very many people seem to have the agenda that bullying is okay when done by them but not in reverse, plus they attempt to claim that somehow not always listening to their drivel = bullying. Again citing the Paradox of Intolerance, retaining such “free speech” instances will most definitely constrain actual free speech across all Fediverse platforms.
So remember then that some people PREFER to be defederated from the likes of hexbear and lemmygrad and yes AN - that’s not a detraction for them but rather a feature. Especially those who do not want to put in as much time individually curating their experiences on the Threadiverse, this is an attractive option for them, and they would seek it out even if they left LW. For example, PieFed.World is also the 5th largest PieFed instance. These are people who put in the effort to make an account on a new instances, giving up accessibility to modify their old content from the new account, and yet they actively chose the same admin team as LW. Which while decreasing (somewhat?) the power of the LW instance, yet further increases the power of that admin team - because people have actively sought it out, and not merely as a kind of default when fleeing Reddit but presumably as a conscious, informed choice.
I always block c/worldnews as one of the first things I do whenever I make an account on a new instance, so I am less informed about that one, but I wonder if some of the same thoughts apply - how many people consciously choose that moderation style vs. it happening to them unawares. I truly do not know which of these is more likely, just wondering.
This is something that has been on my mind as well - centralized platforms such as Reddit et al. are functionally monarchies, but the Fediverse is functionally feudal… which, y’know, isn’t great… the thing is, I’m not sure how we can solve this problem, and I’ve thought about it quite a bit over the years.
The root of the issue is that there is no way to preserve privacy and also ensure that every user is a real human and not a bot/sockpuppet or whatever, so any forms of democracy are dead on arrival on the Internet. The only thing I can really think of would be a real-world fully mutual co-operative that requires in-person voting to decide on issues, but obviously that would mean that instances would need to be tied to a real-world location. I suppose live video calls might be possible, but idk… with modern AI deepfakes, even that might be prone to manipulation by malicious actors.
Until we’ve got a solution to that problem, I think federated feudal states is about the best we can do, and it’s a vast improvement over the monarchic alternative.
One important difference to feudalism is that you can really easily move your homestead to another lord’s domain.
I’d say that does solve a lot. Making instance-switching more fluent, and then yet more fluent, would be enough in my eyes.
Peasants could move between fiefs, but fiefs couldn’t easily move, except by gathering everyone up, and packing everything they can into a caravan, and taking a perilous journey to new lands. Users are peasants, communities are fiefs.
Decentralisation is a well-known trope in Cyberlibertarianism, as the late David Golumbia has already explained in his book of the same title (read Aline’s thoughts about it here).
I remember finding some of the writings of David Golumbia some years ago. At first I thought it was making me unreasonably angry that someone might believe such wrong and stupid things, but as I thought more about it, I realized that my anger was actually very reasonable.
Hint: pretty much everyone thinks their own ideas are “progressive” because the word “progress” generally has a positive cultural connotation!
This is somewhere between ‘not a very compelling argument’ to ‘oh ok I guess left-anarchism doesn’t exist’.
The whole thing is essentially ideology by, and as, analogy.
Cool!
Wanna try any empiricism?
Not an erudite vibes based argument?
Imagine Mastodon had a governance system where all users, admins and minorities were equally represented.
Nah, I’d rather try to imagine a goverance system where users and admins either don’t exist as seperate categories, or are as close to indistinguishable as possible.
This person defines progress as managed, fair, hierachy.
… howabout abolishing class, to the greatest extent possible?
But according to this person, my backlash to this is rooted in … property rights.
Got it.
Turbolib can’t imagine any ideology other than their own, also grass is green.
Maybe they could come by the goverance comms of dbzer0 and the rest of the flotilla, for some exposure to some other ideas?
Yep, first thought that popped into my head after reading it was that it had big “freedom for me but not for thee” vibes. But of course their “freedom for me but not for thee” is better for everyone than the other kinds.
Not only is it better, its the only possible option.
Other options literally do not exist, you can’t see them at all through the frame job of this Overton window, drapes are done up in Hayek, and if you don’t like the drapes, you’re an anarcho capitalist.
lmao yeah xD
I stopped reading as soon as he said “you know who else liked decentralization…”
Thanks for delivering the misericord.
Sadly the UN is ineffectual, being dictated to by the largest and most influential. It ignores the plights of smaller nations, and results in factionalism.
I think the model of the FAF with its focus on giving power back to its users and promoting instance voting on decisions is a much better system to emulate.
Ultimately what we need are less admins who act on their own, and more community accountability for decision making. Having many smaller people led communities can allow for free association between groups who share likeminded ethics.
FAF?
Until it’s possible to pick up posts, comments, vote history, user profiles, user history, entire communities, etc. and take that information to a different instance, federation still feels like silo’d social media.
Great discussion thank you.
@rimu@piefed.social is this your post @rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz ??🤔🤔🤔
Yes those are the same person, on different platforms.
