Blake Leonard on Nostr: I'm beginning to think that the (Mastodon/ActivityPub) Fediverse actually can't be ...
I'm beginning to think that the (Mastodon/ActivityPub) Fediverse actually can't be what we're trying to make it (i.e. the definitive social web). Mastodonians are so brazenly hostile towards things like search and quote posting that would help everyone from Black people calling out impostors to experts offering helpful commentary, and bridges that bring more people on¹, and towards anyone who knowingly or not violates the norms. If you bully everyone off the Fediverse, nobody's going to be here. You'll have your little sheltered corner and that's it. So many respectable people have been bullied off of here, to the point that Threads and Bluesky with all of their moderation problems are more comfortable to them.
We also just don't have the tools necessary to effectively expel hate or control spam. (Or rather, we do, but they're not added in or deployed really anywhere.) Instead, we have feudal forum admins who ban everyone they disagree with, cutting thousands of people off from their friends at a whim. Even corporate moderation isn't this bad.
Defederation culture is already making Fedi unusable for pretty much fucking everyone -- like COVID, everyone knows someone who's been defederated, and there's a pretty good chance you have been or will be defederated from your friends too. And once it's happened, there's no going back to how it was before.
Plus, our software is built for the old web where federation was the norm, not the new web many people are used to. This makes it very confusing for newcomers and old-timers alike. This is probably the one real advantage Nostr has. Bluesky kinda does this but they're mostly a centralized silo (for now) so maybe they don't count for this point.
The unfortunate thing about having a world that could be whatever you want is that nobody can agree on what it should be.
¹ I totally understand the problems with this; my point was that blocking so many people from joining is counterproductive. See my points about the software and the moderation tools.
We also just don't have the tools necessary to effectively expel hate or control spam. (Or rather, we do, but they're not added in or deployed really anywhere.) Instead, we have feudal forum admins who ban everyone they disagree with, cutting thousands of people off from their friends at a whim. Even corporate moderation isn't this bad.
Defederation culture is already making Fedi unusable for pretty much fucking everyone -- like COVID, everyone knows someone who's been defederated, and there's a pretty good chance you have been or will be defederated from your friends too. And once it's happened, there's no going back to how it was before.
Plus, our software is built for the old web where federation was the norm, not the new web many people are used to. This makes it very confusing for newcomers and old-timers alike. This is probably the one real advantage Nostr has. Bluesky kinda does this but they're mostly a centralized silo (for now) so maybe they don't count for this point.
The unfortunate thing about having a world that could be whatever you want is that nobody can agree on what it should be.
¹ I totally understand the problems with this; my point was that blocking so many people from joining is counterproductive. See my points about the software and the moderation tools.