Are we decentralized yet?

> BlueSky (for the average user) is pretty much a drop in replacement for Twitter.

One reason Bluesky is so successful is because it doesn't shove decentralisation into the user's face like Mastodon does. The vast majority of people don't know what decentralisation is and don't care to.

I think that far too much effort is put into decentralisation and not enough into good moderation on these platforms.

Moderation is definitely Fediverse’s weakness.

https://roost.tools is working on open-source options for both social (fedi or not) and beyond social. Generally the idea is that we can fight the bad things better if we are working together instead of independently

ATProto's Stacked Moderation is an interesting approach to combine platform, community, and user level choices

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...

There are also significant practical user experience differences.

Doing a search on Twitter searches Twitter, the whole thing. A search on Mastodon only knows about the servers you're connected to (unless you're searching for a specific user, then it'll micro-target their server to get their account info, but you have to know their name through some side-channel. Similarly, if you chance across a Mastodon post and want to follow that user, unless you happen to be on the same node as them you have to enter your own node data to get redirected to do the follow because of the domain-based nature of web security.

These aren't deal-breakers but we have the hard numbers from other web UX to know that every time you put a friction point like these in the flow, you immediately lose some x% of users. Relative to services that are centralized, these things will slow Mastodon adoption.

(This may not be the worst thing. There are other goals besides maximizing the adoption numbers.)

I'm curious if you could expand on this observation? I've heard this from other Mastodon users but I haven't seen it myself; I wonder if it varies heavily from server to server or if I've just gotten lucky.

Moderation (the intent and success) varies to such a huge extent that it's practically silly to talk about moderation on Mastodon unless you mean moderation on a specific mastodon server (like mastodon.social). But moderation (the process) is intense and servers are usually community run on the change found in a spare couch (i.e. they're volunteers).

I think they do quite well considering the disparate resource levels, but some servers are effectively unmoderated while others are very comfortable; plenty are racist or other types of bigot friendly, but the infrastructure for server-level blocks is ad-hoc. Yet it still seems to work better than you'd guess.

Decentralization means whomever runs the server could be great, could just not be good at running a server, could be a religious fundamentalist, a literal cop, a literal communist, a literal nazi, etc etc. And all have different ideas of what needs moderating. There is no mechanism to enforce that "fediverse wide" other than ad-hoc efforts on top of the system.

I don't use Mastodon because it's too decentralized.

What I mean is I own my own domains but I can't use them on Mastodon without self hosting an entire Mastodon server for one user per domain. Yes there are other implementations of the protocol but none really solve this well in a cheap to run way.

Mastodon's missing feature is identity portability. A user with their own domain should be able to easily use a larger instance to host their identities and be able to migrate them to another instance.

What even is "moderation" at this point? I'm not sure this word is used as defined on paper dictionaries. It is a codeword for something else, like censorship or influencing or artificial control of public opinion?

Because, if it's purely about filtering out content not desired by users, it could be nearly trivially done at the edge, automatic and completely de-humanized, and the word as appearing lately doesn't read that way to me.

They pivoted into that when Mastodon blew up in Japan, German authorities got involved, and its benevolent dictator Eugen Rochko felt need to distance himself from Japanese for his own safety. German police, especially parts of its federal counter-terrorism swat units(?) seem to have odd fixations with anime and take great offense with those contents for some reason.

They can roll that back, or push moderation angle more, but they won't be able to do so without also come forward with the fact that East Asia is producing substantially more amount overall and on average higher quality content incompatible with Western moderation. Those realities won't be popular anyway.

Thank you for the clarification; that makes sense.

It is perhaps also worth noting that the Fediverse architecture does nothing to remove racists or bigots from the possibility of being found in the "fediverse" (here referring to the collection of all servers using the protocol and not the protocol itself), and... That's pretty much as-intended. Truth Social uses Mastodon as its backend; there is nothing the creators / maintainers of Mastodon could, or by design would, do to shut it off. The same architecture that makes it fundamentally impossible for Nazis to shut down a gay-friendly node makes it impossible for other people to shut down a Nazi node; there is merely the ability of each node to shield its users from the other.

That's a feature of the experiment, not a bug, and reasonable people have various opinions on that aspect of it.

I get where you're coming from, and I have largely the same sentiment, but it's obvious that you've never had any experience running a platform, or using one with no/few rules. You need baseline moderation, even if it isn't super ideological. You've got to keep pedophiles and misanthropes out at the very least.

Sounds like I really should be building one with the AI moderation I have in mind. I kind of have been to random deep ends. Most of them can't be that hard to filter out or steer them away from undesired content, especially in this age of AI...