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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

My experience with the fediverse was that enjoying the benefits of federation encountered the same issues with content and user behaviour that can be found in silo'd services.

That is to say, fediverse sites increased their likelihood of replicating/serving hate, pornography and illegal content in correlation to the number of external sites they were connected to and the size of their user base.

It left me wondering why even bother? It's no better than using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups. Perhaps worse.

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There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.

That's all true of hosting a private Discourse instance, as well.

You said in your original comment:

> using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups

Even if what freeone3000 said about Mastodon is also all true about Discourse (I know nothing about Discourse, but I'll take your word for it), it's not true about Twitter/Facebook. And since Mastodon is aimed more at the public group use case, Mastodon is a useful replacement of Twitter/Facebook even by your own logic.

Not quite: Twitter and Facebook have _armies_ of community moderation employees at their disposal; the fediverse has volunteers.

No, the fediverse has at least one per instance, often more. I would even go as far saying the fedi has more mods per users. They're still only mods, for the instance they're on, though.

I have never seen pornography on Facebook.

I saw pornography of very dubious legality within seconds of opening a public Mastodon server during my first time checking out the fediverse. It was enough to convince me never to use Mastodon again.

And I saw pornography on Twitter, which obviously IS THE ting Mastodon copies, too. It totally depends on the instance's mods what they allow and yes, mastodon.social allows porn. Mastodon is not a social platform for catholics. If you see porn without NSFW Content Warning, you can report it.

> universal tracking

I beg to differ. There is no technological hurdle to prevent this. Only privacy-through-obscurity, and who knows how long that will last?

You are speaking of some future state, however likely that may be, this doesn't exist now and exists on the corporate platforms now. Obtaining this information by extracting it from ActivityPub streams is also a far cry from getting the information from a centralized platform that is eager to sell it to anyone with money.

It has happened and more than once that I have found a fediverse post when doing a google search. So webcrawlers are already scooping the data up. And I mean why shouldn't they? It's a publicly posted (micro)blog. There is no robots.txt telling them to stay away? The servers are handing it out for free to anyone who asks.

The only missing part is using it to build profiles and join profiles. It may already exist, but I haven't heard anyone doing it... yet.

Are there no fediverse-scraping services that sell your data to advertisers? That seems a prime target for every moderately-evil adtech executive out there.

Even if there are, they still get a lot less data since they only see what you posted publicly. Unlike Twitter/Facebook, scrapers won't see your every mouse movement, how long you stare at any individual post, or any other of the more invasive tracking opportunities that are available to Twitter/Facebook.

The scraping services also won't know your email address unless you post it publicly or they figure it out some other way, so they'll find it much harder to associate the data they scrape with your other online identities, too. This also makes the data less valuable to advertisers, so I imagine there's less incentive to scrape it.

There’s a growing misconception that sites like Twitter are a good representation of unfiltered, unmoderated content, or that the only moderation actions from these sites is against famous figures like Trump.

In reality, sites like Twitter and Facebook remove a lot of terrible content posted by people who deliberately enjoy terrorizing shared spaces with abhorrent images.

Anyone who has been involved with the moderation of a moderately popular site or platform with image-upload features will understand: There are a lot of people on the internet with infinite free time and motivation to troll public spaces with shock images and similar content. Any unmoderated space will eventually attract these people.

Worse yet, if this behavior goes unchecked it tends to drive the good users away. Decentralized and/or unmoderated platforms seem to have a small following of ideologists who will look past the bad content and focus on the good, but the general public isn’t terribly interested in wading through random pornography or worse content just for the sake of being on a decentralized platform.

> There are a lot of people on the internet with infinite free time

This is what we have to fix. We need to find employment for these people. When you're busy working on something, you don't have time for shitposting.

Wishful thinking. Several of the best/most successful trolls find plenty of time at work to shitpost.

That tells me they're not being challenged enough at work. :)

I’d say the majority of people aren’t being challenged enough at work, especially in the tech sector.

Busy with things, yes, but given opportunities for growth through learning in the job? Not so much.

Being able to pick where that line is, and who gets to decide it is a big part of the draw.

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