Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eadmund | Hacker News Reader

The beauty of federation is that it provides an opt-out. Take a look at Mastodon, for example (FWIW, I am not a user): yes, at the time the article was written the vast majority of folks were on three instances (I am curious what it is like today), but if anyone disagreed with the policies or performance of those instances, he would be free to move to another instance, or set up his own. By contrast, there is no other Twitter which Twitter federates with.

Likewise, a Gmail user is free to move to another email provider (there are large ones, unlikely to have deliverability issues), or run his own (a tricky enterprise, to be sure).

FWIW, I am concerned that democratic rule has its own failure modes, which need to be addressed when designing a system. Do 50.000001% of users really get to permaban another user? Are there any actions which require a higher threshold, or multiple votes over time, or which are permanently forbidden? The U.S. Constitution has the advantage of a Bill of Rights, whose status has so far prevented the outright abrogation of any of them, even if some of them have come under quite a bit of pressure (the First, the Second, the Ninth & Tenth leap immediately to my mind).

Just saying, 'the will of the majority controls' is a recipe for mob rule — which is exactly what 'democracy' means.

Ideally I prefer a consent model, where each user has a list of other users they approve of, and a list of users whose lists they approve of (which may be identical.) That's what social networks were sold as. Servers should be dumb providers that are primarily worried about bandwidth.

Sure, it cuts down on serendipity, but if you want that, you can subscribe to serendipity345's feed which will add anybody who asks, and will autodelete based on the proportion of bans issued from list subscribers (or a selected council) on a particular user, card-check[0] style..

Federation at the server level is a poor substitute for the lack of finer grained governance tools.

Democracy and auctions are a last resort when you can't find a real solution. They ensure a type of fairness, but have awful failure modes. The ideal situation is when people are only exposed to what they want to be exposed to. The dangers of filter bubbles are 1) who controls them, 2) how they distort the information used for decisionmaking, and 3) who controls them. Absolute, dynamic control of your own filter bubble might make you stupider, but you should have the right to be stupid if you want to be.

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[0] Under card-check, when the majority of people in your shop sign a union card, you're a union shop, no need for an election.

> Absolute, dynamic control of your own filter bubble might make you stupider, but you should have the right to be stupid if you want to be.

Individual users are entitled to filter out things they don't want to hear. They own their computer, they're paying for the electricity and network, everything takes place on their hardware, which is their property, presumably confined within their actual home which is also their property. The computer presents itself as a window to the world, but despite literally being billed this way by eg. Microsoft Windows, it is closer to a tapestry placed on a wall.

Criticizing democracy because of majoritarianism is like criticizing programming itself because of how Perl, Ruby, or any other particular programming language works. Democratic governance can be implemented using consensus, majoritarianism, majoritarianism with a 60% threshold, or whatever other rule or stipulation. A constitution is of course also possible; then the people would decide on some ground rules which will be very hard to change for the foreseeable future. Which might be a blessing or a curse for the future people.

> Just saying, 'the will of the majority controls' is a recipe for mob rule — which is exactly what 'democracy' means.

You are not saying anything. Mob rule is indeed a pejorative term which is often used as a synonym for democracy. What of it? I could call you by some insult or other but I wouldn’t be making a point or an argument.

In a democracy of three, two people can vote to kill the third. That's why democracy is a problem, and that's why the bill of rights is amazing. Call it what you want.

edit: democracy as a governance method must be built on consent, an agreement to abide by the outcome of the vote. No one would consent to a democracy without limitations. They're not even stable; they keep peeling off minorities until there are only two members left.

You’re conflating a more general problem of foundations with democracy. How can a form of governance even be started? On what grounds? How has the mandate to put forth the ground rules? Has nothing to do with democracy per se.

It has something to do with a group of people having votes in order to decide things, where the action that the majority approves of is taken. Democracy may mean something different to you.

> In a democracy of three, two people can vote to kill the third.

It depends on the specific rules of their democracy.

Majority democracy would allow the majority to kill the minority, as in your example. I heard this goes back to Roman legions, who knew that the 51% could kill the 49% if it came to battle.

Democracy by consent would not allow for that, because that third person would (presumably) not consent to being killed. This requires that people respect each other enough not to impose on minorities.

Not unlike Bitcoin, it's a lot of resources to dedicate to an opt-out. There's a reasonable question to be asked about the cost/benefit ratio.

Not to imply Mastodon shouldn't exist... It is the beauty of the larger open-source ecosystem that in the absence of Mastodon, someone with a chip on their shoulder about Facebook and Twitter would write it. But the market is such that it will likely forever be an also-ran, and the irreducible complexity of hosting a service online is such that even if people use it, almost everyone will be trading one master for another when they leave Facebook for Mastodon, not becoming masters of their own fates.

Which is fine. We live in a society and all.

I think one of the challenges this first wave of federated platforms have is that they are coming in late and still trying to mimic the interaction paradigms of centralized, ad-driven platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But those platforms were designed, from the ground up, to foster platform lock-in and habituate people into giving up data, providing ads, and be goosed for engagement.

I hope once a Fediverse culture takes root we will see a second generation of federated services that start experimenting and doing things in ways that are, for lack of a better term, "natively" federated rather than simply trying to mimic something closed. That might be when it really takes off, when you start seeing things that work best in a federated environment and make awkward fits for a centralized one. A good example of something like this might be the mod scene in gaming, which Steam tries to get a piece of but can't quite seem to corner.

This would be good.

I found myself thinking a few days ago that half of threading on Twitter could be implemented with simple microblogging and a protocol for back-reference URLs (all of which can be done in something as simple as hugo or Jekyll) coupled with a standard for the user-agent to "unroll" the thread. This requires neither a centralized or federated service; it's built on basic web tech.

The only piece of the puzzle missing is that it only works one way; to see the whole 'conversation,' you'd need to find the tail of it (most recent comments). This sort of data-mashing is one of the things a centralized server can do simply and well (though it's certainly implementable on a federated service). But without a federated service, a rule for semantically identifying "topics" and web-crawler that knows how to sort by newest-to-oldest on a given topic identifier gives you the whole story.

Looks similar to what Indieweb proposes for replies[0]: write a post on your site, than "ping" the original via a Webention[1] to let them know there's a reply, rinse repeat. At that point anyone could build a service to unroll those conversations.

[0] https://indieweb.org/reply [1] https://indieweb.org/Webmention

To some extent the main limitation for a truly federated, decentralized and open network like this is that hosting capacity is, for purely practical reasons, not democratized to the extent that internet access is.

Somehow this used to be better, it looks like ISPs used to (and in some cases still do) provide each customer with some way of hosting files and even publishing static webpages. But while this may have been (barely) enough for the early web it's simply not flexible enough to support the current social networks.

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