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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

I think Mastodon is even more dangerous than Twitter/FB in reinforcing filter bubbles.

Consider: There are various federated servers, often with some shared interest/allegiance. The operators can disconnect you from other federated servers they consider untoward. You now have to choose the filter bubble you most actively want to be associated with, and hearing dissent can become technically impossible.

Someone supporting Russia and someone supporting Ukraine in the current war may not be allowed to talk to each other about model trains, because their bubbles blocked each other.

I think this is scary. It's halfway between centralisation (Twitter) and decentralisation (e.g. Scuttlebutt) and thus creates an uncanny valley.

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That's not what filter bubble means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

But even in the more generic sense -- they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server -- and it's common practice for people to have alts on different ones just for different topics they post about.

They definitely can, there have been stories here before about e.g. blocking of far-right Mastodon instances.

> there have been stories here before about e.g. blocking of far-right Mastodon instances.

See:

> they can't disconnect you, they can disconnect the account you have on their server

There's nothing stopping you from having an alt on a different server that does connect to fascism.social or what-have-you, and the apps these days are pretty good about switching among alts so the UX isn't bad. I will also note, the "stories here" tend to focus on corner cases: instance blocking is predominantly reactive (with Gab being the big exception) and you can always just run your own instance if you want to control your own moderation. I run my own and haven't had any problems with instance blocking.

And again -- if you do end up on a server that implements a block you don't like, you can just move (which transfers your followers) https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#move

this is a good thing

What of the far left then, and the far South? And far East! Can I be the one to choose who gets blocked?

Lots of speech is definitely not up to my clearly incredible and most certainly correct intelligence level and should be blocked!

Doesn't that defeat the point of federation?

Not really? Having alts can be a bit like how people have NSFW alts on Twitter (or, for artists, an art account and a personal one), except if you put them on different instances you can find a local timeline that's more relevant to the kind of thing you're posting.

Some people (notably, it seems, Eugen) think "the point" of federation is to provide a seamless Twitter-like global experience that just happens to be hosted modularly. A lot of the current site culture prefers to consider each instance like a little neighborhood, with federation augmenting a local-first experience. (Conflict over product vision ensues.)

But really, no matter what you're looking for, the vast majority of the time you can just use whatever instance and it's fine -- mod drama whole-instance-blocks get a lot of attention, but it's way more of a problem in theory than in practice (especially now you can move your followers if you move instances).

There is also a fork of Mastodon called Hometown [0] that goes further and provides local-only posting as an extra option. These posts will not be federated but stay on the instance (your Home community). A new application GoToSocial [1] also supports local-only posts.

[0] https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

[1] https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

This is mostly a client problem. Mastodon has propagated some pretty lax behaviour with respect to adherence to the ActivityPub protocol, mostly because their reach is very large in comparison with the other projects, and because they just mapped their existing API on top ActivityPub (which was finalized post Mastodon being popular) and that was their existing use case.

The ActivityPub protocol itself makes it very simple to keep activities out of the public view. It's Mastodon, and projects that implement AP as a compatibility layer with it that address everything as public.

and anyone curious about hometown should read: https://runyourown.social/ :)

Federation doesn't mean you are forced to accept all inbound and outbound connections, only that there is a common protocol to do so if you desire.

You don't have to keep just one account. Find a community that doesn't refuse to federate with the instances you're interested in, or make another account in the instance you're interested in, and log into both. IIRC you can even mix the news feeds in some apps.

At worst it just becomes good old fashioned forums. Remember the 10s of forums & associated accounts we all had?

Many people in the fediverse have several accounts on different servers. I have an account on a Norwegian instance where I mostly follow and interact with Scandinavian folks and another account on of the bigger, international instances for more general use.

I think of the fediverse more like email, where it is natural to have a couple of accounts for different uses and with the possibility to host/manage your own.

Sure, you could make your own bubble if you really want to, but that takes some conscious effort, like blocking your server of from the rest of the network, basically functioning as a walledgarden. That is not default behavior.

> I think Mastodon is even more dangerous than Twitter/FB in reinforcing filter bubbles.

Probably for most people this is a benefit. Not having strangers shove their firmly held beliefs down your throat is a net gain for one's mental sanity in my mind. However I feel like this problem shows itself only because the vast majority of people think of social media in terms of an all encompassing amorphous mass of discussion where all ideas are worthy and all topics are valid.

As someone that builds a service in the same space as Mastodon I am trying to steer away from this behaviour. My project addresses itself to small to medium communities that are focusing their discussions on common interests and topics, and allow for moderators and system operators to police this with the help of individual members. The members on the other hand, can take part in any other community as long as they play by their rules, through the mechanism of ActivityPub federation. Think of it as subreddits but enforced on a service level but having the capability to intercommunicate both at a server to server level and on a client to server level.

But you can just have both -- or is it the existence of decentralized social media that you find dangerous?

It works like the real world (i.e. North Korea cutting itself off from everyone else, or countries boycotting/cutting relations with others), which is the perfect model in my opinion, or the nearest to perfect as is humanly and realistically possible.

You shouldn't be exposed to or forced to interact with people, opinions or content you don't want to see. Want to interact with Nazis (which most instances block), feel your federation is too restrictive or disagree with their direction or rules? You can seamlessly migrate your account to another instance (or make an alt account). You can even spin up your own instance – your very own social network – if you want to, and federate with other instances as needed.

Centralisation in social media is a very unsustainable model, and impossible to effectively moderate a platform as you have a single central entity trying to be everything for everyone, and people and cultures are very different and have different ways of perceiving and viewing the world and others. Each side or party always feels the platform is biased against them, no matter what. Lengthy thread explaining all of this really well: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

The internet was always meant to be and is decentralised, and the same should apply to social media. A platform's role should be to simply provide the network and tools for people to communicate, and end at that. The social part must be up to and controlled by the people. The issue with all current platforms like Twitter/FB is they try to control the social part and how people should interact with each other, and then there's AI and algorithms which is an entire thing and issue in itself as well where you have a corporation employing surveillance capitalism and controlling what you see and what you think.

Mastodon has no ads and no personalisation algorithms and strongly sticks to and follows ethical and humane design principles where only you control what you see.

Why not make it up to the user what content to block, rather than the instance?

The instance is the property of its owner, and owners have the right to control their own property as they see fit. Many Mastodon clients allow users to manage multiple accounts, which can be on different instances with different server rules.

Edit: Additionally, a user can block content from any other user or instance, and also filter content by keywords or phrases. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moderating/

Then what's the point of using Mastodon over other social networks?

Centralized social networks only have one instance that is controlled by a single company. Mastodon can be self-hosted by anyone, and any instance can interact with any other instance by default. Any Mastodon user can pick an instance with server rules that suit their preferences, while centralized social network users must abide by the rules of the only available instance.

Mastodon servers and clients are free and open source, and also ad-free. Most Mastodon instances allow you to sign up without providing any personal information other than an email.

We don't need leaderless digital services. We need non-capitalist digital services. Like a Facebook clone operated by NPR. One that collects enough revenue to operate, but not to pay shareholders.

you can always hear dissent because following any server never requires you to disclose your identity. If you want to be an active participant in multiple communities with your name attached to it, sure another group might exclude you. This is possible on all platforms where people can form networks, including on twitter. This is not really a technological thing. Wherever there are factions there usually is exclusive membership.

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