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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is only free of issues because the masses haven't found it yet. Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

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Moderation shmoderation, but irt "the masses" it seems like a lot of this fediverse stuff tops out in the hundreds of users per instance, not in the thousands or tens of thousands. I'd love to be corrected on this, as I'm afraid that if Mastodon gets one good news day, the entire network would instantly crash.

Mastodon doesn't have a lack of moderation, in fact, it's architecture tends to segregate people out into instances by interest, making it easy to moderate as long as you keep your instance small (most of the really bad stuff will be on a handful of instances that allow it, so you can just block them and only have to deal with the minor problems on your own instance). Mastodon also tends to have one or more moderators per instance, so it probably has a lot more people with moderation privileges than a big centralized company, which can only afford to hire so many people in the call center to handle moderation.

The key here is mastodon isn't a business, so moderation isn't entirely focused on being cheap. Mastodon, correctly in my opinion, identifies social networks as community resources not as entities to extraft profit from.

> Give it a few years and it'll be the same as or worse than twitter, given Mastodon's lack of moderation.

Why is lack of moderation a problem on Mastodon?

Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow, that creates a responsibility to moderate (plus they need to keep the advertisers happy).

The Mastodon timeline is direct follows. If I see some stuff I don't like, I can talk with that person or simply unfollow them.

> Twitter pushes content from random users you don't follow

and the TweakNewTwitter browser add-on rejects it, along with "trending" and all the rest. Add in ublock origin and you've pretty much got Twitter the way I thought it should be.

Mastodon has plenty of moderation: every instance has it's own people, when questionable content makes its way from a non moderated instance to others, the moderators of the others can moderate it. If an instance receives moderation requests from the rest of the fediverse and doesn't act on it, it eventually gets defederated.

Having a process that distributes the load of moderation is better, IMNHO, than piling all that work on underpaid people.

this is written as if you don't understand federated services.

How will it be the same or worse? Which member of it?

Mastodon is simply a social federation enabling software; it's similarly abstract to refer to Twitter's software infrastructure.

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