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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

The uptick of interest in Mastodon due to Musk buying Twitter doesn’t make sense. Only the left is angry about the acquisition. The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities.

Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there.

Further, Musk hasn’t actually unbanned him yet. If this mastodon push was somehow successful, and everyone switched over, then Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans. The people who are mad about Musk might not syndicate Trump’s posts but this wouldn’t matter.

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I think you’re underestimating the number of people hedging their bets on twitter not for ideological reasons, but because a company left with a billion dollars in annual interest is going to have to squeeze that out of whichever users remain. Whether it is through ads or fees, the dynamic on the site will change substantially.

> He would run his own instance, and it would syndicated to all his fans.

He technically does, doesn't he? Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, IIRC.

It doesn't federate though.

It's not god that Elon can see ones DMs.

I'm on the left and it's also just a fine time to promote things like federation that are otherwise hard to get non-technical people to care about, regardless of what Twitter ends up doing. Never let a crisis go to waste!

It might be good for everyone to know that "DMs" on mastodon are not even secret, anyone can sniff them if they read the traffic between two instances.

That's not true. The two instances (and potentially their admins, though there isn't a UI for it) see the DMs, but the connection between instances is HTTPS.

"Guess what: in the fediverse, it would never have been possible to ban Trump in the first place. Sure, leftist servers could have stop syndicating his posts, but this would not have had much more of an effect than individuals blocking him on Twitter if he had never been banned there."

My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off. Hence Gab, Truth, Parler, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the right wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to offend.

My observation is that the modern leftt wing social media user only thrives when there are 'conservative Nazis' around that they can piss off. Hence Lemmy, Tumblr, Mastodon, etc. being largely failures. They all miss the key ingredient that the left wingers need to really get their endorphin hit: people to virtue signal over.

We can both play this game but I don't think it's particularly helpful. One could say Elon is bringing ideological equality to the platform. For leftists/liberals, this equality feels like oppression after years of dominance and privilege on Twitter.

I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can virtue signal to people inside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) virtue signaling going on in the fediverse, for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the left getting the same sort of kicks out of pissing people off that people on the right seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)

I’m just grabbing my popcorn and can’t wait to watch the inevitable splits. Each of the communities will split into 2, will split into 2, etc. They just can’t help themselves.

I think you're only half wrong here. The difference is that you can piss off people outside of your own crowd without much consequence, but if you seek to offend them, they kick you out. There's definitely (a lot of) pissing off lefties going on in Parler, Truth Social, etc. for what it's worth. And I really don't see people on the right getting the same sort of kicks out of virtue signaling (AKA pissing right wing people off) that people on the left seem to enjoy. As you sort of pointed out, they're annoying in different ways. ;)

Again, we can both play these games. You original presumption:

>My observation is that the modern right wing social media user only thrives when there are 'liberal snowflakes' around that they can piss off.

Remember, one of the major reasons behind Truth Social, Parler, etc. failing to gain user share is the fact that their respective apps were banned from Google/Apple stores.

At the end if the day, both extremes, left and right, need an enemy to point at and rally over. They are different sides of the same coin.

Just to not forget the “past”: Trump was banned from twitter due to inciting violence, see https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

There is an objective truth out there, no reason to return to our echo chambers. Some people are angry at Elon buying twitter because a subjectively good platform might just die in a short time, because everyone who had even an ounce of try at managing a platform knows that “unmoderated free speech” is just shitposting.

Also, I don’t see how death threats, n-words and the like would contribute to any discussion.

The objective truth is that states are founded on violence — both punishment for crimes and warfare — so every politician spends their entire career inciting violence. "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is inciting violence against whatever country refuses to fall in line. "Three strikes and you're out" is inciting violence against junkies, hundreds of thousands of whom are imprisoned in the US today as a result.

The press in the US had unmoderated free speech for over a century until the FCC was established, and print publishing still does. That's why the New York Times bought the first Gatling guns: they were inciting violence (specifically, the Civil War) and justifiably feared that rioters would try to lynch them. Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years. Freenet still does.

It's not a bullshit idea. Just an unpopular one.

> Though you're probably too young to remember it, Usenet had unmoderated free speech for about 25 years.

To the point that it became dangerous to use a Usenet browser that would automatically download & display attachments because extremely illegal content would be displayed. God forbid you were running a server, because that was getting pretty close to “possessing” that shit in your data storage. Unmoderated Usenet became a hell hole.

Regulation is, IMO, preferable to seeing unsolicited illegal pornography in one’s social media firehouse.

I will argue that no civil society has ever had a truly free press. To my knowledge, there has never been legal press publication of the images Usenet propagated.

maybe the problem is that you live in a place where 'extremely illegal content' is a phrase that makes sense to you. if you live somewhere that criminalizes possession of certain information of course you are not going to want access to free speech; at any moment you could come into accidental possession of photos of tiananmen square. but that's a problem created by your local laws, not by unmoderated free speech

Let's not be abstract here. The content in question was child sexual abuse photographs. Those are illegal almost everywhere (I do not know of any exceptions).

Most people think those should be illegal to distribute or intentionally possess. I think that; there is a victim who suffered real harm, which is compounded by distribution of images of their abuse. Perhaps you do not, but you'll probably find that opinion falls under PG's "What You Can't Say".

Are you telling me that you live where it is legal to possess, let alone publish/distribute/“free speech”, photographs of children being raped?

Because that is literally what happened circa I’m going to say 1992ish on Usenet, and not in overly obscure newsgroups, but also the ordinary default newsgroups.

There is no unmoderated free speech because sick freaks will always do horrible things with their speech if they think they can get away with it.

This is as factual as gravity: unmoderated free speech will never be legal speech.

Further, you don’t want unmoderated free speech. You cannot unsee those photos.

The point of the person you are responding to wasn't to really defend whether the idea of unbanning Trump was good or not: it was to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to explicitly move to a decentralized solution like Mastadon if that's your concern.

But mastodon is not without moderation on a per instance basis.

Also as I said in my comment, the people who want Trump banned do not want to prevent themselves from seeing his tweets, they want to prevent other people from seeing his tweets. This is what Mastodon prevents. If they just didn’t want to see the tweets themselves, they can block him.

Well, maybe because it is the best for everyone to not see posts which has the potential of armed resurgence against the democratically elected officials against the country, also known as a coup, especially not from a traitor with connections to Saudi Arabia and Russia? And I’m not even from the US, but the country’s fate with the biggest military is insanely important to anyone who shares this planet.

Again... The point of the person you are responding to wasn't to really defend whether the idea of unbanning Trump was good or not: it was to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to explicitly move to a decentralized solution like Mastadon if that's your concern.

Left wing people would live in their silo and Trump people would live in theirs. It's not a terrible idea until you have to ban or unban 5,000 instances depending on their social point of view on ever changing issues and than you realize it is like outdated docs

Just wait for the Anti Defamation League or another partisan organization to release a dynamic blocklist of Mastodon servers to allow leftist admins to outsource all their moderation decisions. Leave it to the Twitter secessionists/expats to build a whole layer of centralization and control on top of a decentralized, federated system.

> The right is gleeful. What the left is angry and the right is gleeful about is the idea that Musk is a “free speech absolutist” and might unban Donald Trump and other right wing / fascist media personalities.

I think this represents what's really going on. Firstly, Musk is not a "free speech absolutist". The issue is moderation policies. Every single platform moderates. Even 4chan. Any platform that doesn't, gets overrun by spam. If not spam, then by bots, or trolls, or something else that makes normal conversations impossible. Moderation is about sign-to-noise ratios. Everybody, both left and right, wants a good signal-to-noise ratio, but they disagree about what they consider signal and what they consider noise.

The problem with Musk's takeover is that he sounds like he doesn't have the first clue about how moderation works and what all the concerns are. The things he says about Twitter keep contradicting each other. It undermines a lot of people's faith in his leadership, and therefore the future direction of Twitter.

And that's the attraction of the fediverse: it offers real freedom of speech, and you get more control over moderation. Everybody wins.

> Trump would be truly unbannable. He would run his own instance

He already does that. Truth Social is Mastodon. So is Gab. It's just that Truth Social blocks every other instance, and everybody blocks Gab.

You might want to look at what happened when Gab switched to Mastodon, and/or when Trump basically made a Mastodon server called "Truth Social", which was some years ago...

(Note also that you are not much of a (societal) liberal if you don't value freedom of speech. But therefore this isn't so much of a left vs right than a top vs bottom issue...)

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