grahamsz

grahamsz, 1 year ago

I expect that instances will get more locked down, perhaps those of us on an instance can vouch for new users who might join, but I can't see how a volunteer admin could police a million user instance. I used to run a 10k user discussion site and while that wasn't a fulltime job it was still a giant pain in the ass at times. If we can get in a steady state where an instance has a core of active posters and lurkers then that seems better than infinite growth.

That then surely leads to federated instances that each represent the tolerances of their admin(s) and they presumably federate or not with other instances with similar sensibilities.

In the end the nazis will get their nazi instance and federate with likeminded types - they get defederated everywhere else and wont really be a problem (maybe for the FBI). (Though I'm not certain that all internet nazis truly are, i think there a group of trolls that get their kicks from being controversial and will get no joy by being surrounded by people who accept them)

The problems are going to be in the gray areas. For example, the argument that trans people don't deserve to exist... I find that abhorrent, but there are people who will happily say that on TV, and there are CEOs of $44B social networks that appear to agree. Some instances will tolerate that on the grounds of free speech and others will not, then the admins are left trying to decide what's grounds for defederation.

However in my limited experience, the thing that kills projects like this is too much navel gazing. There will always be some trolling and noise, but if the remaining users expend all their energy talking about it then the whole thing collapses in on itself. I feel like this is starting to happen on reddit where lots of subs are consumed by meta, but the best thing we can do here is get out and create active communities.