I find this whole situation to be incredibly depressing, especially with Musk tweeting out a fact free insinuation about Paul Pelosi (since deleted without apology.) The proverbial shit is going to hit the fan on Twitter on election night Nov 8 in America and I don't think Musk is prepared to handle it. I'd love to live in a country where we could have nice things, but apparently America is not it.
It also isn't as if Elon was just thumbing his nose at naysayers. A day earlier he pledged to advertisers Twitter would not become a "free for all hellscape."
It will be easy to switch to another platform and there will be tools to help as this post indicates. 4chan users are having fun saying the N word on Twitter and Le Bron James is complaining about it. And this is only day 2. I certainly think people should be able to exercise free speech, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to it. I can go somewhere else if Twitter gets too depressing.
The difference is that each node has its own set of moderators.
So jerks will get moderated there. And when they do that, they'll probably jump servers. And so get cordoned off into wherever federated node that they isolate themselves into.
Note that each server decides which other servers it will federate and share content with.
So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
It's certainly vulnerable to abuse. But it also leaves more room for community response.
And it also doesn't have a recommendation "algorithm". You see the content you explicitly subscribe to. In chronological order. So dark patterns that arise out of feeding people rage tweets and engagement hacking and amplifying "controversial" crap for engagement... doesn't happen. So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
> So eventually nodes that collect jerks will just get cut from most of the rest of the federation.
Why do you assume the "jerks" wouldn't decide to federate among themselves. What's stopping them from creating a Splinternet (Splinterdon?) where they're free to say what they want?
> So the platform isn't going to give an outsized "recommended" audience for crap just because it has high "likes" -- that's not how the platform works.
You can't get rid of recommendations. Someone can easily build an easy to use page-ranked search engine for Mastodon servers, even if unofficial, and the engagement race will reinvent itself.
Nothing would stop them. That's already happened -- that's effectively what Truth Social is, for example.
And it wouldn't matter. Because the majority would be elsewhere. Or not. The point is that there's no centralized authority making this decision. And if I didn't like how the node I was on handled the moderation, and who it chose to federate with, I'd be free to move my account elsewhere.
I personally would just choose to hang out on whatever Mastodon node that had cut itself off the the Musk/Trump-ish node.
That seems likely to result in a split. Not a few isolated servers with jerks, but one big federation with free speech types like Elon Musk, and a different federation with heavy moderation.
But returning to a chronological feed would be nice.
It's already heavily federated so it wouldn't be a binary split like you describe.
Like, it wouldn't be "one federation with Musk types" vs "another with heavy moderation" but actually already a whole bunch of nodes with different types of moderation choosing to isolate away the Musk node. Or not. It would be up to each node.
Note that "Gab" and "Truth Social" are both built on Mastodon. But they're isolated from the rest of the federated nodes.
Suppose there are three servers (A, B, C), and A is federated with both, but B isn't federated with C, and there's conversation between people on A and B.
Do people on C only see the A side of the conversation?
I am not fully clear on how threads are handled, but, yes, in principle visibility of users and posts is based on who they choose to federate with. So C would not see any content that originated out of B. Which AFAIK includes replies, etc.
I'm a Mastodon newb and not an expert, I'm sure someone else more informed could give a better explanation of the subtleties.
Server A also sends messages coming from servers it federates with, so those on server C can see server B's messages, but C'ers just can't reply to them and expect B'ers to actually receive those messages.
This more or less has already happened, though there are more than two "groups" depending on how you define such things. Broadly speaking, there are free speech instances which allow edgelord teens to come in and N-word their hearts out (as well as do more mundane things like question the mainstream narrative on elections, the pandemic, and, yes, this Pelosi story) so long as they don't do anything actually illegal, and there are more regulated instances where "hate speech" is explicitly forbidden. As the instances in the latter group don't like the practices of the former group, the former insulates from the latter by defederating those instances, meaning that insances in both the former and the latter can generally only federate with each other. (Then there are the pro-MAP/CP/lolicon instances, which are generally defederated by both of the previous groups and also can largely only federate with each other.)
Whether you think this is a good thing is up to you, but it does seem that both groups of people on either side of the Great Divide get what they want from the system, so I don't really see the harm in it.
When Twitter is flooded with threats of violence and calls to form mobs will he just do nothing? Is that what you are suggesting? He can take the site dark if he wants and he may have to.
Isn't it the job of the police/FBI to do something in that situation? Why are we expecting corporations to be a private police force, judge, jury, and executioner?
If you owned Twitter and the site was suddenly flooded with calls to attack election officials and raid election offices what would you do? You'd probably meet with your lawyers and find out what kind of liability you had, then you'd field calls from advertisers saying they are all leaving unless you stop it. You'd also field calls from all your friends telling you that you need to stop it. Then you'd go for a walk and contemplate how you feel about people using your site to facilitate armed rebellion. Then you'd figure out how much money you were willing to lose over doing it your way. The most sensible thing to do at the point is pull the plug for a few weeks for "technical issues related to the purchase' and go home and get a good nights sleep.
I'd do exactly what I would do if I saw someone threatening someone in real life, call the police and give them all the information I had. Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.
Pulling the plug would be the easy way out, and would stop people incriminating themselves. Worse case scenario it drives people stupid enough to use a public un-encrypted network to plan a crime onto a secure encrypted network.
Twitter has dates and IP's, in a lot of cases that's as good as an address.
At this point, I can’t put anything past Elon.
The way the texts between Secret Service personnel went missing, even after congressional requests to preserve documents and data, if Twitter becomes the headquarters for seditionists, disinformation and threats of violence that impacts the outcome of which party controls Congress, don’t be surprised if tweets go missing…
I'd be reassured just knowing that he won't use his megacorp megaphone to amplify obvious misinformation about the results of the election, but given the last 24 hours, even that appears to be too much to hope for.
