Re: Mastodon Architecture favors Calomnies

st 26. 7. 2023 v 9:26 odesílatel Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
napsal:

> Dear TAG,
>
>     Having worked on decentralised social networks for 20 years, I started
> an
> account on Mastodon 9 months ago with the big move from Twitter.
>
> This last 9 months experience has led me to think that there is a serious
> architectural problem with Mastodon that the TAG should be aware of,
> and that needs Web Science or other fields to investigate.
>
> I think that the Mastodon architecture helps spread slander in
> two ways:
>
> A) Slanderous Toots spread across instances via tags [1]
> B) Political Activists put pressure on part-time admins to censor Toots
> that
>     respond to those slanders [2] by redoubling the slanderous position
>
> Most Admins are well-intentioned, I believe, and took on this role to help
> balance
> the problems that centralised social networks pose.
>
> Being part-time and more interested in particular subjects - mathstodon
> admins
> in mathematics, w3c.social in w3c standards, etc… - they don’t have the
> resources to dive deep into any controversial issue. As a result, to avoid
> being
> defederated - the equivalent of ex-communication - they comply with these
> requests,
> but without fixing the problematic slanderous toots spreading via the tags.
>
> As a result, we have a social machine that promotes only one specific view
> on
> political topics, those favoured by extremist Activists, who also stop any
> debate
> on topics that risk questioning their position. Leading to more and more
> extreme
> positions.
>
> Compare this with blogs and RSS feeds. People there can write their
> own content on a server of their choosing and can choose to follow
> whomever they want without an intermediary admin to supervise what is seen
> or
> said.
>
> The problem we had with the blogosphere was the inefficiency of
> conversations
> which, due to spam, which had to be filtered. I am working on a way to
> resolve a part
> of that problem with Solid access control extensions.
>
> But I don’t think that one solution only will do. For example,
> for certain types of conversations, p2p duplication of signed content as
> in https://nostr.com/ will be a requirement for serious conversation
> (to avoid people changing or retracting their statements at a later date).
> Perhaps a Solid extension to IPFS would be needed for that.
>

The federated model offers more ownership to the user than the centralized
model.  However you are co-owning your identity with your provider, and in
fact the provider has more ownership of your identity than you do.
Mastodon has this issue, and so does Solid.

Nostr is not P2P, and nostr was created on the assumption that P2P
solutions dont scale well to the whole social web.

Nostr is based on web technology that simply relays messages from one user
to another.  It is similar to the pub/sub thing we made for Solid, except
that it's bug free, and also adds digital signatures.  I actually helped
build up nostr while waiting for patches to Solid to get upstream.

It is much more akin to a web technology than a p2p tech, and is similar to
the FOAF+SSL system developed around 2008,

Now nostr has 100s of developers, around a million users.  It has none of
the weaknesses of the federated model.  Users can switch from app to app,
while keeping the same identity.  Different apps on the same view of the
data.  With new apps springing up every day.

Federated still has a place, and is a thriving eco system, nostr bridges to
mastodon seamlessly, creating a growing open social web.

I'm hoping over time to integrate nostr more into web standards, including
linked data, in the nostr community group


>
> It’s not an easy problem [3].
>
> Henry
>
>
> [1] They don’t reliably spread, as some instance filter some out and not
> others
>    Here is a list of tags across instances of the RFKJr tag
>    https://w3c.social/@bblfish/110768025055570367
> [2] You can see this in action precisely in this thread here:
>      https://w3c.social/@bblfish/110778950392224298
> [3]
> https://teesperky.com/product/we-do-this-not-because-it-is-easy-but-because-we-thought-it-would-be-easy-shirt-unisex-tee/
>
>