"The town square doesn't have algorithms." #JonStewart
https://pca.st/episode/406744d0-f753-4413-a611-c63acb180715
Doc Freemo 
Im so confused what do townsquars have to do with algorithms and why wouldnt someone want an algorithm associated with a town square... such a random and weird statement, I cant even grok what it means.
basically his point being that they are spaces where the people there control the conversation, not some outsider. he doesn't seem to understand we exist, but this point is exactly why I think the fedi killer app is the town square. I wish I could get his ear to explain this place, esp if we could make it more non partisan and non ideological.
@wjmaggos I may have misunderstoof what "the townsquare" is. I thought this was a reference to the town square forums we hold during elections. Is it some software im unaware of?
By the way I think i am very sympathetic to the point of the message, now that I understand it. Though I do have issue with the wording as I think it can divert from the real problem. Like you are 100% right there is an issue with the conversation being manipulated on facebook and other places but the algorithm is only a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the bots engineered to manipulate people and make the public seem to have one opinion when it has another. Unfortunately the fediverse is **more** of a target for this not less and as such the problem is very much rampant, if not worse, on the fedi because the issue isnt the algorithm that prioritizes your feed (it can be part of it) but rather the masses of people that arent people, or the few people who are manipulating the narrative.
We had this exact problem on QOTO, a recognized and self proclaimed Nazi literally said they were going to manipulate the narrative against us by creating fake accounts and despite stating it in the open and even catching some of those accounts it still manipulated Eugene against us because of "optics" and caused retaliation... because of a recognized and known Nazi's manipulation of an open-system.
Sadly the problem is VERY much worse on the fedi.
town square just as an idea. what I think people originally loved about twitter. lots of big brains and journos and govt folks talking civic stuff, but any idea (or linked article) could go viral. a little elitist tho. I want everybody.
do you think fedi is calming down a bit on the censoriousness?
Censoring is peripherally a problem, but its more a symptom of the way the fedi is so easily manipulated by just a few players who arent even neccesarly popular (since one person can control 1000 accounts without any real effort).
But sadly the problem seems to be worse just you hear about it less becauseso many people are censored you just wont hear it.
I actually wrote a white paper ill be presenting (hopefully) at AGI-25 on this topic (ethics in AI and I touch on the social media problem). I even started a whole non-profit that is quickly gaining speed to help address it. I tried doing this in a fedicentric way but the toxicity was too much, so this time I'm attacking it from an AI/AGI centric way instead.
I can share the first of the two papers (the second has the concrete solutions).
i've thought that long-term, most people would be on local instances in the model of NextDoor. they confirm where you live with postcards. or at least used to. if we keep instances small enough, we don't need open signup, right?
@wjmaggos all that does is push the problem to the federation level than the server level. When you have 100,000 small servers how do I vet them to determine which ones are legit and which ones arent? You either need to vet them youselves defeating the purpose, or you need to rely on some central authority creating block lists, also defeating the purpose.
