What would your ideal Mastodon server be like? Interested in others' opinions.
Lazy tech journalists created too much confusion on the importance of selecting an instance, and with Local/Federated timelines, that are not important at all for daily uses, but only for exploration.
My opinion on criteria:
1 Impressum: Entity
2 Operators
3 Moderators
@teixi I've actually been feeling a bit guilty about telling people to just choose a server, that it doesn't matter as they can change later. I've heard several stories now of people from historically marginalized backgrounds being treated poorly, e.g. talking about racism resulting in them getting censored/banned or tone-policed, people getting harassed for their race. I've had one minorly condescending response myself, but I could be misinterpreting.
@teixi Reading server rules, I feel like I wouldn't quite fit in any of them, unless I'm on a free-speech server which also has its moderation issues. If we start building new servers or changing rules, which surely we must, I'm curious how we should design them.
@kristinmbranson
Don't feel wrong at all, everyones trend to start where they social circles are, and that helps for facilitation.
The penalty of changing is leaving the posts in the first one, while moving the rest of the social graph.
Not that big penalty, but then not to change on trends, but until understanding the ecosystem: economical, operational, legal, etc.
On past issues, like 2019 drama with G_B, thus how it resolved:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4213674
On futuribles
@teixi Thanks for the links! Will take a look.
The cost I worry about is being subjected to harassment/censorship. I know for me, when this has happened, it is just such a terrible feeling, can't stop thinking about it for like days, can't sleep, just this hurt anger/fear, depending on what happened. I don't want anyone to feel like that.
Ugh, I'm really sorry you've had to go through this, Kristin. It's terrible, and the "solutions" are often a different kind of terrible when implemented naively online.
I don't think we (= humanity) know yet how to reliably create a community that is welcoming and provides psychological safety for atypical ideas yet doesn't have a substantial risk for harassment. The same freedom that protects one from being censored can be wielded as a weapon to harass. It's kind of like working on advanced technology but wanting it to have no military applications whatsoever; it seems almost paradoxical.
I don't think Mastodon's "no algorithm" model is promises a good solution, either. The reason is that online discourse, without the inputs we get in person, trends towards hostility (as compared to face-to-face interactions) even in the absence of an outrage-selection algorithm. So my hunch is it needs to be algorithm-heavy, with an algorithm that favors not the outrageous and false but the measured and evidence-backed. Wikipedia is an existence proof of this working (culturally, mostly, in their case). Setting moderation as an (abusable) floor below which one can't go doesn't seem nearly as good as naturally rewarding best behavior with increased exposure.
What one can, I think, do reasonably well with Mastodon is have a curated community (maybe only implicitly curated by inviting the right people) within which people are motivated to be pro-social, and outside of which...well...there are dragons and walled kingdoms and so on, and to a large extent that just has to be accepted for what it is. Drawbridge up or down, depending on one's proclivities, but the outside world is going to do its own thing.
@ichoran Good points, thanks for sharing so eloquently! I am with you on the downsides of the reverse-chronological algorithm. It ends up showing whatever there is the most of, and if there are network effects that amplify certain types of behaviors, then that is what we will see. I like the idea of being able to train my own algorithm, but that is me trying to solve all my problems with ML, as usual :). I wonder if then people could train different algorithms and share their algorithms.
Although I am *very* tempted by the idea of training my own algorithm (oddly, I had never considered that before!), I do not think that this can solve the fundamental echo-chamber problem that causes social media to amplify tribalism rather than being a site of public discourse where issues are debated and resolved.
So I think a societally valuable social media system will, to some extent, have to force people to eat their vegetables, kind of like Wikipedia does: You get citations with your claims, like it or not. It's good for you.
(But it does make sense for specialist social media to be a somewhat isolated chamber, because most people probably get tired of hearing yet another thread about spike detection or clustering of scRNAseq data.)
