Olives @olives@qoto.org

Apparently, there is a protest against a regulation which Japan put on the porn industry on how long a studio has to wait before a film (with an actual actress) is published (over a month). It is said to be driving a black market, of interfering with people's livelihoods, and of being an undue burden on businesses (it is even said to violate Article 22 of the Constitution).

It appears it is going to be reviewed soon, and a member of the House of Councilors (the upper house) is already strongly critical of it. I remember an article from some time ago where people from, I think, the Constitutionalist Democratic Party mocked it.

I don't even want to talk about U.S. politics at this point, although Trump seems like the greater of two evils.

While Matrix itself has a few issues (would like to see them operate out of a freer country), something I like about the Matrix approach is that groups are hosted on *preferably neutral infra which, if it moderates, moderates to the law or not much more*, and then, someone in those groups does the actual moderation.

This way, you can decouple the *moderation* from the *infrastructure*, where with the fediverse, these two are tangled together.

It is worth mentioning that weird admins with weird ideas of moderation is literally driving people (including journalists) away from the fediverse.

So, that isn't the discussion I wanted to have, but maybe, it is the one we all deserve.

https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/
In her article "Federation is the Worst of all Worlds", Sarah goes over how instances can selectively censor content between instances (a design flaw which some appear to have turned into a misfeature), and how users don't really have privacy from admins.

The article itself was written in 2018. All of these points are valid in 2024, in fact far more so. It is not really appropriate for me to discuss either of these points without giving her work a nod.

As far as I know, inter-instance censorship was never intended to be some sort of "moderation feature". It was simply a design flaw of how the system was fundamentally designed.

Quite a few content curation ideas have also gone in that direction (and leaning on it more and more beyond breaking point), even though it appears to actually be *harmful* to the fediverse as a whole.

A few people also appear to have a wild misunderstanding that the fediverse ought to be a "holiday resort" where you "escape" from another social network (but otherwise continue to use it for "real serious things"), and never see anything "upsetting" (broadly construed). There are also ten user instances and a couple of random companies who appear to think they run the place, and want to tell people how to moderate in their very particular styles.

https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/ Security researcher Sarah Jaime Lewis long predicted the flaws of the fediverse.

https://qoto.org/@olives/111832774730509831 Is platformization the bane of the open web?

https://qoto.org/@olives/111915071084071471 The fediverse is not a holiday resort. And it shouldn't pretend to be one.

Maybe, I'll write more. These two are best read back to back, rather than in isolation.

For privacy reasons, I'd like to avoid focusing too much on particular cases, that's not really necessary for getting this point across. I would also like to put a focus on the important bits.

It's not like it's telling them to do anything particularly good. It's a group of out of touch people advancing oppression under the guise of putting everyone into the padded cell of "safety".

Also, wasn't Nadine the one giving people the middle finger and hurling violent abuse at a journalist on social media?

To be fair, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party seem better.

A few years ago, British Digital Secretary, Nadine Dorries, spoke about how Britain was going to lead the Internet, and show the rest of the world how it is done.

Like other parts of Brexit, it is hard to escape this idea that Britain has never really gotten over the fact that they no longer control a vast empire, and think they're entitled to tell everyone else how to do things.

After several years of research, I wrote that, I think it captures the essence of fediverse oriented safetyism.

Does it have to be the fediverse?

I've seen the "safe space" theory of the fediverse. The idea the fediverse is this place someone "retreats to", and you can use other platforms as the "actual serious platform". I don't find this compelling though. First off, it limits the potential of the fediverse to being entirely about being some sort of "holiday retreat", not as a serious social media platform to be used to escape from the grips of yet another Big Tech company.

This seems like something better suited to something like a traditional forum, or perhaps, Discord (or if you prefer a free alternative, perhaps, something like XMPP or Matrix). However, there are likely other solutions which don't involve federation. I've seen a few over the years. Such a community could be more tightly curated, and someone doesn't even have to be as itchy or jumpy in their moderation. Or to rely on third party gossip. Is the fediverse the right answer here?

As some have already pointed out too, admins themselves might have issues. A few even appear to have narcissistic tendencies[1]. There also seems to be a streak of "high school drama" which you don't typically see as much with other federated networks, although it is not a phenomena I have not seen in website administration. Typically, I've see such behaviors from teenage community administrators, although to a lesser extent, others as well. We also know there are certain contexts which are susceptible to particularly toxic people.

We have to remember that sometimes there are some tools which are better in some situations[2]. If a hammer doesn't work well, then perhaps, a better option is to use something else. And perhaps, there are situations where federation works better, contrary to some opinions [3].

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

3 https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/federation-is-the-worst-of-all-worlds/

As a rule of thumb, there is no such thing as "strict" or "purely unforgiving" moderation without it getting oppressive / unpleasant for users. And that is not simply knowledge from the fediverse.

Here's an ironic fediverse event I saw.

Someone was going on about how there should be "strict moderation". Weeks later, that user said something which rubbed a mod the wrong way and got suspended.

While I try to avoid being one of those free expression people who only ever covers some country in Africa violating someone's free expression or privacy, since this came up on my radar, I'll cover it.