5 posts were split to a new topic: Social media manipulation
In practice, they can’t really do more about it than Apple could to against nazis buying iPhones. These are general apps for using any implementation of specific decentralized protocols. You could compare any of these apps to a radio - you can set them to any frequency and they will play what’s there. None of Gabs data is actually hosted by Mastodon, so to bring the analogy further, nobody working at Mastodon can even see what “frequencies” the apps are tuned to.
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Late to the party…
My perspective on this is that I welcome gab and others far outside my own mindset to use federated tools like Mastodon (as to me the endpoint of federation is everybody running their own instance of such tools). The main benefit is that choosing your own server to host your stuff also is choosing your own bubble: you are denied amplification. No outrage machine like FB or Twitter will elevate you to the foreground. They’ll be as isolated as their opinion really is. In a distributed setting they and ‘us’ will need to earn their amplification the hard way: by convincing other without an opportunity to scale.
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How does Mastodon work?
Mastodon provides Twitter like functionality, as in people can exchanges messages or broadcast them, like Tweets.
Mastodon uses a protocol called ActivityPub (AP), which defines an inbox and outbox on your server per user. A mastodon instance can let other instances using AP read the public parts of outboxes, and write to the public part of inboxes. This means Mastodon instances can federate, also with other AP implementations. (My WordPress blog has an AP endpoint so I can post to my blog to reach Mastodon users on some other instance. Though I don’t do that currently)
I run a Mastodon instance where I am the only user. From it I interact with others who can be on a variety of instances. Discovery is an issue there. Similar to e-mail, you need to know on which server someone is to approach them. I’m at @ton@m.tzyl.nl but there’s no way you can find that out other than me telling you or stumbling over someone who is following me.
Any instance can choose to accept or not accept traffic from any other instance.
That is why I wrote I think it’s ok that gab and others start using AP. It mostly means they will be stuck in their own instance(s), as any other part of the network can choose to ignore them, and all of their traffic. Not as on Twitter, one troll at a time, but entire instances at once.
By keeping an instance small, internal moderation is easy (in my 1-person instance non-existent even), and small instances are much less likely targets as the attack-surface for trolling is so small, and each instance can cut-off any other.
An issue still is that most Mastodon users are on a hand-ful of instances, so there’s not much real distributedness yet.
See https://m.tzyl.nl/@ton for my public Mastodon profile.
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Very interesting indeed.