Let’s get back to syndication! [01CG]
Federated social media like Mastodon presents a number of downsides and even dangers to users and operators:
- When you run a social media site, you are subject to the Law—not only of your own country, but even other that of foreign countries. Maybe you are small enough that nobody notices, but at some point, there is going to be a regulator knocking on your door telling you that CSAM or other illegal material has been posted on your website and you should not be surprised to find out that you are responsible for that. At times you will also be obligated to censor your users who post from the point of view of proscribed organisations, and it is worth considering whether this may in the future entail a legal obligation to censor those who are speaking out to prevent a new Holocaust, etc.
- Moderation at the “instance” level comes into contradiction with the federation model, because (1) different users have different legitimate preferences, (2) the prevalence of culture war engagement among instance owners leads inexorably towards mass defederation, and the “normies” are constantly getting robbed of their social graphs as a result whilst having no idea what controversy they inadvertently stepped into. To be very clear, I support people having spaces with moderation policies that protect them from harm; but I believe that making these decisions at the granularity of instances rather than individual people does not stabilise over time.
- Each person running their own federated Mastodon instance seems to be too expensive (putting aside the need for system administration, etc.). When you start to federate with high-volume instances, you can get totally blown up.
As Louie points out, we don’t need content moderation at all with ordinary syndication via RSS, Atom, etc. The big reason content moderation is needed on present-day social media platforms is, aside from legal requirements for platform operators, the insistence on unrestricted replies and the “discoverability brainworm” (Louie’s coinage) that has made the Web into a place that serves influencers, hucksters, and narcissists to the detriment of artists and intellectuals. The way to escape from this is to stop trying to be platform operators; the Web is the platform.
I understand that many people want to use the Web to make money or become famous; but I am equally within my rights to wish to use the Web to communicate ideas, create and consume educational materials, and socialise with my friends and family. It is a good thing rather than a bad thing to create tools that explicitly do not support the kind of fame-seeking behaviour that has turned the Web into a hellscape of scams, advertising, shilling, gambling, and exploitation. I do not judge the way any person chooses makes a living, but I know what I do and do not want in my life.
In light of recent efforts by content platforms to blacklist and “de-host” creators of media deemed unsavoury by the large financial institutions, I believe that syndication via RSS/Atom/etc. is a comparatively safe direction for individual sovereignty in our use of the Web, and it luckily costs almost nothing to host a feed (and you can get a free Wordpress.com or $1/month Micro.blog account and just not worry about it if that’s your speed). What is needed, however, is software to make it easier for ordinary people to “jack in” to the World Wide Web in a way that sticks.