This is more semi-meta, so do what you will with that, but I want to explicitly tie together two conversational threads from yesterday:
1. I think the structure of Mastodon really amps rumors and misinfo because the mechanisms we use elsewhere to pass around and find corrections (visible replies, quote-posts, search) don't work here.
2. Instance admin politics are rarely discussed in a public, easily re-findable place—that, too, fuels the rumor-mill, as we saw re: Meta meeting discussions.
3. Whenever someone talks about structural problems like ^^^ there is a common response, which I'll paraphrase as "people are going to be weird and abusive no matter what, and [tech/design/policy] can't change that."
Yes, people are going to be weird jerks sometimes, but systems and structures are *by far* our best levers for changing behavior, and I think it's bizarre that this gets trotted out even by people who believe that, for instance, anti-viral features (systems!) are very successful.
4. The fediverse, with all its flaws, has really given me hope that we're on the verge of much better systems built from much better structures. I really believe we can make all of these things work better, and I think starting with human behavior and desires is how we get there.
I wrote a lot about that—mostly in less Masto-specific ways—in yesterday's post about all the ways our networks can be more alive, and help us be more alive.
@kissane@mstdn.social This is true and needed to be discussed. Somehow people have taken Mastodon to mean Fediverse. They’ve taken choices Mastodon has made and created a blanket belief about other #fediverse projects. There’s also this weird belief about privacy & safety which is not accurate.
@damon I think Mastodon's size is most of the reason for that!
@kissane it does require ultimately for some person, some governing body, moderator, ombudsman, referee, adjudicator, marshal, court, council to be responsible. And we've been told that everything can be driverless. And everything can't.
@artlung Have we? I feel like fedi's fairly clear that there are people in charge of each instance, and people in charge of e.g. Masto's codebase, but I may be misreading your point.
What I'm personally hoping to see is more horizontal self-organization across those small-scale nodes.
@kissane agree 100%! My contention about driverless ness is a zeitgeist of hype that tells us cars will drive themselves and “AI” will make art sans human intervention and social networks will self organize if we merely “flag” posts. The result has been chaos at Twitter and an Instagram where people beg for help from moribund support. Fediverse is an incredible contrast of involved instance moderators!
@artlung Ahhhh yes, the literal kind! I get you now.
@kissane Yeah, as someone who used to moderate a really rowdy mailing list full of messy writers? *Absolutely*. Changing the structure -- physical and social -- 100% improved its culture. It's just iterating smarter design and persistence.
@kissane Edwards’ Law ("You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem") has devolved into a thought-terminating cliche by this point. All of gamification and “nudge theory” have debunked it.
@ratkins To be fair, I am not sad about seeing the replication crisis drag Nudge Theory into hell, but yeah—I think it's super easy to underestimate how much of what we call "technology solutions" are in fact mostly sociological.
@kissane I mean, ask @codinghorror . He’s made a successful business out of building technology that manipulates people into being nice to each other.
@codinghorror @kissane Potayto/potahto.
@kissane
It's really tragic to see the same "open source doesn't understand design" still causing problems after 20+ years
@kissane 100% It's always people and the environment we're in working (or not working) together. Architecture is not neutral.
@kissane Do agree that quote boosts and tech to force all replies to be fetched (both in the works) will help.
@tchambers I think so! I think a fedi-compliant full-text search (super granular, consent-based) would make a huge difference as well. Idk if that's ever going to happen, but I really miss it, and I think it's possible to decouple the good uses from the abusive ones.
@kissane Fully agree.
@kissane
The closest I could find to something of that sort was this:
https://tootfinder.ch/
While it has some flaws, such as only working through the Mastodon API, it's certainly consent-based
@tchambers
@kissane @tchambers always found the principal objection to full text search quite odd, and very 'security by obscurity'.
@toon @tchambers I mean, a lot of people had their lives made considerably worse by abuses of search on Twitter. Especially trans folks and women of color and activists of many kinds. So I really get wanting to have the choice to not be indexed.
@kissane @tchambers sure, but I hear a lot of 'search=bad' which I think is not productive. I don't think the principle of a searchable index is bad.
@kissane A problem of instance admin politics is the potential for baseline distrust. Fedi is supposed to give us this great diversity & now you're trying to get admins to negotiate when they could have totally different structures and values and think the other lot are Doing It Wrong. Building standards around admin comms seems a really good idea!
I think this hobbles wider comms, too. What's the right way to provide public updates on private chats between people who don't trust each other?
@kissane Perhaps not so much a lack of quote-posts, as you can drop links to other posts to cite corrections and it works just as well, but the lack of search (or rather a full-text search where you can narrow down results by author and time period) in particular is a major barrier for digging up backstory or context on things you see.