This reminds me of the discussions about Dunbar's Number and the "monkeysphere". If there is a practical limit to the number of human social connections our brains are equipped for, at least in...
This reminds me of the discussions about Dunbar's Number and the "monkeysphere". If there is a practical limit to the number of human social connections our brains are equipped for, at least in terms of trust, stable relationships, and charitable interpretation, then designing systems that recognize that limit makes sense.
Moderation, of course, is the key to keeping larger groups civil, just as policing keeps larger communities of people more civil than they would be among strangers if left to their own devices. It...
Moderation, of course, is the key to keeping larger groups civil, just as policing keeps larger communities of people more civil than they would be among strangers if left to their own devices.
It can be done, but there has to be adequate (and constrained) power allocated to the guardians. Note that in the real world, the average number of police per unit population in OECD nations is about 1 per 300, which sounds close to a familiar number...
Moderation is big, but it doesn't solve all ills. One of the issues with big networks is that there is no filter for "has this been said before already?" or "are you really adding to the...
Moderation, of course, is the key to keeping larger groups civil, just as policing keeps larger communities of people more civil than they would be among strangers if left to their own devices.
Moderation is big, but it doesn't solve all ills. One of the issues with big networks is that there is no filter for "has this been said before already?" or "are you really adding to the discussion by posting this?" So people can still end up feeling beleaguered and attacked for their opinions just because 40 people all dogpile on them with the same criticism. Or vice versa, it can feel like you're in an echo chamber because everyone is saying the same thing, but there is no discussion going on. It just ends up being rounds of escalation or rounds of opprobrium.
This isn't a huge deal for sharing content or discussing media, but it kind of falls short if you want to go deep on any single issue or topic because each participant is constantly having to go back to basics with each interlocutor.
The "has this been said" filter strikes me as a really good idea. A while ago, xkcd's IRC server had a channel called #signal designed to increase the "signal/noise ratio." They had a policy: say...
Exemplary
The "has this been said" filter strikes me as a really good idea. A while ago, xkcd's IRC server had a channel called #signal designed to increase the "signal/noise ratio." They had a policy: say something that has never been said before. If you didn't, a bot would mute you for a few seconds, then minutes, etc.
This worked really well. You couldn't reply to a question with "that's ridiculous" because that had already been said in the channel at some point long ago. This, combined with a culture of inteligent discussion, made the channel quite nice to sit and have a discussion in.
I think some flavor of this - perhaps advice from suitably-designed AI influencing the ranking of comments and posts - would make nice discussions everywhere. Of course, it would only attract people who wanted a discussion and not a flamewar. For me at least, that is a feature and not a bug.
That was an idea that Randall Munroe (the creator of xkcd) came up with called ROBOT9000: https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ 4chan has a board that...
I agree - I wasn't suggesting that moderation solves all the problems. It's important in preventing some of the worst, though, like the tendency for forums to "riot" with escalating tit-for-tat...
I agree - I wasn't suggesting that moderation solves all the problems. It's important in preventing some of the worst, though, like the tendency for forums to "riot" with escalating tit-for-tat flame wars that turn into gang wars of partisan strangers if the initial offenders aren't stepped on hard.
You don't need to be an IT guru with your own server to achieve this. A group of non-IT people I know achieved this accidentally on Facebook (ironically). Once upon a time, there was a public page...
Instead of Facebook’s model as a “digital equivalent of a town square,” the sites that Kazemi is advocating for are more like a chill house party with a considered guestlist. The key, he emphasizes, is keeping your social network very small—as in 50 to 100 users small
You don't need to be an IT guru with your own server to achieve this. A group of non-IT people I know achieved this accidentally on Facebook (ironically).
Once upon a time, there was a public page on Facebook that attracted a small core group of people. We chatted in the comments on posts. We chatted a lot. Quite often, we went off-topic for the page's intention. Eventually, one bright spark decided to create a private Facebook group for us to chat about anything we wanted to, without bothering anyone else. Entry to the group was by invitation only. They invited the best chatters from the main page.
And a community was born.
That community still exists today, more than a decade later. We went through a couple of incarnations in the early days, as occasional drama took over (the invite process wasn't perfect). But, the current incarnation has been in place for 8 years and counting.
There's only one admin, and we pushed her into it because she was the one who wanted the job least, who was most impartial, and who everyone trusted the most. However, her duties are restricted to approving invitations, because the group doesn't really need moderating.
I've just checked, and the group has 77 members. We've always had about 50-80 members. This falls right in Kazemi's sweet spot. This number allows to get to know each other as real people with individual personalities, rather than just usernames. I agree with Kazemi that this is why our little community has lasted so long and worked so well (that, and we weeded out the misfits early on - yes, it's pretty much an echo chamber). We still occasionally invite new members, but they're people who are personally known to existing members (even if only as Facebook friends), not random strangers.
We're spread around the world. In the early days, none of us had met in real life. However, over the past decade, there have been various occasions where members have met other members - this might be just while someone's on holiday and happens to be passing near another member's neighbourhood, but there have also been a couple of arranged group meetups. We've been with people as their lives have changed: marriages, divorces, re-marriages, deaths, births. One of my favourite events was attending a virtual baby shower for one of our members (that baby has now started school). They also helped me through some bad times (including one 2am freak-out).
But, it works mostly because the number of members is small enough for us all to be known to each other.
You don't need federation to create a small social community. I'm in a number of small social Slack instances, a lack of federation doesn't make it any less social.
You don't need federation to create a small social community. I'm in a number of small social Slack instances, a lack of federation doesn't make it any less social.
In this specific article they're talking about Darius Kazemi's Mastodon fork, which is a federated service. You are of course right, but I think that in order to compete with the big names in the...
In this specific article they're talking about Darius Kazemi's Mastodon fork, which is a federated service.
You are of course right, but I think that in order to compete with the big names in the social network space small communities need to be a part of a large federated network to be able to do so. It's not called "the network effect" for nothing.
It seems like there is more than one way to benefit from the network effect? The way we do it here is by manually creating links to other websites, often copied from other link-sharing websites....
It seems like there is more than one way to benefit from the network effect? The way we do it here is by manually creating links to other websites, often copied from other link-sharing websites. We benefit from the Web's network effect and, in its way, this is a form of federation. The Web is extremely federated with millions of cross-linked servers.
Mastodon's model goes further by facilitating conversations and subscriptions across servers.
I'm skeptical that federated conversations are a good idea, since this results in mixing up separate communities with distinct cultures. On G+, whenever a post went "viral" via the "what's hot" feature, conversation went to hell.
The way I started thinking about it is "don't cross the streams". The same article can be discussed by different communities but they should talk to each other by default. It seems fine for Hacker News to have one conversation and for us to have a different one. (They might even have some of the same participants, but the cultures are still different.) Similarly, the same link can be posted to different subreddits and they each will have their own conversation.
On the other hand, perhaps subscriptions could be federated a bit more, via RSS? I don't favor having links show up automatically, but if it were easy to upvote a Hacker News link and have it show up here, it would save the effort of copying the link.
I've been using Mastodon a lot lately. For me, I enjoy the design. I'm registered on Fosstodon which means my local feed has a free software lean but then I've been curating a list of people to...
I've been using Mastodon a lot lately. For me, I enjoy the design. I'm registered on Fosstodon which means my local feed has a free software lean but then I've been curating a list of people to follow who vary from video games developers to board game geeks to the few rock climbers I've seen on there. I don't feel like I'm intruding on conversations. (although maybe I'm the problem)
I'm on Mastodon as well, but I am hardly following anyone so it's pretty quiet. I see other people's "bad takes" when someone I know boosts them. It's always a question whether to respond,...
I'm on Mastodon as well, but I am hardly following anyone so it's pretty quiet. I see other people's "bad takes" when someone I know boosts them. It's always a question whether to respond, considering that I'm not even following them? Occasionally I've been tempted to say something, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.
It seems like it all depends on how people use boosts? If your posts are public, anything you say could be boosted into some crowd you have nothing to do with.
IMO, a big aspect of small networks is that they're not competing with the big names. I don't want random people in my small chats; I just want my friends.
IMO, a big aspect of small networks is that they're not competing with the big names. I don't want random people in my small chats; I just want my friends.
Ideally, multiple instances of Tildes could be run, maybe with a single sign in or some sort of API aggregation, but full federation doesn't really seem viable for what Tildes is doing.
Ideally, multiple instances of Tildes could be run, maybe with a single sign in or some sort of API aggregation, but full federation doesn't really seem viable for what Tildes is doing.
Deimos is pretty adamant that he's not interested in federating tildes. I'm not sure about his stance about receiving code contributions for enabling it though.
Deimos is pretty adamant that he's not interested in federating tildes. I'm not sure about his stance about receiving code contributions for enabling it though.
Every time this subject is put on the table, I feel a disconnect with my usage. I am very pleased of my feed on twitter because I manly follow musicians, artists, gamedevs, and humorists. I...
Every time this subject is put on the table, I feel a disconnect with my usage.
I am very pleased of my feed on twitter because I manly follow musicians, artists, gamedevs, and humorists. I blocked some news outlet to not even a retweet slip through, and I use the feature "Turn off retweets" often for removing low quality content retweeted by many people I follow.
I keep the following list to a reasonable amount to be able to read all my feed each day. (Any people tweeting more than ~ twice a day is ignored)
And this makes for a refreshing set of content each time I log in.
A few people I follow brings thoughtful discussions on topics that "makes the news" on twitter and this is all.
In my experience twitter is the best social media for my daily usage.
I can definitely attest as someone who's on both Twitter and a Mastodon instance that the overall atmosphere and reasons I'm drawn to them are radically different. Twitter, as the article says, is...
I can definitely attest as someone who's on both Twitter and a Mastodon instance that the overall atmosphere and reasons I'm drawn to them are radically different. Twitter, as the article says, is a hotbed of arguments, snark, and ratio-ing, where you're constantly incentivized to make your voice heard and raise hell about some issue or another. All the celebrities, brands, and politicians are right there for your praise or scorn. On Mastodon, though, the number of celebrities I'm aware are on the platform is vanishingly small, and even then, the fact remains that there's no algorithm to put the hottest, most contentious and popular tweets in your face; the feed is still just chronological, so you only see what you choose to see by following others. (Contrast that with Twitter, where I regularly see tweets from random accounts because people I'm following follow them, or because they liked that particular tweet.)
Since so many communities in the fediverse are small and/or have a specific theme and culture, you feel more of a connection to the other people in your instance, and you're easily able to browse feeds of local toots on your instance and the toots from instances which are connected to your own. However, this doesn't mean you're restricted to following people on your own instance; as long as the instances are federated, you can remote-follow people and still get the same benefits as if the whole platform was centralized like Twitter.
Of course, all this isn't to say that Mastodon is a perfect platform free from conflict. As mentioned in the article, many of the more left-wing instances are united in refusing to federate with instances like Gab which are rife with hate speech and calls to violence, as well as cutting off the instances that federate with them. This can lead to ideological conflict between instances led by admins who would rather let individual users block people they come across when they show up, to those who simply proactively defederate from those instances altogether to protect the communities they've built from having any connection to toxic places. Overall, though, I think the vast majority of the fediverse still has a common mindset and goal--to create their own communities on their own terms, rather than being beholden to the decisions of corporate platforms which only facilitate interactions to turn a profit. Even though Tildes is a separate project, I find it to be similar because of that shared mindset of growth for the sake of the people on the platform, not just so there are more views and clicks to exploit.
This reminds me of the discussions about Dunbar's Number and the "monkeysphere". If there is a practical limit to the number of human social connections our brains are equipped for, at least in terms of trust, stable relationships, and charitable interpretation, then designing systems that recognize that limit makes sense.
Somehow I feel like online social interaction is not exactly subjected to the same constraints that Dunbar started from.
Moderation, of course, is the key to keeping larger groups civil, just as policing keeps larger communities of people more civil than they would be among strangers if left to their own devices.
It can be done, but there has to be adequate (and constrained) power allocated to the guardians. Note that in the real world, the average number of police per unit population in OECD nations is about 1 per 300, which sounds close to a familiar number...
Moderation is big, but it doesn't solve all ills. One of the issues with big networks is that there is no filter for "has this been said before already?" or "are you really adding to the discussion by posting this?" So people can still end up feeling beleaguered and attacked for their opinions just because 40 people all dogpile on them with the same criticism. Or vice versa, it can feel like you're in an echo chamber because everyone is saying the same thing, but there is no discussion going on. It just ends up being rounds of escalation or rounds of opprobrium.
This isn't a huge deal for sharing content or discussing media, but it kind of falls short if you want to go deep on any single issue or topic because each participant is constantly having to go back to basics with each interlocutor.
The "has this been said" filter strikes me as a really good idea. A while ago, xkcd's IRC server had a channel called #signal designed to increase the "signal/noise ratio." They had a policy: say something that has never been said before. If you didn't, a bot would mute you for a few seconds, then minutes, etc.
This worked really well. You couldn't reply to a question with "that's ridiculous" because that had already been said in the channel at some point long ago. This, combined with a culture of inteligent discussion, made the channel quite nice to sit and have a discussion in.
I think some flavor of this - perhaps advice from suitably-designed AI influencing the ranking of comments and posts - would make nice discussions everywhere. Of course, it would only attract people who wanted a discussion and not a flamewar. For me at least, that is a feature and not a bug.
That was an idea that Randall Munroe (the creator of xkcd) came up with called ROBOT9000: https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/
4chan has a board that works similarly too: /r9k/
I agree - I wasn't suggesting that moderation solves all the problems. It's important in preventing some of the worst, though, like the tendency for forums to "riot" with escalating tit-for-tat flame wars that turn into gang wars of partisan strangers if the initial offenders aren't stepped on hard.
You don't need to be an IT guru with your own server to achieve this. A group of non-IT people I know achieved this accidentally on Facebook (ironically).
Once upon a time, there was a public page on Facebook that attracted a small core group of people. We chatted in the comments on posts. We chatted a lot. Quite often, we went off-topic for the page's intention. Eventually, one bright spark decided to create a private Facebook group for us to chat about anything we wanted to, without bothering anyone else. Entry to the group was by invitation only. They invited the best chatters from the main page.
And a community was born.
That community still exists today, more than a decade later. We went through a couple of incarnations in the early days, as occasional drama took over (the invite process wasn't perfect). But, the current incarnation has been in place for 8 years and counting.
There's only one admin, and we pushed her into it because she was the one who wanted the job least, who was most impartial, and who everyone trusted the most. However, her duties are restricted to approving invitations, because the group doesn't really need moderating.
I've just checked, and the group has 77 members. We've always had about 50-80 members. This falls right in Kazemi's sweet spot. This number allows to get to know each other as real people with individual personalities, rather than just usernames. I agree with Kazemi that this is why our little community has lasted so long and worked so well (that, and we weeded out the misfits early on - yes, it's pretty much an echo chamber). We still occasionally invite new members, but they're people who are personally known to existing members (even if only as Facebook friends), not random strangers.
We're spread around the world. In the early days, none of us had met in real life. However, over the past decade, there have been various occasions where members have met other members - this might be just while someone's on holiday and happens to be passing near another member's neighbourhood, but there have also been a couple of arranged group meetups. We've been with people as their lives have changed: marriages, divorces, re-marriages, deaths, births. One of my favourite events was attending a virtual baby shower for one of our members (that baby has now started school). They also helped me through some bad times (including one 2am freak-out).
But, it works mostly because the number of members is small enough for us all to be known to each other.
... and federate.
That shouldn't be kept out of the title, since they're focusing on someone's mastodon(like) instance.
You don't need federation to create a small social community. I'm in a number of small social Slack instances, a lack of federation doesn't make it any less social.
In this specific article they're talking about Darius Kazemi's Mastodon fork, which is a federated service.
You are of course right, but I think that in order to compete with the big names in the social network space small communities need to be a part of a large federated network to be able to do so. It's not called "the network effect" for nothing.
It seems like there is more than one way to benefit from the network effect? The way we do it here is by manually creating links to other websites, often copied from other link-sharing websites. We benefit from the Web's network effect and, in its way, this is a form of federation. The Web is extremely federated with millions of cross-linked servers.
Mastodon's model goes further by facilitating conversations and subscriptions across servers.
I'm skeptical that federated conversations are a good idea, since this results in mixing up separate communities with distinct cultures. On G+, whenever a post went "viral" via the "what's hot" feature, conversation went to hell.
The way I started thinking about it is "don't cross the streams". The same article can be discussed by different communities but they should talk to each other by default. It seems fine for Hacker News to have one conversation and for us to have a different one. (They might even have some of the same participants, but the cultures are still different.) Similarly, the same link can be posted to different subreddits and they each will have their own conversation.
On the other hand, perhaps subscriptions could be federated a bit more, via RSS? I don't favor having links show up automatically, but if it were easy to upvote a Hacker News link and have it show up here, it would save the effort of copying the link.
I've been using Mastodon a lot lately. For me, I enjoy the design. I'm registered on Fosstodon which means my local feed has a free software lean but then I've been curating a list of people to follow who vary from video games developers to board game geeks to the few rock climbers I've seen on there. I don't feel like I'm intruding on conversations. (although maybe I'm the problem)
I'm on Mastodon as well, but I am hardly following anyone so it's pretty quiet. I see other people's "bad takes" when someone I know boosts them. It's always a question whether to respond, considering that I'm not even following them? Occasionally I've been tempted to say something, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.
It seems like it all depends on how people use boosts? If your posts are public, anything you say could be boosted into some crowd you have nothing to do with.
IMO, a big aspect of small networks is that they're not competing with the big names. I don't want random people in my small chats; I just want my friends.
It's not in the original title, though.
Should Tildes federate somehow?
Ideally, multiple instances of Tildes could be run, maybe with a single sign in or some sort of API aggregation, but full federation doesn't really seem viable for what Tildes is doing.
Deimos is pretty adamant that he's not interested in federating tildes. I'm not sure about his stance about receiving code contributions for enabling it though.
I know, I raised the same point a number of times.
There are actually some federated link aggregator projects (in the same vein as Tildes and Reddit) such as Lemmy which are currently in the works.
I didn't mean in the tildes submission title, but in the article title itself.
Every time this subject is put on the table, I feel a disconnect with my usage.
I am very pleased of my feed on twitter because I manly follow musicians, artists, gamedevs, and humorists. I blocked some news outlet to not even a retweet slip through, and I use the feature "Turn off retweets" often for removing low quality content retweeted by many people I follow.
I keep the following list to a reasonable amount to be able to read all my feed each day. (Any people tweeting more than ~ twice a day is ignored)
And this makes for a refreshing set of content each time I log in.
A few people I follow brings thoughtful discussions on topics that "makes the news" on twitter and this is all.
In my experience twitter is the best social media for my daily usage.
I can definitely attest as someone who's on both Twitter and a Mastodon instance that the overall atmosphere and reasons I'm drawn to them are radically different. Twitter, as the article says, is a hotbed of arguments, snark, and ratio-ing, where you're constantly incentivized to make your voice heard and raise hell about some issue or another. All the celebrities, brands, and politicians are right there for your praise or scorn. On Mastodon, though, the number of celebrities I'm aware are on the platform is vanishingly small, and even then, the fact remains that there's no algorithm to put the hottest, most contentious and popular tweets in your face; the feed is still just chronological, so you only see what you choose to see by following others. (Contrast that with Twitter, where I regularly see tweets from random accounts because people I'm following follow them, or because they liked that particular tweet.)
Since so many communities in the fediverse are small and/or have a specific theme and culture, you feel more of a connection to the other people in your instance, and you're easily able to browse feeds of local toots on your instance and the toots from instances which are connected to your own. However, this doesn't mean you're restricted to following people on your own instance; as long as the instances are federated, you can remote-follow people and still get the same benefits as if the whole platform was centralized like Twitter.
Of course, all this isn't to say that Mastodon is a perfect platform free from conflict. As mentioned in the article, many of the more left-wing instances are united in refusing to federate with instances like Gab which are rife with hate speech and calls to violence, as well as cutting off the instances that federate with them. This can lead to ideological conflict between instances led by admins who would rather let individual users block people they come across when they show up, to those who simply proactively defederate from those instances altogether to protect the communities they've built from having any connection to toxic places. Overall, though, I think the vast majority of the fediverse still has a common mindset and goal--to create their own communities on their own terms, rather than being beholden to the decisions of corporate platforms which only facilitate interactions to turn a profit. Even though Tildes is a separate project, I find it to be similar because of that shared mindset of growth for the sake of the people on the platform, not just so there are more views and clicks to exploit.