The Fediverse blockade

jwz got this one right, IMHO.

I was reading a long exchange in the fediverse, based on this post from the eponimous jwz (Jamie Zawinsky).

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/mastodons-mastodonts/

He complains that the way post/replies are related in Mastodon is broken, where a reply to a post is, on itself, just another post, related to the top one by just an "header". In jwz's opinion, this is problematic, because it doesn't give the top post author control about how to moderate the following thread. It's his opinion that things should work differently and he would like to see Mastodon's post/replies to work more like how blog comments work. Some personal considerations quoting passages of his blog post:

> When you block someone, they don't necessarily stop seeing your posts.

True. But then the question is: how is blocking defined in Mastodon and in the fediverse? Let's take the software I self-host, Honk, how it manages blocking and filtering. An excerpt from the related hfcs(5) man page:

> The honk filtering and censorship system, hfcs, controls what messages are seen and how they are presented to the user.

"How they are presented to the user", but no mention whatsoever the other way around. In essence, let's suppose I can block somebody from receiving messages from me. This fall apart whenever the person I blocked follows somebody else following me. Becaus of how the protocol works, they will be able to see a whole thread if the person they follow simply post an answer to one of my posts. I could "defederate", probably. However, it's a tack different than "blocking". Less granular for sure, and defederating an instance with thousands of users because of one bad actor, seems a bit too much of a nuclear button. It won't solve the problem anyway.

> There is no way to delete a reply to your post. Let's say I post a zinger and then someone replies with a racism. I can block that person, and I won't see it any more, but the 10,000 people who follow me will still see it when they click on my post. It means that I have given that terrible person a boost in reach that I cannot revoke. It's like having dogshit on your shoe that everyone at the party can smell but you.

Correct. This is, also, what happens in the fediverse in general. If I follow you and I reply to one of your posts, my reply is going to be sent to all of my followers, along with your thread, plus all of your followers. Essentially, that's another way to obtain a boost as Jamie said. there is, actually, no way, for the top post author, to self-moderate a top post thread they wrote If somebody come and tries to hijack your post, there is nothing you can do, the whole lot of your followers will see the hijacked thread, not what you, the original author, would like them to see.

You have no way, whatsoever, to remove potentially illegal stuff flying around in the whole fediverse without contacting the administrator of every single instance you know that's federating with you, one way or another. If you are me, not that big of a deal, but if you are jwz, with the huge following he's enjoying, well, tough luck. No way you can cleanup whatever anybody wrote in your thread. Considering that, also, the post deletion message is not that well supported. Not even the nuclear option to nuke the entire thread is safe.

> Everybody sees a completely different subset of replies to your post, depending on weather and the phase of the moon.

I don't know, exactly, but given how things work right now, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case. For instance, I receive answers to posts from people I follow, but for some reason, it happen that the thread itself is not properly fetched by my instance. I just see a "reply", to something I can't find anywhere. So it appear to be true. Different or worse, incomplete informations are exchanged between instances. Who knows what's the right order, then?

Of course, there were people jumping on the bandwagon of "free speech", citing that you can not violate their right to say shit. Just an example:

> Imagine we disagree on which political candidate to support in the primaries (not that there is a lot of choice this year, but just as an example), or one of us has valid issues with the other's Senate candidate, etc.

>

> Maybe I could say something you don't like about your favorite TV actor or film star. We might disagree on religion or even someone's vegan diet, etc. You might not enjoy my taste in music.

>

> You are proposing that AT ANY TIME, ON ANY SUBJECT... EVERY account has the right to delete MY writing, whenever it happens to cross their feed.

>

> At what point does my feed become protected enough from countless little dictators that I can feel confident it will not be deleted? At what point do I lose my #FreeSpeech and become merely a cowering subject of someone's whim, merely regurgitating THEIR ideas, rather than risking my replies be deleted?

>

> Discourse and debate require the ability for polite disagreement, or they become merely monologues.

People like this doesn't get it and they totally missed jwz point. You are still free to write your own top-post. If I write a post, I believe that I also have the right to self-moderate it. The thing is: I don't have the right to block you from posting stuffs, only the instance admins can, but "my post, my garden", is fair enough in IMHO. No different than choosing a specific instance in a specific country because you like that country's law more. Or because you like how the instance is moderated by their administrators.

I believe the nice side effect of what jwz proposes, is that the moderation of an instance would be much more distributed among the audience, with the administrators being called only in specific cases (really, really bad rules violations), or to resolve disputes between users. But not for the majority of the moderation work, thing they are doing, right now.

There is one thing to say: Mastodon is severely lacking on moderation tools, way behind Pleroma, to be fair, and given that I don't exactly know how Pleroma work, it might be possible that some of what Jamie proposes is already in the Pleroma's toolbox. However, I'm fairly sure Pleroma can't solve the "fire and forget" nature of ActivityPub posts, given how the protocol is designed, right now.

If you are not jwz: keep it small, you will not have the majority of the problems Jamie is reporting anyway.