• 4 Posts
  • 128 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I like that “safe space” theory, that seems very plausible.

    It’s still a bit messed up though, because that part of our brain can’t distinguish between play fear and real fear, so we get “rewarded” for both which seems like a very risky move, evolutionary.

    I can imagine the aliens being like

    How did they survive to become the apex species?

    Although with all the brinkmanship and poor threat analysis we’ve exhibiting now on a global scale, perhaps we won’t survive as the apex species for long, so 🤷











  • I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.

    I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.

    For example:
    We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
    But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.

    I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.




  • I’m talking about systemic solutions for the general problem of bad-actor mods.

    Defederating an instance is fracturing the community which difficult for a community to withstand with our current user numbers.

    Giving mods less power, such as making communities themselves defederated, makes problems for good-faith mods who are trying to protect vulnerable community members.

    It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance, but that’d be so fraught with abuse that I can’t see it actually working.


  • I don’t think there is a solution.
    Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.

    With more users, having a fractured community wouldn’t be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.