Trading Corporate Overlords for a Network of Moderators?
The difference between the branding of “Decentralized”, and truly being decentralized.
The difference between the branding of “Decentralized”, and truly being decentralized.
I visited Mastodon’s “decentralized” social media platform, and though I like the concept, it’s not really for me. I really don’t see any meaningful solution to the problem they claim to be solving.
The Message and the Conflict
Mastodon’s platform has a powerful message and mission, or at least it attempts to….
“Social networking that’s not for sale.
Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”
I mean, who could disagree with that?
The way some platforms like Twitter, Facebook/Meta, and others, have backhandedly gone out of their way to block and demote any content they deem undesirable, to give total power to advertisers, while secretly being a government / corporate PR engine, is nothing short of deliberate manipulation of everyone at an unprecedented scale.
Many people on all sides of the ideological spectrum are tired of it. It’s eroding the trust we have in institutions, in each other, all while the intent might be net-positive at source.
Who wouldn’t want to prevent mass misinformation, or stop hateful rhetoric from multiplying?
Those are noble goals.
The conflict is in the subjective interpretations defining of those violations. It’s an emotional thing to immediately react and want to prevent those things and state your position against them. It’s an intellectual thing to discard your emotional reactions, dissect the meaning of words and ideas, dissect your own emotional reactions to ideas you don’t like, and arrive at your own conclusion as to why the best of intentions behind these attempts to control our collective idea-sphere, usually don’t lead to the best of places, and seek a more sensible way to solve the problem than heavy censorship.
As well, platforms that are not based on advertising money still have to find ways to fund their existence, and those funders are just as human as everyone else. The Mastodon network, at first glance and upon a little deep examination, does not pass my smell test for a truly open and decentralized platform.
Decentralized
In the crypto world, I measure the truth of this by whether or not the primary stakeholders are the developers, and if the system is truly distributed in a way where the primary devs and stakeholders cannot block, remove, freeze, or control, the wallets connected to their system.
There are platforms in crypto world that uphold Decentralized values quite well, and when applying the idea to an economic engine, it lacks the ideological content that can cripple expression in forums. Decentralized exchanges are truly open places where no central authority has any arbitrary enforcement power. But they aren’t particularly concerned with policing what you can and cannot say.
Let’s take a look at how Mastodon, who operates as a platform for expression (a forum), defines Decentralization:
“Decentralized”
According to the primary Mastodon webpage :
“Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider — we call them servers — that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon.”
Decentralized in crypto world translates to a network of blockchain processing nodes handling a blockchains transactions, and transactional validation activity. While these nodes are managed by individuals, those individuals cannot modify the blockchain itself or the nodes, but they can set up smart contracts to handle transactional activity rules that will govern the contracts that handle the objectives of the “Digital Autonomous Organization”.
The rules imposed here are not ideological, they are economic, contractual, transactional, and no where in the code is something that allows administrators or node operators to cut someone off on a whim if they post something somewhere that someone does not like.
A forum on the other hand, is about expression, and debate.
When you visit Mastodon servers, each one hits you with rules and conditions when you sign up.
Each one seems to have very similar policies of an abstract and ideological nature.
Then it hit me, these aren’t decentralized nodes of any kind.
The Server Rules
I visited many Mastodon servers, all of them with painfully generic rules and conditions that don’t sound very much like they will be free or open at all.
They sound like little HOAs with selective subjective interpretations of reality they want to impose on all their neighbors.
While the rules and conditions vary only slightly from server to server, they all go a little something like this:
This set of rules is particularly amusing because it reveals what other server moderators are probably doing, but don’t quite explicitly say in their rules. If someone in the Universeodon server group doesn’t like something you have said or done ANYWHERE, away from Mastodon, they can pull the plug on your account.
Oh joy.
Trading our corporate overlords for a network of moderators sounds like it will definitely solve all of our problems.
Sounds like paradise!
Holy Crap!
Why didn’t I think of that? 🙄
Who knew how great the world could actually be, if we only would let a small army of ideologically imposing moderators circumvent any form of expression they deem harmful?
Three cheers for Mastodon!
“The People” now have complete control and the social media giants have been dethroned!
In even writing this story, I am testing the limits of Medium’s allowance on divergence of ideas.
Is Mastodon an Open Forum or a Private Forum?
In legal definition, Open Forums exist for a more general purpose and are meant to be a place for debate on any topic, no matter how sensitive.
Open Forums should not be subject to the whims of private parties, or the state, and should be open to permit all forms of expression protected under the first amendment (in the United States anyway).
Forum (legal) — Wikipedia
In the Constitutional law of the United States, a forum is a property that is open to public expression and assembly…en.wikipedia.org
Private Forums, on the other hand, are totally different.
Private Forums exist for a specific purpose typically, and operate under the same guiding principles as Private Clubs, and Corporations.
These entities are able to set their own internal rules to govern conduct of members.
If the Elephant Enthusiast Club decides it’s members can’t use the words “Elephant” or “Hippo”, and must describe them as Nasally Privileged Pachyderms, and Nasally Disadvantaged Pachyderms respectively, lest they be banned, then those are the rules and you agree to be bound to them or leave. Click.
The majority of online forums are private, and the majority of social media companies are controlled by private corporations. This is the problem Mastodon seems to want to solve.
So what exactly makes Mastodon different?
They have a network of servers, each server with it’s own owners/moderators, and IN THEORY, each server owner has the ability to set their own rules to govern the conduct of their server.
Only, that doesn’t seem to be the reality, and it’s not exactly hard to understand why.
HOA Boards and Moderators, Pees in a Pod
Many moderators seem to derive a great sense of personal purpose and validation from their mission in moderating. It’s like being a bouncer, you can start to feel the responsibility and project an importance about your role that is both real, and also puffed up ego and power trip fuel in different contexts, and like all humans, you are subject to the whims of your individual prejudices, even if you posture as if you are morally above that for social credit points.
HOA boards, and Forum Moderators sometimes try to impose whimsical restrictions on members that don’t always make sense, and boils down to a personal interpretation of the rules, but as an essentially private entity, they can do so.
What they try to impose isn’t aways legal either, I have taken an HOA to court and won because they had no legal right to require specially treated windows that were almost impossible to find. That was literally the whim an older couple who controlled the board by being president and treasurer, in the same house, fancy that. In government, that would be called “corruption”, in an HOA, it’s just private rules and discretion, and fine print details.
HOAs exist to protect property values, but can end up trampling all over the property owners and micromanaging people to the extent where there are some who arbitrarily decide they no longer allow lemonade stands, tree houses, or basketball hoops in driveways, and it’s always predicated on the whims of a handful of board members imposing on an entire neighborhood.
Forums are a little more nebulous, and because we aren’t talking about Real Property or clearly defined property rights at the state level, online forums are much harder to address legally or seek appeal when a moderator decides to moderate your posts out of existence on their platform.
The Decentralized Brandname
Mastodon’s network of Private Forums are operating under a marketing/branding concept that makes it sound like they are an Open Forum for everyone. (What Decentralized would actually be.)
The reality is anything but.
It’s a fancy bit of mental gymnastics that is not at all uncommon among our species to being actively doing what you accuse someone else of doing, but spin it in an entirely different context, and also be utterly incapable of seeing the congruities.
It’s not that I don’t agree with many of those ideas of those moderators personally, I am not anti-this or that. I am on …. the “neurodivergent” side of the Tree of Life, so to speak.
It’s that I find the idea of promoting networked Private Forums as some kind of solution to social media government/corporate collusion to influence and control what we can see/read/express, to be no meaningful solution at all.
In fact, It’s laughable at best.
It is the masquerading of mob-mentality posturing as some kind of savior, when underneath the hood you have a new brand of Children of the Corn garbage, only instead of old religious trappings and symbols being parroted to score yourself a bag of virtue points, you have a new religion of different symbols parroted in much the same way, and enforced with the same vigor.
Groupthink Modus
The same faculty that keeps religious people religious, keeps cultists culting, and keeps brainwashed Right wingers veering harder Right until they are barely human anymore, and keeps Leftists going as hard Left until there is no sense of direction or definition anymore.
It’s like watching entropy play out in our mental universe, in an accelerated timeframe.
There is no hate expressed in any of those statements. But they could be interpreted that way if someone is sensitive to my critique of religion, or any prevailing political mob sentiment.
There may be DISCOMFORT experienced by the reader, imposing their own experiential panorama onto my words, and I can relate. When someone focuses on fixing problems, all of a sudden, all problems can magnify. A curious but interesting fact of our subjective human experience.
“When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail”
You will never find me on a crusade to prevent you from doing whatever you please or expressing yourself however you want to express.
Yes, there are bullies and trolls, and the way to deal with that is <delete>.
But there are also people who just do not share your worldview.
People who cannot possibly validate your experience.
People who DO NOT HATE you at all, even if we cannot validate you.
And guess what?
THAT’S OK!
Guess who doesn’t need everyone’s validation?
You!
You do NOT need the validation of everyone, nor should any reasonable person expect validation from everyone.
Fuck em!
YOU are stronger than that.
We only truly crave and need the validation of a small group of trusted and good friends, to keep us grounded, and to keep us sane, to support us and love us, and only in those small groups should we ever expect to remove those whose perspective or worldview is so different that it disturbs our identity and peace.
If you are attempting to create a truly open public forum available to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people, then it’s not only a fruitless endeavor to insist on a universal interpretation of the conditions and rules, it’s downright tyrannical, counterproductive, short-sighted, and …. CHILDISH.
“I’ve created my entire sense of identity around these ideas built on the quicksand of mob validation, now watch me dancing in a funhouse mirror posturing in different poses for the rest of my fucking life to prove I’m really made of what I’m projecting at everyone!”
^ That paragraph describes the most extreme positions on different sides of all ideologies, and the basic modus behind their behavior.
There is no such thing as a safe conversation space in a truly Open Forum, if your goal is genuine conversation in a broad context.
Harassment and bullying, trollishly following and carpet bombing someones feed with insults, that’s a completely different story — and deserves swift ban/block anywhere.
That behavior is easy to see, and we can call it what it is.
The huge gray area: bullying needs to be defined more specifically in order to not devolve into a selective-interpretation block/ban-fest.
Having a different perspective and not sharing the same worldview, being unable to validate your social-construct identity complex, those things are not the same as insult comments, harassment, or deliberately insinuating harm to someone (an intentional threat).
The trouble is when any words, critique, opinion, or just incompatible views on phenomena, or life itself, can be construed as violence.
In my not-so-humble-opinion, those who try to shield themselves from perspectives of a broader audience because mere the opinions of others can threaten their sense of identity…….they need exposure therapy, they need to build on a sense of security and confidence derived within, they do not need not more isolation.
I digress….
(I apply that to all sides of any polarizing debate).
A Good Direction, but Lacking True Diversity of Thought
Where are the truly open Mastodon servers that can say whatever they want?
I didn’t find any. I looked for quite a while.
The answer — it takes admins that are willing, but apparently the entire system imposes it’s own master set of conditions top down, while making it appear that no central group is involved.
In that way, it is more like a Franchise or a Private Club using Decentralized in their trademark brand name, than it is a truly decentralized social media platform.
I am all for a truly decentralized platform that allows speech, but the limits set on Mastodon are indeed ideologically driven, and it shows.
As someone tired of Facebook and X, who is trying to find a platform that isn’t swinging on a trajectory to further polarize the population, Mastodon missed the mark hard.
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
#decentralized #mastodon #socialmedia #rules #admins #hoas #terms #dumb