Gregory's Server|
16 comments
 @anildash you may get to the rest of my threads about this at some point. But I'll say it here as well. My argument was never to say "people don't get to be mad about this". That's not even a discussion I care about. My discussion was "being mad at this one random guy does not solve your safety problem. So now what?"  @polotek @anildash i think people getting mad about it are trying to create and enforce cultural norms, they don't want the tools to be needed to protect people, they want it to be taboo, and harshly punished, to do the things they think are bad for privacy. @tshirtman @anildash right. Make one random guy's life hell as a warning to everyone else. Makes sense.  @tshirtman @polotek it’s worked at chasing off lots of devs and even more casuals. For sure. @tshirtman This is getting thrown around a fair bit, but regulation is a legal/technical solution to social problems. The thing missing in a lot of what’s happening that bothers folks so much today (and arguably the reason Mastodon exists) is a reluctance/incompetence of gvts to regulate social media. I’m not suggesting I know how that should work but it’s still wild west and with ‘AI’ going to get worse pretty fast imo @tshirtman It seems a bit like the reason for the adage of being unable to solve social problems with technical solutions is that engineers are typically not trained in the social sciences. If they were (or if social scientists were welcome and encouraged to work in tandem with engineering teams) there’s a pretty good chance that technical solutions would be a lot more effective  @tshirtman @polotek @anildash “you can’t fix social problems with technical solutions” is a phrase I see with basically no support whatsoever. Encryption, for example, seems to be a very effective solution to “don’t snoop on private conversations.” There’s even varying levels of technical security based on how much you care. @agocke @tshirtman @polotek this is only tech solving a social problem if every conversation everywhere is encrypted. You can't fix social problems with technical solutions. @anildash @tshirtman @polotek if it has to be solved everywhere to be considered solved, nothing can be solved. In some cases it looks like only tech can solve social problems, e.g. gun control.  @polotek @anildash someone here today spoke of “the” social contract of Mastodon and… no? I love me some social contracts, but this person’s idea of the network’s social contract was very different than mine (and I had an account on the first ActivityPub server). The network is already too large to have one set of norms, or one social contract. That fragmentation is perhaps not ideal, but it is reality.  @luis_in_brief @polotek @anildash I think Luis is probably right. At this point it's not conceivable to talk about the entire federated model in any cohesive sense of norms. That ship, if it ever even really existed sailed too long ago. Different servers can be loosely aligned and that's cool but there's no one broad consensus. |
@anildash what we disagree on is the definition of "community". Many people I've talked to about this don't give a fuck about community. They care about themselves. And they didn't know anything about what the norms were. They just hate bluesky. You're projecting the norms of your own circles onto a much wider group of people.
Also there is a strong argument to be made that the actual community norms are to federate with everybody. Because that's what happens in almost all cases today.