Glad to see this becoming more of a thing.<p>I started talking about this kind of blocklist / bouncer list being made available to individuals in 2018 (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849513" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17849513</a><p>more about users having access to controllable filters in 2019 - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816191" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18816191</a><p>things in 2020 made it more obvious the need for such things was coming ( <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521270" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521270</a><p>Will be glad to see these evolve and become more fine tuned as more people get involved.
>So how would the Russian disinformation campaign unfold in a fully operational decentralised reputation world? Users would subscribe to trusted fact checkers’ reputation lists, which would decrease the rating of the bots and the fake content, leaving the disinformation alone in an echo chamber without an audience.<p>Sounds like a nightmare. I've seen a LOT of moderation overreach with the primary Matrix homeserver to begin with, and homeservers blocked from federation for seemingly little reason. I do not trust its administrators to 'fact check', nor do I trust its users to approve of it. I think these measures, in the long term, will create an iron hugbox where every lunatic in the asylum exists in his own bubble.<p>The Matrix network its self is still, as far as I know, still primarily exists within the official homeserver, which has the most users by far. I feel what happens there may have far-reaching consequences to the network, and it would be far better to keep things on a server by server basis rather than making it easier to close off.
Can't we just teach critical thinking in schools and how to do research, learn to determine who has credibility in which fields etc?<p>This is an endless war against miss information. What is wrong today may be right tomorrow. Things change and people need to be smart enough to make their own determination.<p>People should also be smart enough to figure out whom to vote for and what to vote for not relying on some in TV or where to tell them.
Is Matrix really used in such a way that it even needs to solve the captive-audience fan-in problem created by big tech? And if there's a channel of people consensually sharing and coordinating disinfo, then in the limit of free communications, there's not really much to be done. Or is the purpose of this article really to fend off and redirect those calling for censorship?<p>Meanwhile I'm just siting here wishing I could change the color of my username. Sigh.