Social media as a decoupled virtual public space can't both exist and protect our individual rights and the implicit dependencies that culminate in retaining a certain level of rational thought, at least not at the same time.<p>Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.<p>By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.<p>You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.<p>Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.<p>We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.
Related:<p><i>Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42681976">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42681976</a>
I agree, but I feel this is a bit rich coming from Mastodon which is notorious for depending on a load of custom ActivityPub extensions for server to server operation, and just having an entirely separate REST API not based on any open standards (beyond JSON/HTTP) for its client to server comms.<p>I used to run a non-Mastodon Activity Pub server and it never really worked. There’s a reason why everyone just uses Mastodon, at which point who cares if there’s an open protocol.