Amerika

History runs in cycles. These are not exact duplicates, but the same rough patterns occurring. When something fails, people go back to what was there before it, although they interpret it in the form of the thing that failed, so you get a hybrid that is often worse.

With social media, the meltdown over Twitter seems to be a non-issue. Most of the people there do not care about the less censored regime that Musk is running or like it, even though his staff are still removing Right-wingers at an alarming pace. It is now a good place for normie conversation and non-controversial news.

The panic lately over the Israel-Hamas thing — with no one having the bravery, honesty, and realism to simply point out that having two ethnic groups in the same nation is what produced the Holocaust — has caused many to react in horror to the opinions of those around them.

All we can say to that is “welcome to pluralism, morons.” In an ideal pluralist society, Nazis and Rabbis would walk the same streets and respect the opposite opinion for the greater glory of having a pluralist society. When pluralism deviates from that, its utility in enhancing freedom and thriving mostly dies.

Social media will live on with those who already use it and, like AOL, will only slowly fade away if ever. The cutting edge of users went elsewhere, with the smartest heading to blogs, mailing lists, and chat rooms, and the rest trying to find less toxic versions of social media like Mastodon.

Unfortunately, the open source not for profit Mastodon model is succumbing to what took out big social media, which is that in order to appeal to a wide audience, especially the heavy internet users who tend to be neurotic, you need to make a “safe space” by eliminating all non-mainstream opinions that might “offend” someone somewhere anytime.

Mastodon is one sub-network of the Fediverse, a worldwide group of servers that use the ActivityPub protocol, and is most popular because it offers the most features and easiest interface. Unfortunately it has decided to adopt a platform that Meta, Reddit, Pinterest, Truth Social, or Old Twitter might have liked:

1. Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
   Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms.
2. Daily backups
   It is important for users to have the confidence that a trip over the power cable or a rogue bit flip will not erase all of their data. Having a backup strategy is a basic necessity of providing a public service.
3. At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
   Various circumstances can prevent the original owner of the Mastodon server from answering technical emergencies. For this reason, more than one person must have that capability.
4. Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down
   Sometimes services shut down, it is the cycle of life. But users must have the confidence that their account will not disappear overnight, so that they have time to export their data and find another server.

In other words, they want to re-create the same disaster that made mainstream social media lose its popularity because it lost the trust of its users. If you cannot speak on any topic without possibly losing the time you have invested into the platform so far in contacts and messages, you simply stop speaking about anything but the banal.

Social media made itself hateful by allowing a few complainers to destroy the work that ordinary users had put into the site and making connections there. Some of this came about through the bias of the $8/day poor sods who had to plough through all the objectionable stuff posted, some was government propaganda, and some was fear of regulation.

A lot of it came about simply because social media panders to the 8% of the userbase — a few percent of the population at large — who create 85% of the interactions on these sites and apps. This group tend to be miserable malcontents who are looking for a reason that the world is wrong for making them a loser and they are magical prophets of Utopia.

Any time media goes down this path, it loses the cutting-edge users who make it interesting, and promptly dies a slow death as the 8% repeat themselves into a state of utter boredom. Websites die by heat-death just like universes do, apparently, and it manifests first as tedious repetition and random, low-quality participation.

Perhaps we need an alternate server covenant:

1. Minimal moderation
   We design this service for mature and sane people who can handle the disagreements inherent to pluralism and human nature. For this reason, we censor nothing except for spam and illegal material such as child porn and doxing.
2. Culture of Decorum
   While we stand against viewpoint discrimination, or the notion that certain ideas cannot be discussed, we believe that any site, network, or protocol that involves humans should have a culture both of tolerance for any viewpoint and of insistence that this viewpoint be expressed in polite terms, protecting our need for social, political, economic, and religious commentary, which was the intent of “free speech” rules in the first place.
3. Daily backups
   It is important for users to have the confidence that a trip over the power cable or a rogue bit flip will not erase all of their data. Having a backup strategy is a basic necessity of providing a public service.
4. At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
   Various circumstances can prevent the original owner of the Mastodon server from answering technical emergencies. For this reason, more than one person must have that capability.
5. Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down
   Sometimes services shut down, it is the cycle of life. But users must have the confidence that their account will not disappear overnight, so that they have time to export their data and find another server.

The commonsense rules about server backup, emergency access, and advance warning of shutdown should stay because they work at least as a guideline. Nothing is going to stop someone from freaking out and deleting his server in a fit of pique, but having people agree that this is the goal keeps consciousness of it high.

However, the idea that a social media network can be run on censorship is obsolete. It has been demonstrated to be destructive not just to individual users, but to any sense of community. History shows us that it damages the purpose of social media, which is communication and meeting people of interest.

When the dust settles on this sad time, social media will serve as an example of how the Crowd is a paradox: we must both protect it from horrors and avoid the greater horror of abusive protectors, which means we navigate a fine line between anarchy and totalitarianism with an eye toward making a functional community.

Tags: censorship, internet, social media, viewpoint discrimination