But someday after that, we’ll reach a point when the phrase “social media is all fake robo-crap” will be as common of knowledge as “cigarettes cause cancer” or “slot machines are a poor investment”. Adults can still smoke and slot, sure. But nobody in the developed world can say they weren’t warned of the risks.
Prescient.
Bluesky is a small indie company. It can’t afford to fight the law or implement the extensive age verification the law requires. So it chose to pull the plug and leave.
FB, X, etc, have a lot more resources to implement the extensive, invasive age verification Mississippi requires and keep fighting it in court until the decision upholding it is final.
Wow, look at all those corporate buzzwords. The focus on big generic ideas and the lack of implementation discussion or specific examples. And those perfectly spaced em dashes. Chef’s kiss. Premium chum right there 😆
But AI generation aside, this article is counterintuitive in a bad way. Save a Fediverse instance by building a real life community of “handmade goods and creative projects” based around that instance? If users cared about your instance enough to have real in person events your instance wouldn’t need saving.
If anything, it should be the other way around. Real life communities can incorporate a Fediverse instance for online socializing and building community. And those instances will thrive as long as they fill a need for the community. But creating the instance first and building a community - which is several orders of magnitude harder to do - to support the instance? Sheesh.
There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it’s more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don’t even have to look at so many potential flags).
How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?
Because “multiple independent steps of verifying” is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people’s rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It’s called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.
(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)
Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.
What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.
* If you wanted to summarise this letter on a t-shirt, it would be “People > Protocols > Platforms”. *
Can I get this under Calvin pissing on a Disney logo?
Seriously, this is now my favorite summary of the fediverse.