Twitter and Mastodon: The Ideological Problems of the Fediverse

I've done my time and then some on Usenet. If learning to moderate online forums is like studying trolls and demons, then hanging out on Usenet is like living in Sunnydale: if you survive long enough, you'll eventually come up against one of every kind of monster – and after a while, your reaction will change to “Bored now.” – Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The Fediverse is a decentralized network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes. Any resemblance to the political order established by United States constitution is not at all a coincidence – it takes serious study and effort to create political ideas, and even then people have to be persuaded to adopt them. Much easier to fall back on things already known. And, it has exactly the problems of constitutional federations on the US model worldwide. In US politics, there has been a race to the bottom in local jurisdictions. Commercial corporations go to Delaware for a liberal regulatory environment. Businesses go to anti-worker states for cheap labor. Firearms go from states where their purchase is easy to states where it is not. And so on, and on. Without strong federal authority, there is nothing to stop these abuses.

The Fediverse is as it is because of a number of ideological choices justified by “freedom.” Freedom of speech. Freedom of the press. In many respects the Fediverse is better than might be feared; the management of major sites is so far fairly decent. It helps that the mother site is in Germany, where Nazi content is specifically outlawed. But there are also numerous bad actors, and numerous sites run by bad actors, and by design there is no way to completely shut them out. So long as they are polite, the Fediverse enables their abuses.

“You have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.” – a bartender in Baltimore