Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
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Not exactly. state actors and political party-sponsored troll farms have nurtured that tribalism and dialed it up for the past decade while the companies running the platforms stood by and raked in the cash because anger is engagement is money.
Technically the concept you’re referring to is totalitarianism.
Generally speaking that’s the view that there is one truth, one set of morally-correct beliefs, and that because What Is Good is known, it can be assumed those who don’t agree are Bad People.
The basic seed of totalitarianism is this idea: “We know everything that needs to be known”
An example of a totalitarian culture is Nazism: they thought that they’d worked out The Truth and that gave them the confidence that they were doing the right thing even as they did horrible things.
Another view on totalitarian belief is this common argument against capital punishment: “Given there are errors in determining guilt, a system of killing people determined to be guilty, will in fact kill some innocent people.”
That’s an anti-totalitarian argument. Basically it says “Given that we don’t have omniscience, let’s take it easy on the drastic action”
The totalitarian view on capital punishment relies on this implicit argument: “Our courts have determined that guy is guilty, and our courts are always right, so the only ethical move is to kill him”. Then you might ask “why’s it okay to kill that guy but not other people?” and the totalitarian say “that’s different, because the first guy is guilty and the second guy is innocent”.
It’s that certainty that defines totalitarianism.
And the way it leads to dictatorships is this: If determining the correct move is a finite process that proceeds deterministically from observations and the already-determined set of moral rules, there’s no reason to ask multiple people’s opinion about this law. Therefore it will be law because we know it’s right.
The non-totalitarian stance is open to new information, and doubts the ability of any one individual to have final knowledge of the right move, and so polls everyone on major decisions. ie democracy, or the distribution of power.
Great comment! Totalitarianism better describes this notion. My biggest problem is with these people thinking they know better, truth is we don’t know. All of these are social experiments and instead of taking preemptive drastic measures we can take a light handed approach and make decisions democratically whenever actually needed.
I think it’s more like the instances are countries, admins are governments, and defederation is embargo. Information and influence are the resources. Eventually, you’ll have instances that keep to themselves and others that throw their weight around regardless of any real world political alignment.
Who is this this dictator/authority you refer to that’s forcing instances to defederate?
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