Comment by thombles
3 days ago
Spam, illegal content, and moderation in general. How do you protect against new account spam when any domain could be a PDS and any PDS could host an arbitrary number of users? What do you do about people stuffing ebooks and TV shows in git repositories? If a project is getting piled on with all its issued spammed because of political views of the repo's maintainer, is this considered a problem, and if so how is it fixed?
The advantage of an AppView is that, like BlueSky, you can actually have a central moderation team and consistent moderation policy. Even if people post whatever they want on their own PDS it is possible to curate what people normally see. However, even though I avoid following the drama I can see that the BlueSky moderation team is constantly under fire for some decision or other. Choose your poison.
Nowadays I don't have the appetite for fully decentralised public networks and all the responsibilities and problems they bring. It's nice that AT's content is completely open compared with something like Twitter, but it's so helpful that the day-to-day administration is centralised when you want an authority to appeal to without ending up with the quagmire of "defederation".
A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node? (i.e. providing storage and access to arbitrary git repos uploaded anonymously)
But doesn't the decentralized firehose make it easy to build curation? You decide what/whom you want to subscribe to---rest of social media be damned. Why do you care what unmoderated crap is flooding the world outside your cosy corner?
And if you choose to receive a broader sampling, you can subscribe to someone who will curate it for you---either manually, or through algorithms. It seems like an elegant way to have a web-of-trust layer for curation, composed with an algorithmic curation layer---and be able to tune the latter separately to suit user needs, without being beholden to the interests of the platform operator. You can easily switch your subscriptions if you don't like the way someone is curating it, without wholesale losing access to the network!
> A question to ponder: is anyone here going to volunteer to run a "permissive" radicle seed node?
Doesn't opening up curation+subscription solve this problem too? Anyone can curate in opinionated ways, and offer to "host" whatever they are okay with accepting responsibility for (at whatever level of endorsement, so long as it is clearly communicated) and users have the choice to subscribe.
The problem today is that curation is tangled with access to the network, so you're forced to accept the curation provided to you by the owner of the walled garden (and incentives are misaligned)
AtProto does have platform and user managed labelers for the moderation piece, so it's at least built into the protocol. The jury is still out on how well that concept will scale.