the rando problem

It's becoming more clear that some technical choices about visibility that ssb takes create very high levels of unnecessary drama. Randos with "ideas" constantly swoop into channels such as feminism with poorly researched theories for all to see, including new people who will be put off the community for good. It's also tiring to deal with this stuff. If you don't deal with it, other people will see it which creates toxicity (because posts are waaaaay too visible). If you deal with stupid shit, you get yelled at even when you do it politely and people feel "attacked". (These are often the same kind of people who complain that other people "can't take a joke" or whatever when they say something fucked up.)

All the clients work this way so at this point I don't expect it's really possible to fix it. It's a bad assumption at a fundamental level, but now we know what happens when you build a p2p social network with that display mechanic. Twitter, facebook, and tumblr don't really have this problem to anywhere near the same degree because you don't see posts you didn't sign up for. Friend-of-friend gossip may be a neat way to implement a p2p protocol but it creates pretty poor outcomes when it comes to a social network.

Example: %Qq9M+rF...

This dynamic makes ssb not so much a personal log where you can write your off-the-cuff ideas and share them with your close friends, but a public space where randos will snipe messages and make you feel shitty. Or else you will see shitty messages from randos and feel compelled to chime in because most everyone can see their garbage ideas and leaving those around unchallenged in a public space pushes the window of acceptable conduct to a bad place where newcomers only see drama and toxicity and will peace out. Doing all this makes everyone involved feel shitty and exhausted.

The thing that made Facebook magical in the beginning was that you got to open the door to this little inner circle of people you'd let into your exclusive club.

They later added public groups etc, but scuttlebutt is the other way around

Really what we want is a way to private message with our closest associated people, but still sometimes explore the wider buttverse

@dangerousbeans
Back in the day, facebook really only let you network with other folk at your college. You literally listed when you would be in what class and could mingle with folk, setup study groups, and talk about professors. It was, in fact, really neat. It's sorta a shame.

seems like the real issue is that people are encouraged to join (public) pubs, so instead of forming separate communities everyone ends up in the same room. not everyone is going to get along, and thats fine. it isn't even that "friend of a friend" is a bad idea. pubs are at the center of the social graph that you don't like. a public pub doesn't filter its friends, any rando that shows up will become a friend of the pub and get within your follow distance if you are on the same pub.

honestly, this isn't surprising at all. i spend a lot of time in what you would call "toixic" circles and my pub is pretty popular. i've made it invite only because my poor sbot is losing its mind, and i don't want to be a centralizing force in the scuttleverse. i'm not claiming to be the cause of the issue, but i disagree that the problem is in the model. the problem is that the topology of the internet makes pubs necessary and unless that problem is solves, pubs are going to keep pushing us into crowded spaces that make everyone upset.

so get on hyperboria and unfollow all the pubs!

@xj9 I am following people who follow people who I've blocked, so while pubs might be an issue for drive-by randos I still think the main problem is the assumption that your friend's friends's posts should be visible. Another huge problem is that people will see activity in channels that they aren't invested in and don't really care about, which causes topic sniping with unproductive counter-posts. In real life, when I have friends I don't share everything with them. I know what topics we can have a productive discussion about and which topics I know we disagree too much to engage. The tech surfaces every message to everyone (in an immutable way no less), which simultaneously stifles saying what you really think while showing messages to people who are not the intended audience.

I think maybe things could be two fold:

• Replication should be deep and async ... e.g. 3 hop could be slow and even wipe after certain limits of your local memory are exceeded.
• Clients displaying discussions by default could restrict themselves to one-hop or friends-only only posts, so you wouldn't even notice?

Personally I think what we are seeing has positive effects long term. Coexisting, making peace, finding compromises isn't fun. It is stressful, but unless we as global citizens want to drop back into a digital form of tribalism maybe that's there is a chance here?

In real life, when I have friends I don't share everything with them. I know what topics we can have a productive discussion about and which topics I know we disagree too much to engage. The tech surfaces every message to everyone (in an immutable way no less), which simultaneously stifles saying what you really think while showing messages to people who are not the intended audience.

That's a good point. Maybe there could be a feature where you assign tags to certain posts you make and you would only actively share those posts (they could be read through other means) with friends that also have those tags assigned to them, by you?

If you change friends.hops from 3 to 1 in your config file will that stop copying friends of friends' posts to your own machine? Or just stop copying them from your machine to your friends? That would solve the rando problem. I feel like dividing your friends into groups is a different beast.

I don't think this is a problem that requires a technological solution. Actually, let me rephrase, I don't think a technological solution will solve this.

The situation experienced by @substack is quite common here in Brazil on mainstream networks. It is a human problem, not a technical one. Everything that follows now on my message is my own opinion and it might be flawed and or incorrect, I don't claim to have a grasp on the absolute truth but this is how I see these situations.

The web/internet has made it easier for us to come in contact with people with backgrounds and experiences that are vastly different than our own. Education, mindsets, research, culture (as in how things are where you live and with whom you establish relationship), historical background, everything differs and yet we're all thrown together in the same place with the power of voicing our opinions.

This leads to confusion and drama as often people will claim that their own non-expert opinion has the same force as hundreds accumulated years of research which shows the opposite facts. We're now in a world so polarized and so without empathy that it becomes quite hard to disagree with people without entering a shit storm. Believe me, Brazil Facebook feeds are basically a civil war for the past couple years.

There are often these kind of archetypal scenarios playing out:

• Some from privileged background sprouts opinion about stuff they never experienced. And here I mean any kind of situation where the person talking stuff has no idea about how things really are for those in that situation. (Cue: people from foreign countries with deep pockets saying: "Brazilians should just get their act together" without realizing the world is much harder than that).
• People thinking that facts, scientific research, academia stuff, real research, have the same value as their belief system. (Cue: anti-vaxxers, flat earth people).
• People without notion of historical and geopolitical processes saying non-sense about the current state of the world. (Cue: Americans complaining about immigration.).
• People diminishing personal traumatic experiences because in their own personal case it was different. (Cue: anyone doing victim-blaming on sexual abuse cases).

All these and much more are playing out constantly. Technological solution will not solve the diverse differences in background and experiences we all have. Blocking, or erecting walls between us don't solve this either but I do understand why people often need to do that to keep healthy. What solves stuff is education. People need more study, real study, proper study. Just an side note about this need, my wife was touring the US as a Journalist at the invitation of the DoE, at one of their stops at a university of texas campus, a GEOGRAPHY TEACHER argued that Texas was larger than Brazil (in area, as in square miles). He argued from a position of authority on the subject but he was of course completely wrong. This is scene is played out with variations all day long on the web.

To be able to coexist and work together, we need to be able to be together on the same place with people we disagree with. We need to be able to look at someone we disagree with and still strive to built a better future that includes everyone. It is hard, taxing, exausting and somewhat impossible, but it is IMHO the only way.

I too am fed up with people who are radically against whatever I believe in, but maybe, we can talk to each other until at least all parts involved understand what the other is saying even if we can't find common ground. In essence, technology is not a substitute for empathy, tolerance and education. Maybe we can do better, maybe we must do better.

In essence, technology is not a substitute for empathy, tolerance and education.

you are one of does people complaining about bad words while doing it yourself. and this smells like self protection to make it easier for you this just seems to be about you. while pretending your helping others

@ben I don't know you or the discussion behind this thread but there are two approaches that can be taken forward. One path is of conflict and fighting, in which all the parts involved keep struggling more interested in defending their own points of view and replying to whatever message the other people post as if it was an attack (perceived or real attack, doesn't matter).

Or.....

The path of solution, in which we must strive to understand where each person is coming from. We need not to agree with one another, but we need to make an effort to at least understand. We can keep our disagreements and all work together if only we can achieve a place of tolerance and empathy here.

One potential way to categorize people is dividing everyone into two camps, those who love the process and those who love the solution. You may remember the first kind from your coworkers, inevitable you had someone in your team or class, that loved the process, they would spend all their time in the process of something that would never yield the solution. There are many in this group that love to argue, fight (doesn't mean if it is the good or bad side of a fight), discuss something forever. You may also have experience with people from the other kind which can't really be in peace by following process alone, they must come to a solution. Solution doesn't mean whatever they agree with but it might be a position of compromise that satisfies the parts involved enough, after all, no group solution is ever without compromise.

Like all generalizations and categorizations, this is of course false and most of us switch camps depending on the situation. Now we're in a bit of cross-roads here where we can keep the process going where we fight, argue, discuss, block, flame, or we can aim towards a solution where we talk trying to understand one another towards reaching a point of compromise.

Scuttlebutt is like a ship (more like a fantasy floating island, really). This ship can be one where there is constant fight and abuse between the crewmembers, which will probably lead to revolt (as exemplified by the revolt of the lash a naval mutiny in Rio between enlisted sailors and naval officers). Or it can be a ship where we try a bit of democracy in its simpler and better sense, where we assembly, talk, understand and try to reach compromise (maybe not unlike the processes described in The republic of pirates.

In which camp are you right now? The process or the solution, I am asking because if you're in the process camp, I will refrain from interacting further as I'm usually the one trying to reach compromise. If you're in the solution camp, then we can all try to work this together and maybe see each other with new, more interesting eyes.

it all depends i like compromise but that does not mean i want it at all costs or that i would compromise what i say. and compromise comes from both sides. and like i said im willing to talk to anybody about anything but if someone is not nice to me i will return that to some degree i don't need to but it depends on the situation. so i guess you decide if you want to interact with me.

I'm kinda dreading the drop in public posts that might occur when private groups appear. I really like randomly finding posts from people I didn't know existed and I mostly like the way scuttlebutt works now. I think mostly we just need better filtering on what we read, not what we write.

On reddit you don't see things until they have a certain number of upvotes (related to the total votes/users in a subreddit) but you can see everything if you want and then help out with the initial filtering.

On scuttlebutt we're already able to filter based on the social graph, but it'd be nice to see things from non-friends as soon as e.g. one of your friends likes the post, or maybe after a certain number of your friends read posts from a person without banning the person that person's posts becomes visible. Then you could simply decide on your filter level based on your mood and energy.

Something like this would require testing and tweaking but we could simply expose the underlying parameters via the UI and then everyone can play around with it and share experiences about what works. These filters could also be specified per-channel or per user (e.g. you like a person but think their choice in friends is shit).

@SoapDog I think there is a technical solution in this case and it is fairly simple: don't display posts from non-followers. But that must be done in every client to be effective. Without that feature, clients are effectively an abuse lightning rod where if you speak up you will be piled on by people who you didn't invite into your life to begin with.

@substack do you think this problem could be solved with community specific portals - as in portals that are branded flavours of the patchwork client?

I think the 'one interface for all' may be a weak point of this platform as a discussion place, too many broad topics and no ability to effectively moderate. Maybe community specific portals with governance tools that filter can be an answer. Similar to reddit, moderators can administrate a sub using tools - perhaps by selecting a set of tags to flow under that portal. If the governance is poor, and feeds and the content becomes a mess, then people can switch to a new portal. Censorship is not a swear word I feel, it can be used to filter messages and users that are flagged irrelevant to that portal, without being able to censor the actual conversations.

I would like to use the technology for example to run an SSB app powered to give information on cryptocurrency investment - so I would not need the hundreds of other tags to show up. I can build my own from forking the #patchwork client and track the changes, or use a vanilla project like #patchbay as a starting point; but it seems silly to throw away the great work done already on the patchwork client and start again.

@substack I totally understand why that is necessary in some cases. See if the solution I mention here is agreeable: Maybe that could be a setting on the client you're using. You'd still replicate your configured amount of hops, people would still see you but you would only see people you are following. So even though your posts might still attract people you don't want, you'd never see it. This wouldn't require a change to all clients, it would be only a setting on your desired client. What do you think? I could try to help with a proof-of-concept of this.

I think this might be easy to implement and accommodate both your need and people who wants the current behavior of seeing friends-of-friends.

People thinking that facts, scientific research, academia stuff, real research, have the same value as their belief system. (Cue: anti-vaxxers, flat earth people).

In your heart you know it's flat.

@SoapDog - I agree this is a social problem, an important one for SSB to take on, a shared goal is to have technology serve us.

Peer to peer's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness, that's what makes it a challenging area to work in, how to enable discovery while preventing malicious actors.

To some extent, private groups will help, especially with filtering of content. We all talk differently in public from the way we talk in the privacy of our homes, for many good reasons. For example one might be a radical feminist or a moderate intuitionist or a liberal monetarist and how one talks about these beliefs varies greatly by the context. In public one is more careful, or arguably should be more careful, to choose their words wisely.

Private groups help with this, especially if the groups have policies or rules governing acceptable behavior. I keep going back to this we don't want nobody nobody sent (reference to the Daly political machine in Chicago, back when democrats were the ones gerrymandering)

I really like the idea floated by @Dominic that users should be the ones who extend invites. Coupled with policies governing groups, we'd be cooking with gas!

I can't wait to have a private group for category-theory. We have lots of arrows in there, and they shoot both ways, so I'm a little nervous right now allowing anyone to just walk in and own them.

In your heart you know it's flat.

Earth's surface is flat. It's just that the local geometry of spacetime is curved due to gravity.

Also, Earth is at the centre of the universe: there is no objectively-measurable centre; all frames of reference are equally true; and right now you are on Earth.

@SoapDog I think if people have to go out of their way to customize a client in order to have a nice experience the battle is already lost. I don't think this would fully shield against unwanted drama either as your friends might have a different configuration where they would engage with trolls and you would become ensnared in drama from that. I don't know if I want to use ssb much anymore. There is cool ideas and discussion but there's way too much shit from people I don't care about. It's extremely emotionally demanding to deal with randos.

@substack well, we're not all trolls, there are tons of great people here, if we let a couple people spoil everything then there will never be cool technology because there will never be something that can prevent drama.

One solution, to keep things healthier for those that are having too taxing experiences is refusing to engage with trolls. Blocking people, that is more effective here than in other platforms. Maybe sharing blocklists with friends that feel the same way.

I don't know. I don't want to see people I like leaving, and my most compelling argument is that there are more good experiences here than bad ones.

I've had my fair (and unfair) share of trolling and targeted bullying. Heck, in a FOSS community that I am part of, I've been bullied and wronged systematically for years. It sucks. It makes me quite weak actually. I couldn't solve that, not with technology, not with talks, not with mediation, I've came to realize that there will be no solution, so I will simply ignore the problem and try to do good stuff instead and to hell with those fuckers.

Basically what I think is that moving away doesn't solve stuff, it just postpones the day shit will reach near you again. My current tricky is be very liberal with blocking/unfollowing, if something starts taking a tool on my emotion beyond what I think it is reasonable, then, block'em'all.

And one thing I do is when I am down due to trolls and drama, I always, try to engage with cool people, move my focus into better things. Move me forcedly away from drama and into new more positive experiences. There is a lot of good stuff around here on SSB that might entice you and that you're not yet aware probably.

Maybe we could do some focus groups and talk to each other in private chats with a small group, away from the possibility of trolling, and try some "experience sharing and community caring".

@substack I would be really sad if you departed. As I continue to be sad at the absence of @dust.

SSB is a promising technology and technical community to me, but it is as of now the only online social network that I participate in.

I also think something is fermenting in this new space where SSB, DAT, IPFS, and Holochain live, that will evolve into some new creature unlike anything seen before.

Learning how to deal with trolls and drama is part of the evolution. Emotionally demanding, but not escapable.

Saying "this is a human social problem" to me implies we should have similar solutions to what we have in meatspace on SSB. In the real world, you don't hang out with assholes, you leave places where they are, and you set up private spaces where only trusted people come in. You don't have to listen to people you don't want to, and if a friend of yours shows they don't have good judgement about who their friends are, you don't trust them to invite people to your house or go to things they invite you to (but you're less likely to be friends with them after a while).

Personally, I only want to see posts from my friends on Scuttlebutt, and I wish there were a way to set it that way (I especially don't want to see someone's posts if they only connection we have is a pub). Lately I've been feeling aversion to spending time browsing SSB, because it seems like every time I do there's some asshole troll. I got full on sealioned by PM yesterday, and I really don't have time or energy for it.

At this point in my life, I have no interest being subjected to BS. Yet I can't just happily scroll by abuse or bigotry, because if I am seeing it I know others less privileged are too, who will see it go unchallenged and become more likely to leave SSB (making this less and less somewhere I want to hang out).

I don't give a shit if I end up a complete no-asshole filter bubble. Sounds great to me. There are plenty of ideas to share and work to collaborate on with non-assholes. And unless I have tools to create an actual trust network, no way am I going to tell people who trust me that it's a safe place to come into. So hell yeah let's make technical solutions, and quite draconian ones at that.

The difference between SSB and whatever moderation goes on in the legacy web is that there is no central authority who can silence or ban anyone, and no global policies. If people want to wade right into cesspools or cavort with strangers, more power to them. But the design philosophy of SSB should be to give total power to each person to craft their own subjective reality, connections, and experience. That is how we'll see the incredible emergence of myriad diverse communities that I think it's SSB's destiny to bring about.

@Alanna

I don't give a shit if I end up a complete no-asshole filter bubble. Sounds great to me. There are plenty of ideas to share and work to collaborate on with non-assholes. And unless I have tools to create an actual trust network, no way am I going to tell people who trust me that it's a safe place to come into. So hell yeah let's make technical solutions, and quite draconian ones at that.

Yes! One of my mentors told me, something like, "you will make progress faster if you move with people who want to move with you than if you waste time arguing with those who don't."

At this point in my life, I have no interest being subjected to BS. Yet I can't just happily scroll by abuse or bigotry, because if I am seeing it I know others less privileged are too, who will see it go unchallenged and become more likely to leave SSB (making this less and less somewhere I want to hang out).

Thanks for posting this, @Alanna.

I'm very guilty of scrolling by most of the time. I usually dig posts of people who do stand up to bigots/trolls to make it visible to both sides who I support. I've been feeling pretty burnt out in general lately, and confronting trolls on ssb is just one more thing for which I haven't had the energy.

I don't give a shit if I end up a complete no-asshole filter bubble. Sounds great to me.

I think I blocked ben a while ago, but I've still seen long threads of people engaging with him recently. Patchfoo's algorithm for sorting content is very primitive, so I can either unfollow or block people if I don't want to see their content. Unfortunately this means that I'd have to block the people trying to stand up to ben to avoid hearing about him.

To me filter bubbles are problematic when they are done to you by algorithms that you cannot see, understand or control.

Setting your own boundaries, and knowing how and why you're doing it seems an entirely different issue.

I'm happy to have learned the phrase concern trolling recently. It's so much easier to call out bullshit when there's a good name for that type of bullshit. It seems like there's a kind of filter-bubble-concern-trolling that's become a convenient way for free-speech advocates (I use that in a negative sense) to pressure people to listen to them.

As with fake news, the term seems very easy to coopt to their purposes. The way Alanna and @sam have framed it as a matter of consent is a big step in the right direction.

for self-directed filter bubbles.

It seems like there's a kind of filter-bubble-concern-trolling that's become a convenient way for free-speech advocates (I use that in a negative sense) to pressure people to listen to them. i think that explains a lot

@Alanna your latest reply made me understand much more about the background on this discussion, thanks a lot for it. I understand that my own personal experience and "wants" is quite different that personal filter-bubbles and I of course think it is great if SSB can provide you with that safe space. Now, moving onto more action, it might be doable to patch patchbay or some other client to expose a behavior like "only show posts from friends", would this be enough of a good start?

Is this a good project for someone to tackle under the grant system, provide some form of "patchsafe" which could be a client that enables those trust communities by raising shields around friends.

Please don't take me wrong, I know the problem is quite deeper and more nuanced than "just showing friends posts" but I can only propose solutions that I myself could build and that is probably upon my reach or the reach of someone who knows as much about ssb as I do, which is to say, a novice SSB developer. More seasoned developers might be able to implement much better solutions.

@Greg K Nicholson

Also, Earth is at the centre of the universe

Of our observable universe.

This was not clear to me at first, but it does make sense. It's not about how far our telescopes can see, it's really about how much light has reached us. We are at the very center of a perfect sphere of observable universe (until we launch probes far enough away from Earth).

I don't choose friends, in real-life or online, based on their similarities to my views, and I don't intend to.

What I want, and have wanted for a while, is a control for my own online filters. Not quite sure how to put it to words, so let me try with pictures:

The idea here is to have a sliding scale that allows me to pick, not just a single position within the scale, but a range.

Example settings:

Setting both sliders all the way to the right would basically be the same as only seeing your own posts.

This kind of control would require algorithms that analyze and calculate the "distance" of people in terms of their opinions. You could imagine that this could be further broken down by topics. Two people might agree on a particular topic yet sit on opposite sides of the spectrum on another topic.

The reason why I want this is that in recent times I have grown more weary of the negative side-effects of filter bubbles. This is something I wish to discuss in #collectivism but haven't yet had the time to.

@substack I also value and enjoy your posts and would be sad to stop reading you. Let's find a way to make things work.

I'd like to differentiate filters against people not like me (which I don't do, I connect with people who are very different from me all the time, and learn a lot from many of them, including many that I disagree with) vs filters for trolls and people who seek attention for their disruption of everybody else's conversation (where I sometimes try to reason with them privately to see if they can be reasonable, and sometimes avoid them in whatever seems to be the easiest way).

@bobhaugen the issue is drawing the line between a real troll, who you cannot (by definition) engage in a constructive argument with, and a perceived troll, who you believe you cannot engage in a constructive argument with simply because their views are so distant/opposed to yours (and yours to them).

I spent some time online engaging in what I could initially best describe as intellectual masochism, by selectively browsing through twitter feeds of people who were in the opposite side of my own beliefs, and have found the experience somewhat humbling.

To a large extent we are all a product of our (increasingly more polarized) environments.

Hi all, I'm mainly a lurker but wanted to throw in some comments on this issue.. I've got a huge amount of respect for all the contributors here.

I see a main issue, not as some people being trolls and others not being trolls, but one of expectations. You have some highly invested people attempting to enlighten those with less context, you have somewhat invested people looking to build consensus and grow and you have uninvested people looking to inspect the platform, kick the tires and to see if this communication medium enables their preferred modes of interaction. Intersection of these modes seems to be universally frustrating. Certainly receiving a hastily typed glib/sarastic reply is crazy annoying, and possibly counter productive... but it is a legitimate use of the platform and one that may not upset the group or be considered trollish in the right context.

It would seem a karma system which allows me to individually reinforce negative or positive feelings(by person), then choose that for a specific post karma has to be neutral (based on me is easy, but based all current posters to the thread is better) for you to post in the conversation. This would mimic the sort of trust you have when people bring others to your party. As people you trust enter, they chain in people they trust (as long as the group agrees, by karma) in an organic way. There's still the potential you post something and unknown trolls enter early, but it should prevent a conversation from going in unexpected or frustrating directions.

I don't think this is a problem that requires a technological solution. Actually, let me rephrase, I don't think a technological solution will solve this. -- @soapdog

I just posted about Zed Shaw's Utu I think there are some tech ideas that can help address this.

We're now in a world so polarized and so without empathy that it becomes quite hard to disagree with people without entering a shit storm.

I think that's, sadly, quite true online, and offline it seems to be moving closer to true each day.

Blocking, or erecting walls between us don't solve this either but I do understand why people often need to do that to keep healthy. What solves stuff is education.

Yes, but that's beyond the scope of any social network, and I find that online people simply don't want to hear your "education" because "You're wrong!" (cue violent conflict).

I don't think this would fully shield against unwanted drama either as your friends might have a different configuration where they would engage with trolls and you would become ensnared in drama from that. - @substack

Sometimes your friends engage in things that make you uncomfortable or unhappy. Typically you need to decide if you have to unfollow that person online. There's no getting away from that really, but you can minimize it with intelligent filtering that learns what you like to see and don't like to see. When your friend starts going off about some topic you want nothing to do with (or starts arguing with trolls) the filter could simply push it farther away (lower down the stack, hidden behind some extra step, whatever).

What I want, and have wanted for a while, is a control for my own online filters. Not quite sure how to put it to words, so let me try with pictures: -- @ktorn

I would suggest that that's a valid idea but incredibly difficult to quantify (and thus implement). However, a simple bayesian filter of things you find "worth reading" / "interesting" would pretty much get you the same results.

The thing is, I don't think people actually want posts from people who are "different than me" or "similar to me" they want posts that are "interesting" to them regardless of source. If you are a person who likes hearing from differing viewpoints then the things that are "interesting" to you are likely to include posts from people who are dissimilar. If you want posts from people like you then you'd just be training it as an echo chamber and reinforcing posts from people similar to you. (cc @bobhaugen)

@khrome I'm often ok with glib and sarcastic, but trolling is known art. I've seen the masters at work. The goal is to disrupt the conversation and shit all over the participants and make them flee for the exits. Done maliciously, it's a form of DOS.

The current trend is a bunch of almost always young white males complaining about women or people of color in threads where their targets are trying to say something. In their own circles, they get points from their white male buddies for doing this. If they can DOS a conversation started by one of their targets, they go back to their own haunts and crow.

@bobhaugen : How bad has it gotten? So far in my feed (which is admittedly small and mostly concentrated around code contributors) it seems to be unwelcome opinions and stacking up well thought-out posts against something someone wrote without punctuation at high speed. I wasn't aware there were alt.tasteless style raids happening. I took the original post to be "The current state of the things requires me to have conversations with particularly disagreeable randos that sap my enthusiasm for the network", which seems different than ideological raids that are poisoning threads.

Generally, I'd think with the current controls this network will resemble 4chan more than FB as time passes, which implies an increase in this kind of activity outside the potential for actual network abuse.

As regards social hierarchy: I am, unfortunately, far too well versed in this type of victim making behavior having grown up in the American south.

Isolating or clustering bad actors seems like it would be enough... unless there are sockpuppets or willing proxies. Is that already happening?

@Alanna wrote:

I don't give a shit if I end up a complete no-asshole filter bubble. Sounds great to me.
[...]
So hell yeah let's make technical solutions, and quite draconian ones at that.

Well, as you may have guessed, as a personal stance, I find that to be quite ignorant and short-sighted - we (others, you, me) can argue this at another place and another time in case there is a common will and energy to do so - however:

@Alanna wrote:

The difference between SSB and whatever moderation goes on in the legacy web is that there is no central authority who can silence or ban anyone, and no global policies. If people want to wade right into cesspools or cavort with strangers, more power to them. But the design philosophy of SSB should be to give total power to each person to craft their own subjective reality, connections, and experience. That is how we'll see the incredible emergence of myriad diverse communities that I think it's SSB's destiny to bring about.

... I agree with that entirely - People should make choices like they desire. So as long as the technology allows you to set slides like @ktorn suggests, but maybe based on web-of-trust + based on whole users or users that follow user x or a single thread by user x that should get us somewhere without distributed censorship by automated filter bubbles?

Maybe there could also be a shared-channel filter, latter could let you select multiple channels/tags and a percentage value, if peeps share at least X% of those channels with you. That means you see those contributions of peeps that share similar interests (or less similar if you set it to 5% or 0%).

@SoapDog thanks for your writing here, I love your vibe. Also, most of the work is already done for filtering by friends in Patchbay. We'd just need to add a couple of lines and threads could have this feature too

@ktorn I too have dreamed of this slider future. I've also dreamed about measuring distance for things like replication, and have discussed this with ssb-actual-friends. I would love to build this... give users the power to decide what closeness might mean, and provide some tools for over-riding the algorithm for some people. I reckon it would be hella interesting and empowering

Adding to all the good alternatives that others have raised here, I also think the hops config should be per-friend, not globally. E.g. by default, the hop should be 1: only replicate friends, but for a certain friend you could opt-in for a hop of 2 or 3 if you know that such friend opens up access to a certain community. It doesn't make much sense to pull in every community centered around every friend you have.

For mmmmm I'll try to use hop 1 by default, also because mobile phones don't have a lot of storage, and let's see if we can build per-friend hop config.

Maybe the amount of jumps can be deducted automatically according to the number of friends or followers in common. It starts with hop 1 for all but if there is an obvious closeness with a certain friend the hop can go to 2 or 3....

@andrestaltz that's great!

@andrestaltz
your comment about 1-hop made me thinking. So would it help if tagging would include replication recommendations (to specific groups). E.g. there is two ways to tackle it: The user receiving information based on friendships/follows and the user sending information, am I wrong?

Maybe the sender could give type hints aka declare if something is worth reading/replicating - for now it would be: If you hit like, other clients may replicate, otherwise they may or may not based on their preference? And then have a web of trust feature where X-likes = your threshold filter? So everyone can open or shut the window to the street without distinctively following/unfollowing/banning?

@substack @xj9 It sounds like we would want not only the choice of how many FOAF levels deep we want to see, but a depth per friend. You follow someone who only follows nice and friendly people, you can have a FOAF-level 2 with them and not have to killfile anyone, but then you follow someone who seeks out contrarians (and maybe you don't) and then rather than having to killfile dozens of accounts you can just FOAF-level 1 that contact after three strikes.

This would be helped by the front-end showing clearly why you are seeing a post. "This user is a 3rd-level contact of yours, via Pekka and George".

dont mind me, I am not quite sure exactly how this would turn out, but this manually assigning of hops starts to sound a lot to what happened to APRS in #hamradio.

it started as a wonderful idea, just like scuttlebutt, where people would broadcast packets on air with information of interest to the local area and rebroadcast things that you hear. much like gossip

then the network grew, and just rebroadcasting stuff you heard from others took enough time that nobody had any time to actually put new info in. so people started tagging stuff for retransmission of maximum x hops.

but then a hop started to mean very different things in a local area vs a transmission trunk from mountaintop to mountaintop.

it still works whatever you choose to do with it, but now there are central recommendation as to how to set up the routing so you dont bring the entire nework to a grinding halt. in essence, you have to do manual routing the way people tell you to.

so starting with a very grassroots thing, now you have to do it the "way its done". or be an expert with intimate knowledge of how the network works.

my understanding of people arround te scuttleverse is that they dont really want this to turn in an expert-only thing, nor to have a "central way its done".

Just rambling here, i hope i am making sense

Just rambling here, i hope i am making sense - @Andrei Cociuba

Yes, that totally makes sense, and yes the analogy is a good one. Mountaintop to Mountaintop, vs local repeater to local repeater is like pub server to pub server vs connections across a LAN. In some cases 2 hops gets you a few meters. In some it gets you a few countries.

Right now we have the issue that most everyone is connecting to each other via a few big pub servers. I don't see this changing any time soon, but pub servers will (if things continue according to plan) start changing to be lots of little servers with handfuls of people instead of big monoliths that everyone subscribes to. So, it will move towards the local repeater state of things.

With the current state of the world, yes if the network grows the effectively centralized pub servers are going to be shoving around a huge amount of data. Not only are they not up to the task yet, the bandwidth and storage costs could become onerous. We'll have the same problem of #APRS, and like everything else, we should take a moment to learn from history.

Thanks for bringing up this bit of relevant history that not many folks are familiar with.

to be honest, i am not intimately familiar with it.

but fabricobbling wireless networks is one of the reasons i started being interested in #hamradio, so i started looking around and found out that most of the ideas i had at the time were truly unoriginal, and they have been tried before. cue APRS.

Personally, i dont think APRS is THAT bad, i do kinda like it, but then again I am the type of person who spends nights setting up a scuttlebot server and monitoring CPU load. not exactly your average joe.

I think there'd be more APRS users and experimenters if there were some sort of incentive, but 9600 baud AFSK on VH/UHF is not really enticing in this day and age.

In fact a lof of the hams i know are mostly on air using their default GPRS/3G/4G modems

I am rambling again. Yes, theres lessons to be learned in history. No, i am not intimately familiar with the details.

Does anyone have any opinions as to what hapened to APRS? Does anyone else see the parallels to scuttlebutt?

With the current state of the world, yes if the network grows the effectively centralized pub servers are going to be shoving around a huge amount of data. Not only are they not up to the task yet, the bandwidth and storage costs could become onerous.

Brilliant! We have protection against too much centralisation: as soon as a pub becomes too popular, it becomes impossible to maintain, and people have to start using other pubs instead.

There'll be an equilibrium size where a pub is populated enough to be useful, but also small enough to be fast. Pub operators should set limits on how much bandwidth and storage their pub uses.

(The amount of data stored and transferred isn't directly proportional to the number of social connections, which is the important number, but it's a reasonable approximation.)

Case in point: last weekend, the matrix.org home server had an outage. I took the opportunity to switch my Matrix identity to a different home server, disroot.org. A Disroot account just so happens to come with email, calendars and contacts, so now I've finally migrated away from Google! 🎉

Outages → workarounds → decentralisation.

Resistance starts on the path of least resistance! ✊

Wow awesome content here. It is interesting how everybody is trying to find technological solution to social problem. What would be social solution? How do people solve this away from keyboard? How do we deal with trolls and bullies when we physically meet them?

As usual i really like @bobhaugen view on this.

I am wondering how would SSB play out if the "you move faster with people that want to move with you" was taken further? Meaning invite only communities and well you basically get "elite" type of environment with certain codes/manifests/expectations etc. It is classical thing forums / pirate groups / trackers are doing.

I mean these are probably two different things - trying to make something very open where everyone has a voice and trying to make something that concentrates brainpower with concrete views/beliefs to accelerate everyone.

Isn't it just that SSB used to be the concentration where the core devs (obviously with similar views) were grouping their brains but now SBB is victim of its own success and it is starting to be more public place wth many more worldviews?

I completely understand that when there are ideas that you don't want to hear... well it stops working for you. It becomes pain and it does not enlighten you anyhow. The ideas that push people forward can't be too far away from their current views. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to waste time with that.

The question is if i would want to rather have something open that i have to spend lot of time with to get something out or something "elite" where there are dangers like closing yourself into bubble, discrimination etc.

Hard problems.
The

I mean these are probably two different things - trying to make something very open where everyone has a voice and trying to make something that concentrates brainpower with concrete views/beliefs to accelerate everyone.

How can we foster the sort of place that trolls just don't want to be in? Like shopping centres 💸 that play uncool music so that youths don't want to loiter there (with their skateboards and their ghetto blasters and their texting…)

I think free listening can stop trolling in the classical sense of “trolling” (deliberately disturbing people) — but not the sort of threatening and abusive behaviour, like doxxing, that some people call trolling because it's “bad behaviour on the internet” and they think that communicating via the internet is somehow separate from “real life”.