[hrpc] Mastodon, and the human rights consequences

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

By now, you probably have heard of Mastodon, the latest trend in
federated social networks. Mastodon is a direct competitor of Twitter,
but with free software and, more important, federation of the servers
(called "instances" in mastodonian). Its growth (both in number of
users and in number of instances) is spectacular. Another example of
the strength of the permissionless model.

Today, most discussions on Mastodon revolve around Mastodon itself but
this will probably change when people will start to use Mastodon for
real. What I find specially interesting is that the two main threads
have been around two points which have direct human rights
consequences.

The first big discussion was about the model of instance
deployment. Mastodon *allows* anyone to have its own instance
(warning: installation today is complicated; for geeks only; and it
requires a big machine, your Raspberry Pi won't suffice) but allowing
does not mean it's mandatory. Many models are possible for deploying
instances:

* a few GAFA instances (mastodon.google?) Pros: instances will be
managed by professionnals, and will be reliable and durable. Cons: a
lot of opportunities for corporate control / censorship, etc.

* everyone has her own instance. Pros: maximum user control. Cons: not
realistic *today* (the software is still too rough). Does not enable
people to cooperate.

* organisations (a lot of various organisations) create instances based
on a common vision. La Quadrature du Net (a french NGO working on
digital liberties) already does it with the instance mamot.fr. Pros:
allow people to cooperate when they share something. Cons: you may not
find an instance that suits you.

Of course, there are other models, and these models are not mutually
exclusive.

The second big discussion is about the
censorship/moderation/callitwhatyouwant policies of instances. The
whole point of a federated network is that each instance can have
different rules (unlike the ICANN TLDs, which have a huge set of
mandatory rules). So, it can be expected that some instances will be
restrictive. This raise a lot of issues:

* will we always have "free" instances with the minimum legal set of
rules or will the users have only a choice between restrictive
instances?

* will we see restrictive instances blocking the others (the Mastodon
software permits it), thus opening the possibility of partitioning the
network?