Re: [hrpc] Mastodon, and the human rights consequences

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

Hi Stephane,

I finally got around to experimenting with this, and I have to say this
looks really good after all experiments with Twitter alternatives
(Diaspora, etc).

Am still having a bit on an issue finding people, but that might also
just be me.

A thing that I found quite interesting was one of the slogans with which
people were annoucning their transition from Twitter to Mastodon:
'#ProtocolsNotPlatforms', which I think should appeal to many of use here.

What I was quite fascinated by is that you can not only export data (in
open formats) but also import data, so migration between is really
possible and doable (albeit with loss of followers).

All in all quite inspiring!

Cheers,

Niels





Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital

Article 19
www.article19.org

PGP fingerprint    2458 0B70 5C4A FD8A 9488
                   643A 0ED8 3F3A 468A C8B3

On 04/10/2017 09:55 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> 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?
> 
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