[e1ven]

I had written a toy social network a few years back the past which had these features - It worked very much like an encrypted version of usenet.

This is probably my bias as an engineer showing, but the technology doesn't seem like the hard part-

I always understood that having an resilient network means people will use it to post some bad things, but I don't know if I really internalized the scope of that until later.

I had originally envisioned it might be useful in oppressive countries, where people needed a way to communicate - Recent events have shown how dangerous that can feel when you're in the midst of people who feel like that describes them.

As another HN post pointed out, there are two natural audiences for such networks - Idealists, and those who can't get away with stuff on other networks.. And the second is going to be far more common. That will influence the culture, and help to drive other "good" people away from the service, amplifying the effect.

Even if you have user-selectable moderators (Which I had, similar to the request the author makes), without a huge war-chest to hire a large team of default moderators, you'll never be able to keep up. The default experience for the average user will be terrible.

Over and over, I ran into issues like that - It's relatively easy to built the technological network, but managing the social network aspect is an unsolved problem.

[at_a_remove]

If you have an old-ish head unit in your car, it may receive an RDS (Radio Data System) feed that could tell you what station it is or what song is playing. However, many stations around here are using it to advertise Club Fitness and Golden Oak lending. If you cast further back into the mists of time, anyone could send you a webcam or chatroom invite ... this was naturally exploited by spammers approximately ten milliseconds after its invention.

I have since formulated the concept that any communications channel, any at all, where it does not cost to transmit per message will eventually be colonized by the advertising fungal organism. Even low-cost messaging can be colonized, but the lower the cost, the faster it comes.

Similarly, like FreeNet, any communications channel that can be used to post Things You Do Not Like will be used to do so. And that once you implement some kind of wide-scale filter against that, absolutely nothing can be done to stop someone from attempting to take over, to add and subtract to that filter, for their own purposes and their own ideology.

I have no solutions for this.

[nelsondev]

The author (OP) proposes community generated and shared block lists.

I’m imagining an opt in block list, where with enough downvotes, if you are a member of the block list, the content is hidden.

If the block list starts blocking content you want, you can fork it, keep the parts you want, remove the parts you don’t.

[intrasight]

Made me laugh and weep ;)

[grahamburger]

IMO this is why federation is an important aspect of decentralized networks, and is commonly listed as a reason for use Mastodon / the fediverse. Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with. Notably mastodon.social and the instances related to it haven't become cess pools of hate speech, because they do have strong moderation policies, but for users who want to post that stuff there are other instances they can find.

[convolvatron]

more importantly, moderation is an overlay. instead of worrying about what and what isn't acceptable speech, let subcommunities form with their own policies and they can curate their own worldview

that doesn't at all address bubbleism, but trying to decide which set of statements is 'ok' for everyone seems like a lost cause

[sneak]

> Each instance can set their own moderation policies and decide what other instances they want to federate with.

Yeah, this is why the fediverse is terrible, too. Your site admin shouldn't be the one deciding who you can DM, or which people can follow your feed.

Imagine if email worked that way.

[folkrav]

Doesn't this basically boil down to the model we currently have, but decentralized, or am I misunderstanding?

[notJim]

Any idea why Parler took off rather than a right-wing instance of Mastodon? Is it about framing?

[hinkley]

Before I decided that 'game developer' was not in my future prospects, I discovered the concept of reckless entitlement, where people will do anything the system allows, and a persistent subset of those people will rationalize that if you didn't want me to do that, then you should have written the code differently.

This is tantamount to "Stop hitting yourself."

Like the old line about academia, "the fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low," the stakes for gaming and socializing with internet strangers are both pretty low.

Additionally, computers make you an efficient asshole. You can make a pretty big mess before you have time to think about whether you really should be doing what you just did. To err is human. To really foul things up requires the aid of a computer.

[mawise]

There's another dimension that nobody seems to talk about, and that's what happens with access to content is restricted. There is basically no censorship and no abuse from "those who can't get away with stuff on other networks" in the realm of SMS (or WhatsApp/WeChat/whatever your country uses). You can have a very healthy network if the authors are responsible for access control to their content. That's the idea behind my side-project of an easy-to-use, easy-to-selfhost private blog.[1]

When people want to use the platform to "become a thought leader" or "expand their network" then you're in the realm of public publishing which is where all the problems you cite become issues. The web makes privacy possible, and I don't understand why so few people are interested in that angle. For me I want to be able to share photos of my daughter with family and friends. I don't care if someone else wants to privately rant about the government to their friends--privacy enables both of these.

[1] https://github.com/mawise/simpleblog