If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 year ago

    The trick is to find out how to leverage the community for quality signals, and just support that with good foundations.

    Spam filtering is done by corporations but they’re not all mega tech companies like Google. A lot of it is done at the network level, too.

    DNS has also always been the prime example of a federated service that works so well we can rely on it as a public utility. Why hasn’t it been taken over by bad actors rapidly recycling their identities? It’s not because big tech has thousands of human agents monitoring it at great expense.

          • scarabic@lemmy.world
            1·
            1 year ago

            We can keep playing this until some bad actor is pretending to be me typing this right now.

            But this is why moderators work in teams, and why there is an admin as well. A solo mod who’s a bad actor is not going to develop a very appealing community, and whole scam shitpile instances can always be defederated.

              • scarabic@lemmy.world
                1·
                1 year ago

                You may also be interested in this wiki page about direct democracy. Notably, the framers of the US Constitution were very concerned about the tyranny of the majority. All the institutions and checks and balances in the system are there precisely because you can’t always trust large groups of people. Direct democracy is highly problematic, at least as much so as a system with intermediaries.

                Direct democracy was not what the framers of the United States Constitution envisioned for the nation. They saw a danger in tyranny of the majority. As a result, they advocated a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic over a direct democracy. For example, James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, advocates a constitutional republic over direct democracy precisely to protect the individual from the will of the majority.

              • scarabic@lemmy.world
                1·
                1 year ago

                Democracy is not someone’s idea for how to prevent corruption. History shows that an unrepresented populace is unproductive, restive, even rebellious. And an unrepresented aristocracy is prone to coups. Democracy is a way to minimize those.

                Moderators can be corrupted more easily because there are fewer of them? There are fewer but they’re more vetted and they’re never given power without someone being able to take it away.

                And we’ve seen how easy it is to corrupt large populations recently. Harder to corrupt the masses? No.

                Do you have any experience with managing a UGC community or is this just theoretical thought? It doesn’t seem grounded in actual experience to me, and I do have that experience.