[HacktionLab] Facebook exodus & where are people going

Charles Céleste Hutchins celesteh at gmail.com
Wed Mar 28 23:17:20 UTC 2018


I've been trying for years to get people to move off of facebook onto open
platforms and for the first time in a long time, people are actually
willing.  what will make the difference this time is how mature the
replacement tech seems. One of my friends groups has migrated from WhatsApp
to Signal and, because it supports all the stickers and animated gifs,
they've embraced it.

The early migration to Diaspora failed because the platform was buggy and
slow. It's able to cope now, but has uncensored Nazis systematically
posting abuse to the #newhere posts made by LGBT people. The moderation is
non-existent, and the 'ignore' button is barely functional. These problems
are baked in to the design and there's no momentum to fix them because the
dedicated user base are oblivious/immune to abuse (or are actively
participating) and have ideas about free speech that are slightly
problematic.

Mastodon is great and while there are a LOT of 20 year old communist
furries, I see more and more middle aged people joining. Also, the kids
take hate speech very seriously and their moderation policies and
infrastructure are sound.

There's a peer-to-peer video service gaining traction called PeerTube and
some work is being done on p2p systems to replace tumblr and reddit, but I
haven't been following what's going with that.

I don't think the Diaspora platform is salvageable without major
intervention.  However, Mastodon, itself, was a major intervention for
GNUSocial, so another user of the protocol could solve the moderation
problems.  Friendica and Hubzilla both speak the diaspora federation
protocol, but I don't know much else about them. I briefly got a friendica
account, but the user interface I saw needs work.

@celesteh at algonoise.social
@celesteh at mastodon.social
@celesteh at joindiaspora.com

On 28 March 2018 at 22:43, Paula Graham <paula at fossbox.org.uk> wrote:

> I've not had problems when talking about geek stuff but know a lot of
> female/queer/trans who've been set upon for talking about gender/sexuality
> issues - not just on twitter but also on diaspora. A lot queers moved to
> mastodon a year or two ago in order to be able to manage that problem
> better - also some people are uncomfortable on the isil platform of choice.
>
> I was also badly savaged on the London Linux list once for picking someone
> up for using the word 'slut' (about a 14 year old friend of his daughter's
> ye gods). There's sometimes an unfortunately thin line between open source
> and breitbart when it comes to women and queers :-o
>
> P
>
>
> On 28 March 2018 22:07:18 BST, Chris Clemson <Chris.Clemson at gogreenit.net>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On 26/03/18 08:08, Paula Graham wrote:
>>
>> Diaspora filled up with hate speech, I like mastodon but it does seem a
>> bit twenty-something - be nice to expand the age range a bit?
>>
>>
>> Diaspora seems fine to me, but then I only really follow geeky stuff
>>
>
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
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-- 
cheers,
Les

--
Dr. Charles Céleste Hutchins

http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/
http://www.bilensemble.co.uk
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