In a previous post, I suggested that people should escape from big company-based social networks and find refuge in the Fediverse. The reason for that is simply to avoid being constantly considered a profitable customer, being profiled, and continuously bombed from advertising campaigns or sponsored posts. In brief, the purpose is returning to the original spirit of the big network of peers of the 90s.
Reading here and there on the Fediverse, I see that many people abandoned the well-known prime-time socials because of the diffused toxicity of such environments, censorship, and other bad personal experiences in their use. Unfortunately, the past examples of newsgroups and IRC channels showed that even Mastodon profiles or Matrix stanzas are not an answer for such drifts of digital life. The new Fediverse simply changed the user experience of communication services, not the core social experience of them.
Nothing is truly different between modern Fediverse services and groups, channels, or mailing lists of the old good days. Like it or not, we had trolls, spammers, and other strange beasts even in the 90s - when the men were men, to use an abused clause. Of course, the smaller the communities, the fewer the social problems of interaction among individuals in the digital world, and that's a fact of life. Therefore, a microblogging platform such as Mastodon could seem a great place to live digitally happy. IMHO, it is only a matter of time and critical mass (number of active accounts) before experiencing the same type of dynamics, unfortunately.
Of course, we had solutions to mitigate the problems that have been always the same in the last 30 years or more:
- Defining netiquette and conduct codes.
- Introducing community-driven pools of moderators with privileges to kick off pernicious individuals based on their behaviors and repeated violations of the conduct codes.
- Never feeding the trolls.
- Having a reasonable number of good bots to manage spammers and other harmful agents automatically.
Note that anonymity has never been a problem, so identifying users is not a solution and should not be considered in the equation. It does not work as a definitive deterrent, and those proposing such a practice are probably in bad faith.
That said, there is also a profound difference between a self-governed community with a set of rules chosen and defined by the community itself and censorship imposed by a company, a government, or any other external entities. This would be an excellent opportunity for the Fediverse to conjugate a non-toxic environment for users with a sane distributed network far from profit-only logic. It only needs to be caught by Fediverse communities.