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The free fediverses should focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety
(privacy.thenexus.today)
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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I agree that different instances will make different choices based on their priorities, but follow this through. Take trans people as an example of an especially vulnerable group that consent-oriented federation makes sense for -- so trans people will be be less safe on instances that don't take a consent-based approach. What instances do you think trans people will prefer to be on?
And there must be something I'm issing, because I don't understand how you got from consent-based federation to "giving up free will". Consent is literally about having the ability to choose, so exercising your free will.
Well, there are always people who want a more safe space and in turn leave (or threaten to leave) a certain environment. Whether the environment then choses to make itself more safe or to stay the same is a careful consideration. Making it more safe might make other users leave, but also attract others to the instance.
In the same way, there will be people calling for more openess/"free speech", prompting the same consideration.
For me, the basis of this is given by law; everything else needs to be negotiated dynamically, how open/save an instance is might change over time depending on its users.
Now, in this debate, identity politics tends to favour more safety by default, which might make sense at first, but if you follow it through consistent, you end up in something like garden eden. Because there, everything is safe, you don't need to fear any threat whatsoever, but you are also not really doing anything. If you default to "safe is always better" you end up in a totalitarian system.
So safety/openness is in general a worth consideration and it should be dynamically debated. Maybe in a few years, consent-based federation proves itself to be a best-practice to make a place safer for trans people and becomes a standard; then we all adapt it happily - that would be fine with me; but if so, I see it at the end of a process.
Yep, I agree that instances and social networks that focus more on safety will attract some people but others will leave. Today, there are a whole bunch of social networks that don't focus on safety, and very few that do. So there are a lot of options for people who prefer "openness" and very few for people who prefer safety. Strategically, that's an opportunity for the free fediverses today.
Yeah, probably. Question is how big it will become. Let's see.
In the short term, they'll be much smaller than Meta's fediverse (because mastodon.social and most of the big instances are federating with Threads) and of course much smaller than Threads. Longer term, we'll see, but I wouldn't expect them to be as big as Threads for a long time if ever.
Ok, I may have blown the discussion a bit out of proposition earlier. It's just that I thought you meant basically the whole Fediverse. The name "Free Fediverse" is a bit misleading imo.
Yeah, one of my takeaways is that I should have been clearer that this isn't a proposal for the whole fediverse. And not sure what the best term to use is, "free fediverses" is what I'm going with for now (based on the freefediverse.org).
Free fediverse(s) makes sense, building on top of that already floating term sounds sensible
How about this as a revised first sentence to clarify the focus is on an alternative (not the whole fediverse)?
As I discuss in the first post in the series, the "free fediverses" are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism, and these strategies position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and "Meta's fediverses".
Sounds fine at first glance
Thanks! I included a slightly-modified version of it in https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7194307 , we'll see how it goes.