For Validation, Try Federation

Somebody wrote an obnoxious hate-piece over on The Verge some days back, welcoming Elon Musk to Twitter Hell. The essay is for the most part corrosive nonsense, but the piece does have an insight or two. The primary one is true, and subtle to the point where I doubt most people ever give it much thought: What social networks sell is valildation.

In other words, people gather on social networks to feel good about themselves. The network accomplishes this by censoring any voices that disagree with network members. Remember the days when disagreement was a learning opportunity? I do. Even polite disagreement is now “literal violence,” at least to the cohort desperately lacking self-esteem.

What Musk does to Twitter won’t be known for awhile. I’m guessing that people will no longer be banned for politely questioning conventional wisdom, like posting links to evidence that Ivermectin actually does have strong antiviral properties. Ditto HCQ. Why linking to a peer-reviewed scientific paper should be blanket-bombed as “misinformation” is simple: “Misinformation” now means “anything I or my tribe disagree with.” If Musk can call a halt to that, it will have been worth every nickel of his $44B. What it means, however, is that Twitter will become a network that does not specialize in validating its members by silencing their critics. If those seeking validation flee to another network, that’s a good thing. I generate my own validation. So do most of my friends. I guess not everyone can do that.

The real problem with moderation is that it tends to bias network traffic toward viewpoints the moderators favor. Worse, there’s one body of algorithms to moderate the whole damned network. Unless you’re in the favored cohort, you’re out of luck.

There is something called Mastodon that almost nobody talks about. (More on Mastodon here.) It’s a social network composed of independently hosted social networks, joined loosely through a mechanism called federation. Every instance (which is what they call an individual Mastodon server) can have its own moderation guidelines, and everybody can block anybody they don’t want to hear from. This sounds like the perfect solution: On Mastodon, nobody can hear you disagreeing with them if they don’t want to. Shazam! Validation!

I don’t have time to even join a Mastodon instance, much less host my own. If you’ve had experience there, by all means describe it in the comments. I bring it up here today because of an article I read about Twitter founder Jack Dorsey: He’s creating a new social network to rival Twitter. He’s doing it with federation. It’s called Bluesky, and it just opened registration for beta testers. It uses a protocol developed in-house called the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATP.)

I’ve been reading the news about Bluesky for the past few days. There’s not much hard information yet, but it sounds a great deal like a slightly more centralized Mastodon. I could be wrong about that. Again, hard data is scarce. I did notice that nowhere in the articles I’ve read is there any significant mention of moderation. That’s a very sore spot for a greeat many people, primarily those who just want validation, or tribalists who want to limit user perspectives to their own template. One hopes that Dorsey can get past this hunger for censoring The Other, and actually create a space where literally all perspectives can be heard.

We’ll see.