Mastodon is big in Japan, but maybe not for great reasons...
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/
Interesting read, thanks for sharing Eli Fennell.
ReplyDeleteInteresting read on cultural differences, yes. But no reason to ban, ignore, or even vilify Mastodon.
ReplyDeleteJürgen Christoffel I did none of those. I merely shared the article.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the important factors behind the major adoption in Japan is the backing of a big brand/company, of which in this case is Pixiv.
ReplyDeleteEli Fennell it's a rather interesting article. And in no way did I want to suggest that you posted this to flag Mastodon as bad.
ReplyDeleteBut the information is, IMHO, a bit of a side-topic for "Google+ Mass Migration" and thus, given your very sparse/short intro, might be misunderstood. That's what I wanted to point out with my (too) rather short comment.
Jürgen Christoffel Having observed the sorts of posts shared in here, I don't see this as any more a side-topic than the Gab Package Bomber article shared by one of the Moderators the other day.
ReplyDeleteAnd honestly, I kept my intro short, because there's no brief way to explain Japanese lolicon that would be better than how the article explained it.
I personally think this article serves as a 'warning' to people who are new to Mastodon, or specifically Pawoo.
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I think is relevant to anyone considering Federated networks, beyond the content issue itself. After all, as the article points out, this is functionally 'breaking' the Federation model, as various communities refuse to link up with each other, i.e. as they begin to act exactly like small-scale versions of the thing Federation was supposed to address.
ReplyDeletePutting aside that any number of laws could, and likely will, be passed to regulate decentralized social media (my experience having taught me that lawmakers are universally unimpressed and uncowed by legal loopholes designed to get around other regulations), even without such laws, one may end up in a situation little-if-at-all-better than simply forming a small likeminded community through existing channels, such as email or even privacy-centric social networks if one maintains a tightly regulated contact list to avoid being flagged.
Of course it's bad. If a socmed is bad for hosting alt-rights, then it's bad for hosting any deviation from "norm".
ReplyDeleteOh wait, I forgot: double standards. Ignore this comment.
It seems to me, those who host federated nodes should have the power to control what its users post. From a user perspective, there are far more pros than cons and I can't say that about others at least for my use case.
ReplyDeleteI do believe content filtering is best accomplished by the user controlling their own user experience. Developers should focus on providing the tools users and administrators need to achieve those goals.
Each node like any other Internet based presence is only allowed to operate in accordance with applicable laws in their jurisdiction. It is a complex issue where slippery slopes exist.
Am very glad through this article to understand more about how federations work online. Makes me wonder about diaspora.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres As we saw with Gab, user-controlled filtering mechanisms won't work against determined lawmakers and the court of public opinion, and as I've pointed out elsewhere, somewhat misses the point of a major reason people generally think networks are responsible for some degree of moderation of things like Hate Speech and Child Porn: it's not just that they're offended to see it, but that they don't feel other people should be seeing those things, either, whether because they're considered immoral and illegal, or just a risk factor for self-radicalization.
ReplyDeleteThis article is also a reminder that quantity of content is a fairly meaningless measure. I read recently that Mastodon is by far the largest of the federated networks, but if that's primarily because of Japanese erotica, that doesn't hold a lot of value to me. I'm interested in where the interesting discussions are.
ReplyDeleteMartijn Vos Indeed. The major networks also fudge the significance of certain metrics, but then no one seriously doubts if Facebook or Twitter also get lots of real users sharing ordinary things. If Mastodon is more Napster-for-lolicons than anything else, it calls serious question into how 'social' it really is as a network.
ReplyDeleteEli Fennell Gab like a few others mentioned in this community actively market to alt right users and moderate content accordingly based on user reports and online evidence. We can't blame that on user controlled content filtering. Those are centralized services that control users. The federated spaces are decentralized services controlled BY the users of whom some are hosting nodes. I think it is important we don't attempt to compare apples and oranges.- things are confusing enough to all of us LOL
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres It doesn't matter whether I compare apples and oranges, it matters whether lawmakers and public opinion believe that it's an apples-oranges comparison.
ReplyDeleteThey won't. Trust me, 'decentralized social media' is not a synonym for 'Beyond the Reach of Laws/Peer Pressures/Social Consequences'.
Eli Fennell Agreed on that point but then I do not believe anyone or any service should be beyond the reach of law. Japan has different laws and culture as you posted regarding Mastadon content. However, in the federated space, each node host has the option to restrict traffic through its node AND each user in federated space (at least with Friendica) has the privacy controls to restrict what content they see.
ReplyDeleteUsers will undoubtedly report anything they see that is illegal to the appropriate authority just as they do now. Whether those authorities enforce law, whether they have jurisdiction, or what the laws that apply are is an entirely different matter associated with local governments and their constituents. If there is anything we have learned as a society, at least in countries where it is allowed, "if you see something say something". If you don't like laws governing social networks or feel lawmakers or enforcement are not doing their jobs, run for office to change things. :) I believe node owners share responsibility just as much as I believe parents share responsibility in controlling what their children are exposed to and keeping them safe.
Am I missing something? Substitute "the Internet" for "Mastodon", and all the arguments apply. Anything being said here about federated social networks applies to the Internet in general.
ReplyDeleteFederated social networks (as opposed to centralized services) revert to a more direct realization of the potential of the internet, for both good and bad.
Kent Crispin You overestimate how difficult it would be to derive a legal definition that distinguished Decentralized Social Media from The Internet.
ReplyDeleteThat will, by no means, be an obstacle for lawmakers, nor will that semantic distinction persuade public opinion. The Internet, after all, is just a generic name; Mastadon, Diaspora, etc... are brands. Anything with a brand, is not sufficiently distributed and decentralized to avoid being easily and surgically cracked down upon.
As I said earlier, lawmakers the world over and throughout history have rarely been impressed by Scalable Legal Loophole Theories. At worst, they change some language in their laws and close it.
And we're talking social media, here, not Peer-To-Peer File Sharing. People will jump through epic hoops if sufficiently motivated to find a piece of content online. You can't wack-a-mole a piece of content off the internet. But you can wack-a-mole any species of social media until it becomes too onerous for most folks to bother. Doesn't even need to involve active censorship, just onerous regulations, e.g. holding any server host to costly laws regarding removing Hate Speech, Pirated Content, etc... Sure, you can keep hopping server jurisdictions, but few people will do that just to evade Social Media Moderation or the risk of a network shutting down. Finding a downloading a file is an individual, private act requiring no long-term investment; setting up shop on a social network is communal and long-term for most people. They won't play a wack-a-mole game of hopping various host servers or running their own, especially if it puts them at any liability.
ReplyDeleteEli Fennell the definition of the federated social web dates back to 2010 and has evolved since that time into a series of protocols
ReplyDeletew3.org - Protocols - Federated Social Web Incubator Group
https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
Shelenn Ayres I don't think you're getting my point. You can build protocols all you want, but in the end, they have to be usable and people have to be willing to do what it takes to use them.
ReplyDeleteThey're not exactly User Friendly as-is to most social media users. Any bit of added regulation or legal complication would make it exponentially worse.
People just want to hang out online. Very few are trying to be at the forefront of a radical and complicated new way to connect.
I wonder if a federation protocol should be an RFC-based internet standard, like email.
ReplyDeleteEli Fennell I believe I understand your point quite well, but I don't agree. The history of the internet is festooned with examples of people "trying to be at the forefront of a radical and complicated new way to connect." In fact, that is a signature characteristic of the internet.
ReplyDeleteMastodon, friendica, hubzilla, diaspora et al may be brand names, but the software is open source and the protocols are public.
This shows that demand for new platforms comes from people who can't find a home for them now. It is most likely that those are people who are in conflict with either law or common sense will be the ones searching for a new home most desperately — the shutdown of Google+ is a separate issue.
ReplyDeleteLolicon is in a legal gray zone in many parts of the world, and clearly illegal in some parts (maybe except mere possession), which makes it impossible for hosters of centralized and federated platforms to tolerate it (for federated depending on the server location). Japanese lawmakers decided that lolicon, as long as it is purely fictional, would be a victimless crime if punished, and therefore is absolutely legal there. That also means they learned something about their past mistakes that created lolicon in the first place, and we probably should listen. There's no evidence that lolicon results in more child abuse.
From a censorship point of view it's funny that lolicon emerged from the ban of depicting pubic hair as a measure supposed to work against pornography. Well, if you censor normal behavior, you'll get some kinky behavior as a result, especially because lawmakers are such fucking boring lawyers who cannot imagine anything, but porn makers have the weirdest and kinkiest fantasies. Censorship has weird consequences.
So if you develop free software for operating social networks, you need to understand that you provide a technology, which can be and will be used in unexpected and from tasteless to criminal ways.
And if your network is federated, you should think about some sort of “censorship borders” that can keep nodes connected, but limit the spread of some contents within the area where it is legal. Otherwise the idea of having a single, connected namespace is going to break.
In a p2p system, you probably should have similar measures: Even when you want to connect with your Japanese friends, maybe you don't want to get in contact with some of their more kinky stuff.
Eli Fennell I get your point ;) and there are people working to make federated solutions more user friendly - I am one of them because usability and accessibility are often not a focus for developers - especially in open source. The shutdown of consumer G+ is driving development on multiple solutions right now.
ReplyDeleteI was simply making a reference to your comment about a federated social web not being defined legally. The set of protocols is a basis for legal definition.
Actually, you might have just convinced me to use Mastodon. Although I'm not specifically interested in lolicon, I do use Pixiv, and consider myself an anime aficionado. Generally speaking, my personal code of ethics regarding anime is much closer to the Japanese one than the American one (that is one reason that I moved from Manhattan to Tokyo in 2004).
ReplyDeleteEli Fennell The other factors why people don't want that stuff on the networks they're on:
ReplyDelete1. People don't want to be associated by that stuff (if a person mentions they're an 8chan member, they shouldn't be a surprise of the reaction they can get);
2. If governments limit that content, what will happen to that network? Will it be like Gab? All that time and effort and one day, Poof!, gone?
Bad enough we're being exiled from G+ after 5+ years, as it is. Finding a new "home" isn't easy, as acquaintances and friends disperse. It will never be the same again, as it took years to find those people.
Kevyne Kicklighter Yes, those are also risks.
ReplyDeleteI'm not telling anyone not to do decentralized social media, just to be realistic in their expectations, and to know both what they want in a network and who they want to connect with there.
There are some promising benefits to decentralization, such as a portability of contacts. But people seem to think it will either 'prevent censorship', which this case alone proves won't happen (it may not have the same deplatforming power, but federated groups defederating from each other over content types that are governed under different laws and norms in different cultures would seem to me to fit the common definition of 'social media censorship' being promoted these days), or that it can function outside the laws and customs of the places it operates (which, not to intend to repeat myself, but nothing is more certain to get laws passed to regulate something than that something being promoted as a scalable legal loophole; not all of us are Elon Musk and can get away with 'Not A Flamethrower', and even he wouldn't have if it hadn't been such a small, meaningless stunt).
Eli Fennell It comes down to if people wanting to live on the edge and willing to take those risks. I rather just find a comfy home of people talking about news, culture and music.
ReplyDeleteMartijn Vos: most of the open social networking protocols are either RFC-standard or -track protocols, or are build from them.
ReplyDeleteMastodon is built on ActivityPub and OStatus.
ActivityPub is a standard for the Internet in the Social Web Networking Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
OStatus is based on pump.io, earlier StatusNet / GNU Status, itself based on XMPP (formerly Jabber), Atom, Activity Streams, WebSub, Salmon, and WebFinger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking
en.wikipedia.org - Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking - Wikipedia
FYI in the federated space:
ReplyDeleteostatus is an early microblogging public protocol
activitypub is the likely successor to OStatus
diaspora is a macroblogging public protocol
dfrn is an early messaging protocol
zot is the likely successor to dfrn
webmention is essentially a website to website messaging protocol
Eli Fennell raises good points, though I'll make this observation: platforms don't become proof against regulatory shutdown by eliminating all abuse. They become proof against regulatory shutdown by becoming sufficiently indispensible.
ReplyDeleteTwitter, Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Wordpress and blogs generally, SMS, email, the telephone system, television, radio, newspapers, and the postal system are not free from non-civil, criminal, abusive, or socially abhorrent behaviour and content. But they are, for now, too significiant to be shut down.
The Internet as a whole is mostly too big to be shut down. Not that this hasn't been tried -- in China, Egypt, Turkey, and elsewhere, on either a partial or temporary basis. But it is overall too important to kill.
A mechanism to credible address more flagrant offences helps. And these exist within all of the systems listed above.
Virtually any epistemic or informational system has been decried as a hotbed of sin, vice, crime, villainy, bad morals, and or puns of questionable quality. Moral crusades are a potent weapon. They frequently fail, or produce far worse effects than the supposed sins they attempt to wash out.
To an extent, the concerns raised over Mastodon (and this article is over a year old) highlight that it is reaching a level of significance. It also highlights the defences of the system against such practices.
Users, or admins, can block entire instances, either entirely, or from visibility on public timelines. That latter means that person-to-person connections are still possible, but that a poorly-managed or generally-incompatible instance won't have general access to those which find it problematic.
Mind too that there are incompatibilities in real life. The author of Tiger Moms has spoken on the peculiarly sharp cultural divide affecting Indonesia, where an elite Chinese minority and the Muslim majority literally cannot sit down to break bread together, or more specifically: have highly exclusive dietary practices due to the predominance of pork in the one cuisine and the taboo nature of it in the other. Cultures are funny that way.
Not an answer to how to resolve this matter, but a note that strong differences will exist, and any global communications and epistemic system must find ways to accommodate both. The alternative is separate networks.
Edward Morbius That eating thing is severely exaggerated. Chinese can and do cook and eat chicken, beef and fish without traces of pork, and on the other hand they have no problems whatsoever eating Muslim food. The Chinese-Indonesian cuisine has even replaced a number of ingredients with hahal ones, and also adopted the taste to the local habits, so in reality, the Tiger mom is just wrong.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese elite may not eat with the locals, because they have no business with them (after all, most of the business is in the hand of other Chinese). But if they do have one, they'll take everything into account that's necessary to make their customers feel welcome.
Bernd Paysan It takes planning, coordination, compromise, and consideration. The Muslim aversion to pork is extreme.
ReplyDeleteIndia, where both pork and beef are taboo, among different populations, has similar issues.
At the very least, the differences don't make community easier.
Amy Chua, World on Fire:
ReplyDeleteLAMB: Do I remember you saying that the Malay and the Chinese do not intermarry?
CHUA: That`s correct.
LAMB: Why not? Now, explain Malaysia. What is it, 15 million people? I can`t remember for sure.
CHUA: Malaysia is much smaller than Indonesia. I can`t remember. I think it`s about...
LAMB: I mean, Indonesia`s got a couple hundred million.
CHUA: That`s right. That`s right.
LAMB: But why not the intermarriage between the Malay and the Chinese?
CHUA: The -- one important factor is religion. The Malays -- Malay majority in Malaysia and the Indonesian majority in Indonesia are principally Muslim and the Chinese are not. And so one professor friend of mind from Singapore was just joking, but he said it`s the pork factor, that you know, Muslims don`t eat pork and Chinese eat pork all the time, and therefore it`s impossible to get along. And I -- that`s -- he was just being facetious, but I think that religion certainly has played a role.
And an interesting counter-example is Thailand, where -- this is the Southeast Asian country where there has been the most assimilation and even intermarriage. And I think that most agree that one of the factors is the fact that the Thai are Buddhist and not Muslim, and this has made assimilation between the ethnic Thais and the Chinese easier.
http://www.booknotes.org/FullPage.aspx?SID=174375-1
Also:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tYADf21tkk0
booknotes.org
Religion = culture and vice versa in the Old World. Whole societies sprang up over A religion and it became a national identity even.
ReplyDeleteIt becomes v-e-r-y complicated like in Burma, where the Buddhist majority is being quickly outbred by the Muslim minority (Rhos), and the clashes it causes on resources and cultures. Going to have a war in Southeast Asia on that in itself, because the religions are at opposite poles of beliefs between populations.
Why I keep saying social platforms have to be regional for regional needs, as it's best for a sense of community instead of antagonism.
Edward Morbius This one-way street of religious conversion certainly discourages intermarriage. The Chinese men don't want their foreskin to be cut (not only for pleasure reasons, self-mutilation is a violation of filial piety in Confucianism), and the Chinese women don't want to be second-class humans; pork is only one issue in many. Buddhism also solved the dietary problem: Buddhist diet (strictly vegetarian) is only mandatory to monks and nuns. And while the Chinese Hui Muslims found a way to integrate Confucianism into their scholary traditions, other Muslim scholary is incompatible with it.
ReplyDeleteBut the biggest barrier is economy. In combination with the intolerance, it is something the Chinese can't bear: you can't tell anyone that your way of life is superior, when all evidence shows the contrary.
So yes, intolerance can build up barriers that make formation of a community impossible.
Kevyne Kicklighter The broader the range of interconnectivity and interactivity, the more basic and simpler the foundations must be. This tends to emerge naturally, as with pidgin and trade or commerce languages, where a basic set of nouns, verbs, and descriptive terms are adopted, most highly functional. More abstract concepts require more abstract language, but can apply only within a smaller realm. This is also the crux of what's referred to as "code switching", where individuals change language, dialect, and behaviour to correspond with different social contexts. The familiar or in-group mode is almost always far more relaxed and informal than the foreign or out-group mode, especially when relating upwards in socio-economic status.
ReplyDelete(NB: I'd written the word "class" for "status" then replaced it -- that's sensitive usage in most contexts these days itself.)
I've long thought that social and online systems have lacked for a sense of space and locality in the physical sense. It's become far more obvious that they're also lacking a sense of space in cultural senses. I'm not sure how to sort this, but it is something which badly needs sorting.
Bernd Paysan We're getting closer to agreement.
ReplyDeleteIf a set of differences exists within an otherwise shared set of values and status it's far easier to work with and through them. Where a set of behavioural or tolerance differences exists in the context of additional differences in values and status, the effects tend to be multiplicative. All the more so if there's conflict over limited or rivalrous resources, or worse: status and standing.
I've been re-reading H.A. Grueber's compilation of Greek and Roman myths. The story of Eris and her golden apple, to be given the most worthy and beautiful of the three most powerful Greek goddesses is the very heart of discord: to grant one the gift is to make enemies of the other two. The other gods and goddesses present realised this. Paris did not. His attempt at picking a winner played out poorly for him.
Edward Morbius Regional politics is especially an issue in US politics.
ReplyDeleteWas on Quora and I had a Canadian ex-pat living in Japan arguing to me the definition of a liberal politics in America -- he's seeing the USA through the lens of whatever media source he likes, yet he doesn't understand the difference between, say, politics in Georgia from California. He's not here to understand the differences at the local level.
It went over his head, because he thinks American politics are national party platforms.
Every region has different priorities and a particular outlook. Rust belt want jobs. Deep South civil rights. These are separate issues FROM any national party platform and how national parties operate, yet crucial to why folks vote and chose what candidates they do to serve them nationally.
All politics is local. All cultures are also local. People can export national politics and cultures into other countries, as emigrants and tourists, yet its not the same. Let's be real: your mom's meatballs are always going to be better than cultural cuisine served in a restaurant chain, even if someone lived in a country for a decade. It's exotic and far away, it's not everyday cooking and the culture that revolves around family tables.
Communities that are so broad in scope lose their closeness, as it's no longer conversations at the dinner table. Its some tourist hodgepodge with as much soul as plastic.