[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press]

"Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web."

Most major decentralized and federated platforms don't have the necessary tooling "for scalable management of harmful content and conduct — or even the enforcement of their own rules."

For some, of course, this is by design: the same version of "free speech" which animates Elon Musk and in effect prevents speech from anyone except for in-groups and the loud and powerful. To have truly free speech - where people from vulnerable communities can have a voice and real debate can be held without threat of violence - there must be trust and safety and moderation.

The piece rightly calls out IFTAS for the great work it's doing in this area. More must be done - which in part means convincing federated communities that these ideas are important.

Unfortunately a common attitude is that "we don't have these problems" - a common refrain when your bias makes you blind to your lack of inclusion. As many Black users found when they joined Mastodon and were asked to hide the details of their lived experiences under content warnings, or when people told them that these were American-only experiences (which, of course, they aren't), a predominantly white and male Fediverse that seeks to maintain the status quo rather than learning and growing can be quite a conservative place.

This is an important piece, and an important finding, which everyone working on decentralized tech should pay attention to.

#Fediverse

[Link]