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As digital communication opened up, people could build their own communities. Free from the type of monetary pressures that existed before, free from a lot of outside oversight. Many people, for instance, didn't know how to access a #BBS or even have the equipment to do so. So self-expression could be unleashed, and was.

But if there are absolutely no rules, then whenever a group gets big enough, troublemakers will show up and ruin it for everyone. 2/

The #Debian project had to grapple with this. It took it awhile to learn that allowing poisonous people to run rampant caused more harm than good and drove away would-be talented developers.

But there were never absolutely no rules. Perhaps the owner ("sysop") of a #BBS would ban you for insulting their cat. Perhaps they let just about anything go, including the poisonous bits.

3/

In most areas, you had a choice among multiple BBSs. If you didn't like the vibe at one place, you'd call another. Sysops liked callers, so they learned pretty quickly that they'd lose out if they were bad at moderating.

#Usenet didn't offer the same choice of providers for most, but there were usually real life consequences for behaving too outlandishly there.

4/

Some BBSs let people from minority communities such as LGBTQ+ thrive in a place of peace from tormentors. A lot of them let people be themselves in a way they couldn’t be “in real life”. And yes, some harbored trolls and flamers. each BBS, or Usenet site, set their own policies.

These had to be harmonized to a certain extent with the global community, but with BBSs especially, you could use a different one if you didn’t like what the vibe was at a certain place. 5/

With the rise of the very large platforms — and here I mean CompuServe and AOL at first, and then Facebook, Twitter, and the like later — the low-friction option of just choosing a different place started to decline. You could participate on a Fidonet forum from any of thousands of BBSs, but you could only participate in an AOL forum from AOL. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. 6/

As social media became conceived of as very large sites, it became impossible for a person with enough skill, funds, and time to just start a site themselves. Instead of neading a few thousand dollars of equipment, you’d need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and employees.

7/

All that means you can’t really run Facebook as a nonprofit. It is a business. It should be absolutely clear to everyone that Facebook’s mission is not the one they say it is — “[to] give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” If that was their goal, they wouldn’t be creating AI users and AI spam and all the rest. Zuck isn’t showing courage; he’s sucking up to Trump and those that will pay the price are those that always do: women and minorities. 8/

Really, the point of any large social network isn’t to build community. It’s to make the owners their next billion. They do that by convincing people to look at ads on their site. Zuck is as much a windsock as anyone else; he will adjust policies in whichever direction he thinks the wind is blowing so as to let him keep putting ads in front of eyeballs, and stomp all over principles — even free speech — doing it. Don’t expect anything different from any large commercial social network either. 9/

The problem with a one-size-fits-all content policy is that the world isn’t that kind of place. For instance, I am a pacifist. There is a place for a group where pacifists can hang out with each other, free from the noise of the debate about pacifism. And there is a place for the debate. Forcing everyone that signs up for the conversation to sign up for the debate is harmful. Preventing the debate is often also harmful. One company can’t square this circle. 10/

Beyond that, the fact that we care so much about one company is a problem on two levels. First, it indicates how succeptible people are to misinformation and such. I don’t have much to offer on that point. Secondly, it indicates that we are too centralized.

And on that point, #Mastodon is a solution. You can join any instance, easily migrate your account from one server to another, and so forth. You pick an instance that suits you. There are thousands of others you can choose from. 11/

Some #Mastodon instances aggressively defederate with instances known to harbor poisonous people; some don’t.

And, to harken back to the BBS era, if you have some time, some skill, and a few bucks, you can run your own Mastodon instance.

12/

This thread is an experimental abridged version of my blog post at https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10737-censorship-is-complicated-what-internet-history-says-about-meta-facebook. I abridged it manually; no AI was involved. I am curious if people find this format useful or if they'd rather have a simple link to a blog post. (I note that Cory Doctorow does both, incidentally).

/end

@ellyxir Thanks - I appreciate those thoughts.

@valhalla Fair enough. On Mastodon timelines, most people will see the last post first, but I can see it go either way.

@thebluewizard Well hello! And wow, yes indeed I wrote that book, somewhere around 25 years ago now. I'm impressed anybody remembers it!

@jgoerzen Thank you!

@vagrantc Thank you for the thoughts. The being able to reply to specific portions part was one of my goals. I have found that when I post a link to a blog post, I get a lot of reposts and favorites but very little conversation. I am really here for the conversation so I wondered if this might be better. But I definitely don't want to be annoying!

@tivasyk Quite so, and I suppose for the post here I could make that more clear, but going into the full detail on Fediverse on an article mostly read by people that haven't heard of it I thought would distract from the point.

That said, I do still recommend Mastodon primarily because of the account portability feature, which I don't think exists anywhere else.