The trouble is that it is precisely those "broadly appealing, maximally accessible alternative platforms" that are required for spreading messages that precede, e.g., genocide.

There is simply no way how one could invite merely potential victims, and keep perpetrators and their enablers (who start the fire by telling people to not be "snowflakes", those who "won't be silenced by the woke", etc.) out.

I get why one would desire that, but the Fediverse of today rather resembles a Third Reich basement where the persecuted are hiding. Planting signs everywhere to show the "way to the nearest shelter for potential victims of the Nazis" does not look like a reasonable idea, to me.

The first who try to hide are the most vulnerable. Only then, the party members who once thought they'd be safe if they obeyed and looked away, realize that they'll be next.

And they don't learn. They don't show solidarity. They're entering the shelter, loudly complaining why the shelter does not offer all the amenities of the flat they were just running out of, in panic.

I believe that the existence of many different house rules is an advantage of the Fediverse, not a disadvantage. IFTAS is walking a very thin line here. Being a community where moderators exchange experiences and consent on what they feel they can consent on: fine. Becoming an outsourced moderation center that ultimately mandates what is ok, on every instance: not fine.

(1/5) Your post is an amazing text that I enjoyed reading. I'll split up my reply into a thread and I'm really sorry that it is a very long thread. I may be misrepresenting parts of your arguments, out of my preconceptions and biases.

For me, the most important sentence was something that we agree upon: "Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected."

I almost didn't make it there, because the text started with ascribing an experience of "paranoia" to some people, and piled upon that, later on ("failure not only of imagination, but of nerve"; "retreat into private spaces").

I've deliberately spoken of a "basement", because giving shelter is only a single function of a basement, and a defensive one. A problem focus (what do we want less of) is a natural reaction, but it does not define people, as you seemed to suggest. You are right in saying it centers "harm to individual well-being and social status—to mental health, to reputation, to productivity". My solution focus though (accidentally, an established form of brief therapy that has outgrown its original domain), a focus on what we want more of, instead, is always the backdrop.

There is no "full retreat into the bushes", here, no recommendation that people build a "nice bunker of their own". Since you have referred to cultural artifacts as well, let me mention that my understanding of this role of the "basement" resembles the one depicted in "Le Dernier Métro", a 1980ies French movie: "Lucas", a Jewish theater director, is not just hiding away in its basement, but he's integrated into the evolution of the theater. Without the basement, he'd simply not able to do that. It's nobody's belief that "the only viable strategy is to stay quiet and hide", as you seem to claim. Lucas isn't quiet, at all.

(2/5) It seems the central point where we disagree is what you summarize as "The public social internet is worth designing and governing", " the business of building systems for civilization", the call to "build human networks resilient enough to withstand every kind of weather" by "people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems".

I sense a discomforting contrast between such global aspirations claiming the existence of a quasi-elite that can handle such a program; and your criticism of "the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture". The belief that we were facing some kind of a global "network design" problem that can be solved by "able" persons is part of a detrimental culture, not the means to overcome it. The unspoken "Trust us on this!", combined with ostentative diagnosis of "paranoia" that I mentioned above is particularly discomforting, in this context. Context collapse is not the problem of the "wrong" culture imposing their rules everywhere, but the idea that context itself badly needs as much "good globality" as possible.

(3/5) There is no "societal refusal to take on the responsibilities of governing our increasingly complex commons", it's just that what you describe as "Facebook but open-source and federated" looks like the much better alternative for many, despite it also being differently bad, as you say. It is both the acknowledgment that you "can't fix people problems" with software (that you should even engage in #AlgorithmicSabotage); and that the existence of "many places" may not resolve them all, but is required as a safeguard against global feasibility fantasies.

We try to partially solve these problems by strategies leaning on the principle of subsidiarity that has both served humans well, with respect to protecting smaller entities from being steamrolled by larger ones; and done harm, too, by giving power without accountability, in many cases.

To use an (unappetizing) image: "global solutions" lead to everybody walking up to their ankles in manure, because a majority decided "they" can tolerate it, so "everybody" can, up to that height. "Federated" solutions lead to a pattern of absolute cesspits in some places, and relatively dry floors in others. Establishing boundaries, also against "design globalists" infringing upon subsidiarity, is crucial. Less figuratively, my instinct tells me to e.g. prefer a landscape with some defederated Nazi server instances over a landscape with Nazis spilling to everywhere, that are allowed to say barely legal things, because of the "barely".

(5/5) Getting back to the IFTAS issue, I'll point to the specifics of about.iftas.org/activities/mod… again, because I often see "Come on!" replies that gloss over them:

• Their solution is summarized as "standardised processes and resources for monitoring distributed media", with hash databases curated by external entities
• "We cannot open the underlying hash matching databases, and any implementers will need to separately pursue access to these resources.": this is a clear constraint that server instances will hash media locally, and send hashes to "somewhere", for classification; this also implies that the classifying entity can build hash catalogs of all media present on the instances that request classification from it
• "If we find pertinent matches we’ll provide human review, notify you via email and issue a takedown request. We perform any required reporting and law enforcement record-keeping so you don’t have to." - Based on which jurisdiction?
• "CSAM" and "terrorism", two of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, are used as a promotion tool for the hash-and-match approach; red flags all over here - "terrorism" as defined by Turkey, for the Kurds? By the PRC, for the Uyghurs? By Putin, for occupied territories? Again: who is curating the hash databases? Who is curating the curators? This is particularly troubling since automated reporting is already part of the system, and using NCMEC in a first step normalizes the reporting to authorities per se, by starting with a specific implementation that does not raise too many objections.
• "Once these hash databases are in place, we will explore text classification for issues like spam, child sexual exploitation, hate and harassment." - World-wide valid classification, based on what criteria?

It's important to realize that IFTAS being small and most likely not being a malicious actor is irrelevant. It does not take a decidedly malicious business organization like #Thorn (that colluded with EU commissioner #YlvaJohansson – there is ample material about hash-and-match as part of the EU's attempt at #ChatControl). All it takes is a useful door opener organization. I do not share your optimism that "currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced" – especially in the age of grey intelligence, grey policing, and public-private partnerships.