• blue_berry@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Well, there are always people who want a more safe space and in turn leave (or threaten to leave) a certain environment. Whether the environment then choses to make itself more safe or to stay the same is a careful consideration. Making it more safe might make other users leave, but also attract others to the instance.

    In the same way, there will be people calling for more openess/“free speech”, prompting the same consideration.

    For me, the basis of this is given by law; everything else needs to be negotiated dynamically, how open/save an instance is might change over time depending on its users.

    Now, in this debate, identity politics tends to favour more safety by default, which might make sense at first, but if you follow it through consistent, you end up in something like garden eden. Because there, everything is safe, you don’t need to fear any threat whatsoever, but you are also not really doing anything. If you default to “safe is always better” you end up in a totalitarian system.

    So safety/openness is in general a worth consideration and it should be dynamically debated. Maybe in a few years, consent-based federation proves itself to be a best-practice to make a place safer for trans people and becomes a standard; then we all adapt it happily - that would be fine with me; but if so, I see it at the end of a process.

    • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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      11 months ago

      Yep, I agree that instances and social networks that focus more on safety will attract some people but others will leave. Today, there are a whole bunch of social networks that don’t focus on safety, and very few that do. So there are a lot of options for people who prefer “openness” and very few for people who prefer safety. Strategically, that’s an opportunity for the free fediverses today.

      • blue_berry@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Strategically, that’s an opportunity for the free fediverses today.

        Yeah, probably. Question is how big it will become. Let’s see.

        • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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          11 months ago

          In the short term, they’ll be much smaller than Meta’s fediverse (because mastodon.social and most of the big instances are federating with Threads) and of course much smaller than Threads. Longer term, we’ll see, but I wouldn’t expect them to be as big as Threads for a long time if ever.

          • blue_berry@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Ok, I may have blown the discussion a bit out of proposition earlier. It’s just that I thought you meant basically the whole Fediverse. The name “Free Fediverse” is a bit misleading imo.

            • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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              11 months ago

              Yeah, one of my takeaways is that I should have been clearer that this isn’t a proposal for the whole fediverse. And not sure what the best term to use is, “free fediverses” is what I’m going with for now (based on the freefediverse.org).

              • blue_berry@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Free fediverse(s) makes sense, building on top of that already floating term sounds sensible

                • The Nexus of PrivacyOP
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                  11 months ago

                  How about this as a revised first sentence to clarify the focus is on an alternative (not the whole fediverse)?

                  As I discuss in the first post in the series, the “free fediverses” are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism, and these strategies position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and “Meta’s fediverses”.