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	Mastoconflict
	June 02nd, 2018
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	Mastodon is having a little tiff right now over the introduction
	of a new feature: trending hashtags. As the project maintainer
	puts it, it has been the most requested feature addition for over
	a year. When it rolled out, though, it was met with widespread
	criticism and, in many cases, open hostility. The rebuttals back
	and forth quickly escalated and became personal. Pretty much
	everyone involved is greatly unhappy, regardless of their position
	on the issue.

	Meanwhile, I'm sitting back here thinking to myself, "democracy in
	action." A collective developed and idea with their voices (the
	addition of trending hashtags). When that idea was implemented,
	other collectives disagreed. They weren't aware of its
	development, they argue. It is unsafe and can be used for evil. It
	will target groups who are often targets and make Mastodon unsafe
	or unwelcoming.

	There's one person in charge of the project. He must be the
	problem. If it weren't for him, surely the issue would be put to
	rest. It's as simple as that, because a "pure" democracy will
	always work things out. This is an example of corruption of the
	perfect, federated state.

	Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. The issue isn't having
	a single leader. The issue is that groups of people have different
	wants and needs. This is inherent to any sized group of people
	greater than one. You cannot make them all equally happy. You
	cannot serve every single use case simultaneously. The utopia of
	democracy does not exist, just as it does not exist for communism,
	or socialism, or even monarchy.

	So what do we do? We use our brains. We make decisions that help
	as many as we can. We use our morals and make decisions that hurt
	as few as possible. We don't cross lines that shouldn't be
	crossed. We listen to the words of the suffering and try to ease
	that suffering. We say to those with excess, "you have excess.
	Your priorities are lower than those who need help."

	This is all but impossible in systems that favor group-think. The
	power in those systems comes from those who can manipulate the
	system. Who can speak loudest is often the one with the most
	money. The wider the spread of power, the more this systematic
	influence becomes absolute. It can devolve to cult of personality
	eventually. The key to the recipe is broad reach of voice.

	What is the countermeasure? Strong-willed leaders who can champion
	the "right" decisions. What makes those decisions right? The
	things I listed above. What ensures a leader will execute those
	decisions and not others? That depends on your system. In
	government, there's not much, though a constitutional system can
	help balance it. It's easy to slide into despotism. In social
	systems like open source projects, the answer is the freedom to
	move on. The system is open source and the protocol can work with
	other projects. Mastodon can be forked and formed into something
	else by others with a different set of principles. If the current
	leader of the project does not implement policy (in the form of
	software features) that reflects the needs of the people, that's
	the easiest path to take. No bloodshed, just moving on and
	building something new.

	But back to the question of trending hashtags themselves. Are they
	a good idea? Probably not, at least in the way they've been
	implemented so far. There's been a lot of valid points about how
	bad actors already abuse similar systems in other networks.
	There's nothing currently in place to prevent that, and the
	distributed nature of the network makes stopping those attacks
	even harder than on Twitter. There have been very good ideas to
	tweak the feature to avoid the abuse. Ultimately it should come
	down to a cost/benefit analysis. Unfortunately it's more likely to
	come down to the loudest screamers. But that's democracy.