(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Suddenly #Mastodon: history teaches what will happen when Twitter-expatriates discover “federated social networks” are a volatile blend of unsafe spaces & stifled speech with blunt, imprecise instrume

2022-11-10 20:19:56+00:00

Elon took over Twitter, both the community and the products are tearing themselves apart, and a bunch of people who have probably never used a federated social network before are beginning to experience the joy of having nobody they can usefully complain to.

But those of us who are old enough and nerdy enough, have seen this all before.

34 years ago — almost exactly to the day — there was launched the the rec.humor.funny Jewish/Scottish joke debacle, which led to early calls for censorship of the — federated, global — USENET social network, and possibly the internet’s first flirting with what some call “cancel culture”.

Things Fell Apart 5: A Scottish Jewish joke

This has all been far better documented by kinder and more neutral people than I, so let me start by wholeheartedly recommending this Jon Ronson podcast which will set the scenario better than anything I write; then I shall add links and some context further down.

Here’s a link to the podcast; again it’s really nicely done and has a modern context, so I recommend it thoroughly: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00127xv

A thumbnail sketch of what happened…

USENET was (at the time, typically considered as) a series of topical discussion groups, similar in tone and content to “subreddits” on today’s Reddit, which operated through a federated network of servers (Mastodon: “instances”) with large servers generally being run as one-per-university or one-per-large-university-department or one-per-corporate-geography, taking a “feed” of content to replicate to other servers and to offer to local users. Individual users tended to parasite-feed off of larger instances, and (not all but) most content was replicated globally, in a store-and-forward fashion.

One of these subreddit-like groups was rec.humor.funny – groups were organised hierarchically and top-down, so “recreation/humor/funny” or uk.rec.sheds (“uk/recreation/sheds”) were typical names.

rec.humor.funny (RHF) was a moderated group, like a moderated email list, with only one legitimate poster (Brad Templeton) acting as an editor; jokes were emailed to him, and he would drop them into a queue for automated and semi-random distribution.

One joke was sent to him:

A Scotsman and a Jew went to a restaurant. After a hearty meal, the waitress came by with the inevitable check. To the amazement of all, the Scotsman was heard to say, “I’ll pay it!” and he actually did.



The next morning’s newspaper carried the news item:



“JEWISH VENTRILOQUIST FOUND MURDERED IN BLIND ALLEY.”

The story of what happened next, and why, is written up at https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/rhfban.html — but again, if you want a more neutral and modern retrospective on the matter, listen to the podcast above. Otherwise:

Now this joke has some mildly racist overtones, and so I made a minor mistake in forgetting to follow my usual policy on such jokes, namely to encode the joke in what is known as rot13 encoding.



Our policy here has always been to not judge jokes based on their politics, only on their comedy. This means that jokes like the above can make the cut.



The bad news was that November 9, 1988 was the 50th anniversary of Krystallnacht, the horrible night when the Nazis burned and smashed the property and temples of German Jews, considered by some to be the start of the worst of the holocaust.

Yep, the “algorithm” — viz: random chance — sent that joke out on the 50th anniversary of Krystallnacht. The article continues with “what happened next”.

Again, I don’t want to repeat what has been covered better, elsewhere, so I recommend Jon’s podcast and some of the other content which it clearly referenced:

https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/rhfban.html – history of the event

https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/kwrecord.html – local (to Templeton’s home server) newspaper coverage of the event

http://jmc.stanford.edu/general/rhf.html – as seen by John McCarthy at Stanford

https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1989/01/30?page=1 – stanford daily coverage, jan 1989

https://web.archive.org/web/19990429211045/http://www.cs.oberlin.edu/faculty/rhyspj/comppolicies/stanford.edu – relevant posting by John McCarthy on USENET

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/origin-silicon-valley-dysfunctional-attitude-toward-hate-speech – 2017 recap by the New Yorker

How does this apply to Mastodon?

So this morning I saw this, and I’m like: yep, this is just the beginning:

I just posted this exact same thing on Mastodon and received a reply indicating that I should have put a content warning on it because it doesn’t have “good vibes”: pic.twitter.com/CRbak6q6YG — Leah McElrath ???? (@leahmcelrath) November 8, 2022 https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1590074230493745152

Contrary to popular myth, the internet is not inherently decentralised; the goal of packet-switching is for a client (e.g. a browser) to be able to talk to a (inherently centralised) server (e.g. a webserver) irrespective that large chunks of intermediary infrastructure have been nuked. This centralisation aspect is literally reflected in supposedly rigid hostname that is embedded in a URL immediately after the ://

Online generations since 1994 have grown up with primacy of the Web; they expect centralisation and controls which (potentially) come with it.

They expect individuals to be banable (sic?) from platforms

They expect content to be (somehow) “taken down”-able

They even appeal to infrastructure middleware providers like DNS authorities, ISPs, and DDOS-prevention outfits like Cloudflare in (often: failing) attempts to cancel entire websites

They expect someone to be in charge

Narrator: alas; contrary to expectation, nobody is in charge.

On USENET, everyone had a personal killfile , or blocklist of toxic posters and keywords. Site admins blocked feeds from contentious servers. People complained. People argued a lot about “free speech”.

People looked after themselves.

Yes, there was much discussion of netiquette, but there were also zoned-off areas of USENET where that didn’t really apply – the alt.* hierarchies were “4chan” to the rest of USENET’s “Reddit”.

Perhaps “content warnings” will be the ROT13 of Mastodon — and their use will be demanded for everything contentious — but if that happens then (exactly like ROT13) there will be pressure for their removal.

The issues this thread highlight suggest a central tension for Mastodon: if you want it to fulfil Twitter’s news/digital town square function, this is an absolute non-starter.



But if you like it *because* it’s different, this is what you want. https://t.co/Pi5J8fbFsw — James Ball (@jamesrbuk) November 10, 2022 https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1590655718280941568

Eventually some clients will auto-remove them, and then where will we be?

Unlike the abuse management of most (large, centralised, commercial) platforms with whom people are currently familiar, much USENET censorship, blocking, a lot of the consequent anti-censorship-reaction too, was petty, ad-hoc, ill-considered, and even spiteful.

There’s going to be a huge crunching of gears in a few days, weeks, or months, when people who are used to the above controls upon stuff which upsets them, will have to come to grips with the new newness that it’s their responsibility to not look at it, instead. There will be calls to ban individuals, to block “toxic” servers, and counter-bans will be set up.

I wonder it they will try to “fork the fediverse”? Not least, the existence of Gab points in that direction.

It will be interesting to watch.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/16403
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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