Recent searches
Search options
new tomo devlog post: how do you deal with shitty people behaviour?
excerpt:
after posting that "Eris-Free Net" wikipedia article the other day, it made me think about how to deal with misbehaving shards on tomoNet, and how governance works on decentralized networks.
when i started thinking about creating something like tomo years ago, i often thought about Ultima Online as - not so much a model for - but an example of a network of online communities that was always interesting and sometimes frustrating to deal with
in-game, for several years, UO really was the "wild west" of online communities - so much was left up to players to figure out. for a long time, there were no game mechanics that enabled players to enact governance of their own (e.g. creating towns, villages, provinces and local laws). the outcome of this was that most often a kind of hillbilly/frontier justice, or outright dog-eat-dog existence, became the norm.
this was great for player-killers and people who loved strife. it added some intensity to the game that no other game had, or in my view has ever had since. (WoW/EQ/etc all elected to bolt everything down and render the world in nerf).
...
BBSes also had governance-by-sysop/god, FidoNet with network coordinators, and USENET with its backbone cabal.
tomoNet - a network of tomo shards that agree to all swap groups/posts with one another - is going to have to deal with the question of (self-) governance sooner or later. at the moment, tomoBBS has no specific controls for managing defederation and it does *not* use the ActivityPub protocol. it needs some, and i need help thinking through what the options are, for a network based on NNTP.
...
if you've got thoughts on how your online social community was governed (or failed to be governed) by its users, i'd love to hear about it. it's a wide open topic for debate, and there are no wrong answers at the moment.
@vga256 I'd bet @ireneista has thoughts on this.
@vga256 It's kind of how many federated community networks crumble isn't it? Spammy and trolly content frustrating users and network splits and admins giving up on it all leading to users flocking to centralized options.
Out of Usenet, IRC and email only email seems to have avoided this death spiral. With an intimidating lot of automated moderation technology.
Coincidentally, I received my first bit of what seems to be Fediverse spam yesterday.
@vga256 I don't know a lot about all the standards for authenticating emails and recognizing spam. But it seems to have to do with requiring proof of authentication, assigning scores of good behavior to participating hosts, and hosts gossiping about trustworthiness among each other, while not being required or expected to blindly follow another host's rejection of something.
@reinierl yeah, it's not a very well worked out part of NNTP unfortunately - it reminds me of how SMTP works, which honestly sucks.
@autumn looks great - thank you!