Infowars and the reluctance to curate

I would like a way to post video

"hesitation to curate" - well said Manton. However I believe they are looking at this aspect selectively. On one hand, they want to benefit from the power of curation when it drives their business (curated timelines). It is when it becomes a responsibility that they attempt to shy away.

@adrianizq Thanks for the feedback. We wanted to start with photos and podcasts, but videos would be a natural next step. Just want to get everything else working smoothly first.

I'm slightly concerned that the NYT thinks Facebook owns YouTube...

@rosemaryorchard Oops, I think that was my fault as I was summarizing their article. I've updated my blog post.

@amit Well said. I think that’s exactly it. They want all benefits, no responsibilities.

Really looking forward to being able to embed videos here. Along those lines, is there a way to post animated GIFs at MB?

I agree with everything you wrote, and agree that Apple’s decision is much easier than Facebook & YouTube’s because of the reasons you listed. But let’s take it a level deeper: Should Cloudflare drop websites it disagrees with? Should webhosts? Domain registrars?

In other words, how open should the open web be?

@DazeEnd There's a lot of competition for hosting, so I think that helps. Domain registration is different, though... I think everyone has the right to be on the web. Content violations should be resolved on individual platforms and not at the DNS level.

@grayareas There's not really a supported way to post animated GIFs yet, although some people work around it by hosting a GIF somewhere else. I'd like to add more control over auto-playing and pausing first.

It would be nice to see the capability, once you get the proper controls in place. As a cinema buff, I find they can be a nice way to grab a motion-snapshot of small moments.

@PhoneBoy Even with more distribution there are always parts of the system (everything from a Mastodon instance to a podcast directory) that need curation outside what a single user can do. Micro.blog's focus on domain names and feeds gives it a unique advantage over Twitter. I think it's very different.

@PhoneBoy off the service yes, but not off the Internet. If Facebook and YouTube remove someone, their content is gone. Poof! It’s a pretty big difference.

@DazeEnd I think that ultimately it is up to Cloudflare to decide that. It’s their platform and they aren’t obligated to support them. That still doesn’t prevent someone who really wants their content available from buying a computer and hanging it off of an IP somewhere.

@PhoneBoy Think you're only thinking about the timeline, but it's about actually owning what you publish. Even if micro.blog did that (and it's different already because community guidelines were established upfront not arbitrarily later), as someone "taken off" the service, you can take your domain, identity and followers with you — those that visit your domain will continue to receive your updates much like those who subscribe to your feed — you just won't be hosted on/via MB, plus you can leave a note/post whatever at those locations about any changes. When Twitter or worse, YouTube does it, it instantly breaks your relationship with them in entirety. There'd be no way for them to follow up easily unless they also follow you elsewhere, or for you to adequately notify them. You just have to take your outrage to a different channel & hope it gets noticed. It also applies in reverse if I have a problem with something MB does and I want to leave. It's fundamentally different.

I tend to agree, although I struggle with it. Denying DNS, hosting, and other fundamental services seems less like “refusing to distribute an offensive book” and more like “refusing to supply paper and ink.”

The ability to publish on the web is the modern equivalent of standing on a soapbox in the town square. I fear that allowing companies to deny basic services (hosting, DNS, etc.) gives corporations much too much power in deciding what speech is acceptable and what isn’t.

@cheesemaker Yeah, but that doesn’t address the root problem. It just shifts it. What if an ISP finds speech offensive? Should they be able to deny the use of their service to distribute the offensive speech?

@cheesemaker (For the record, I don’t have solutions, just concerns. 🤷‍♂️)

@DazeEnd I think your questions touch on a potential issue with how we view the Internet, which is that we want to treat everything on it the same way. Some parts of the Internet are utilities, like roads, and should probably be treated differently than other parts. I don't know whether it is possible to determine which parts of the Internet were built by tax payers versus which part by corporations.

@frankm Yes. Utilities are the perfect analogy. Thanks.

@DazeEnd Yet even if someone is completely censored off of the internet, their free speech has not been impinged. There is no Constitutional right to have one's voice amplified, digitized and/or broadcast. Anyone can still use a real soapbox on a real town square.

@PhoneBoy The technical differences are everything. 🙂 Because posts on Micro.blog are blog posts, you can continue to post to your own blog.

"lot of competition for hosting" - "domain registration is different" - are you saying that there isn't competition for DNS?

Having said that, service providers like DNS and ISP and Hosting shouldn't have to police all content. How could they? But as @amit said - if your income is from curation, you have the money and the means to censor.

Please consider something like OmniWeb’s preference to animate gifs twice or thrice.

@DazeEnd To be clear, I think DNS is a special case. For example, Alex Jones should be able to have a domain name even if his content is banned from most social networks. (I think we mostly agree about this.)

@donblanco I was thinking the companies that manage a top-level domain, not normal registrars. In practice this is a non-issue, though. And I agree about most normal hosting companies... Twitter and Facebook are different because they both host content and (often) actively spread it to thousands or millions of followers.

@liz Good idea!

I think we mostly agree too. And, for the record, I’m not trying to argue. I’m just discussing so I can better understand, for myself, where to draw the line. There are a lot of competing interests here: speech, commerce, property rights, safety, etc.

ah, I gotcha man!

@DazeEnd well it appears that in an extension of your question, MailChimp has also pulled the plug on him. That’s not quite as far down as the ISP level but it’s getting there.

@PhoneBoy Sure, but that's a different conversation. The comparison was that MB and sites like Twitter are the same, which was my original point. Could MB do more? Sure but the fundamental creation of content (my posts) are indeed owned by me now and will be available even if I leave MB at the same location. Technically with webmentions on non-MB hosted blogs, your responses/conversations are actually logged at the owner's site as well, MB should/does have more in the works to address that specifically.

@PhoneBoy I haven't used Mastodon at all so that could very well be the case, no doubt MB has ways to go. For me personally, real ownership of content solves an aspect of governance where platforms control and/or police owners because they are so dominant. MB can't wipe me off the web even if they don't want to contribute to being my loudspeaker, just like Apple could delist my podcast but my listeners can continue to consume them via other directories or directly from me.