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1. fireth+(OP)[view] [source] 2020-06-08 17:38:31
> the debate there is how much corporate censorship people are willing to tolerate without injury to facebook's bottom line and stature.

Facebook doesn't need to respond to what its users think it should do, because its users aren't organized enough to achieve the collective action necessary to threaten its bottom line. More generally, what Facebook "should" do, from the perspective of the public good, is a wrong question. Facebook's business model is fundamentally misaligned with the public interest, so even if we could pool our strength to force it to the right policies, it couldn't be trusted to enforce them faithfully. What's right for Facebook isn't what's right for Us; with perpetual struggle we could at best narrow the gap.

In contrast, a federated structure, like Diaspora, is conducive to democracy, because Diaspora is not a company with its own interests. Diaspora is Us. In a federated system, the question is not "what speech do I wish the monopolistic enterprise I've subjected myself to would allow". The question is "what speech will I allow on my server" and "what servers do I want to network with". These questions are inherently more democratic. When the right model is chosen, the problem of endlessly tuning parameters disappears. Fit can be achieved without all the work of overfitting.

So I use Diaspora. I don't have any friends. But I know I'm right.

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