Preventing abuse in decentralized systems

Below are notes extracted from the etherpad for this session (held at Redecentralize 2019)

Session Title: Preventing abuse in decentralized networks

Called by: Doug Belshaw

https://moodle.com/moodlenet

What Happened?

• Discussed the problem of Gab in the Fediverse: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking
• Broke into three groups:
  • Technical
    • How do you have a world which is both anonymous, but leads to consequences if you do something (e.g.) illegal?
    • Decentralised identity (liability)
      • What would happen if someone didn’t want to do that?
      • How do we make (criminal) liability possible?
    • Micropayments as a way of adding friction into the system
  • Philosophical
    • Discussed how communities are run offline and how this doesn’t (or does)
    • Mastodon not really ‘decentralised’ because admins have access to data and provide access to it
      • Boils down to issues around trust
  • UX
    • We’re using old patterns for new problem (or at least in terms of implications)
      • Learning from cities which have abusive behaviours and have to deal with them
      • Book (trilogy) “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander
        • Thinking about, for example, T-junctions and reducing accidents
    • Some people move away from abuse, some people actively look for places to inflict it
    • SSB project - framed moderation around “freedom of listening” https://www.scuttlebutt.nz
      • No admins, but a form of moderation in the sense as being based on friends and friends of friends (auto-blocking, delegating blocking?)
    • Shared online blocklists? c.f. Blokada: https://blokada.org
    • Technology as a tool to solve certain types of problems, but the solution to abuse is unlkely to just be technical (too much is led by what technology -can- do rather than what it should)
    • Shadowbanning and online/offline differences (what do we do online that we could never do offline?)
    • Design doesn’t have to be neutral - we can make people (e.g. the alt-right) not want to come into spaces we are
    • The internet as a mirror of a very specific type of society (when there’s so much diversity in the world)
      • Decentralised vs centralisation in terms of cities (where more demands than resources)
      • One of the first questions to ask when setting up a community should be “am I setting up a village or a city?”
    • Cell-like structure where ‘pubs’ (c.f. SSB) can be cut off - still exist, but not visible
    • Run your own social - https://runyourown.social (“social networks should not have more than 50 people”)
    • In smaller communities, things get sorted out more naturally (e.g. village pub) but in larger ones more formalised (e.g. city pub)
    • Levels to organising (e.g. Carnival in Brazil - big ones, but also small ones)

Next Actions: By When, By Whom?:

• Sunday aftern 16:00 - Remixing UX Patterns for Decentralisation
• Read a recommended book (Christopher Alexander - ‘A Pattern Language’)
• Write up what happened when members of the alt-right joined SSB