But change from drugs to escorting and you'll find some of the same people now saying that it should be banned because without sufficient verification it is possible to paying people who are coerced or forced into doing it. People are tortured and killed to get the drugs delivered, and if one doesn't verify (or if one insufficiently verifies) then they are funding such activities, but many are willing to ignore that.
Look at those who ignore the harm of buying drugs from unverified sources, where you may be paying money to a supply chain ran by the cartel. And some people do that (I think MADD would be one case, especially for the subset of their members wanting to ban all alcohol) yet even in that case those people selectively apply the same reasoning about something else. Even if we ignored the logistics of such a challenge and agreed on the conclusion, why is the same logic not applied to things like alcohol and all the harms that results (drunk driving, alcoholics ruining their lives, etc). People will point out that if we ban guns, we wouldn't have to worry about school shootings. More than agreeing or not with this line of thinking, I find the bigger problem is how selectively it is applied. In either case, I think it's probably a net positive for society when people can discuss things they actually feel instead of things that they think others think they should feel, even though those others might not even feel that way! Shouldn't society operate in a way that we think it should operate instead of the way that we collectively think everybody else thinks we think it should operate? And those things that they might not feel comfortable discussing can be negative, but they can also be positive. Self censorship due to social pressure certainly keeps some people (as has been mentioned Facebook shows clearly enough that lots of people simply don't care) from discussing things that they would not feel comfortable discussing under their real name. While there will be a space for commercial providers which use ads or subscriptions to pay for their instances, the ease of personal setup makes centralization a lot less of a tendency for the Fediverse than it did for email.Īs a thought experiment - would slavery in the US have ended sooner or later if we had anonymous internet from the 18th century on? I'm not implying there is any clear answer, but I think it is a simple way of immediately seeing much of the nuance of this issue that you might miss at a cursory consideration. All of these combined decrease the friction for lay (for multiple definitions of lay) users to run their own instance, which makes the gulf between a (not-yet-existent) commercial instance and a personal instance a lot smaller.
On top of this is a community interest in creating software (like Pleroma) that is easy to install and administer. You don't need a mailserver to send mail to an address, but you need to setup an instance and have other users specifically follow you to send spam toots, or Fediverse messages. Spam is also a huge problem in the email world because of the ease of sending an email. Right now the ActivityPub standard is well defined, and most instances already follow the server-to-server API. You have to setup SPF records, DKIM records, on top of which many mailers send non-standard mail out, which you have to make sure your rules accept these non-standard pieces of mail. Hotmail and Gmail came about because running your own email is difficult (I used to run my own email). It seems like, if the federated protocol is successful and allows it, new large providers would spring up like Gmail and Hotmail. > Speaking of which, I'm not seeing why every instance operator would decide not to grow. Moderators are more willing to take actions like this when each user does not contribute to their bottom line. While blacklisting an instance can be problematic, it's also probably not that big of a deal for most. Most of my followers/followees are on the same instance as me.
Most people typically find an instance with people similar to them.
You wouldn't want to block Gmail, though. > Though there are email blacklists for known spammers, and it can be hard to administer a new email server. Cutting your users off from communicating with their friends seems kind of drastic? Suppose that happened with email, the original federated network?