• 12 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 2nd, 2024

help-circle





  • More critically, the proof-of-concept so far appears to lack any real work on moderation tools or implementing a web of trust system. These would be absolutely vital components for a federated encyclopedia to have any chance of controlling quality and avoiding descending into a sea of misinformation and edit wars between conflicting “truths.” Centralized oversight and clear enforced guidelines are key reasons why Wikipedia has been relatively successful, despite its flaws.

    Without a robust distributed moderation system in place, a federated encyclopedia runs the risk of either devolving into siloed echo chambers pushing various agendas, or becoming an uncoordinated mess making it impractical as a general reference work. The technical obstacles around federating content policies, privileges and integrated quality control across instances are immense challenges that aren’t obviously addressed by this early proof-of-concept.

    While novel approaches like federation are worth exploring, straying too far from Wikipedia’s principles of neutral point-of-view and community-driven policies could easily undermine the entire premise. Lofty goals of disrupting Wikipedia are admirable, but successfully replacing its dominance as a general reference work seems extremely unlikely without solving these fundamental issues around distributed content governance first.



  • The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.

    While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia’s dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.

    That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.




  • I did read the links, and I still strongly feel that no automated mechanical system of weights and measures can outperform humans when it comes to understanding context.

    But this is not a way to replace humans; it’s just a method to grant users moderation privileges based on their tenure on a platform. Currently, most federated platforms only offer moderator and admin levels of moderation, making setting up an instance tedious due to the time spent managing the report inbox. Automating the assignment of moderation levels would streamline this process, allowing admins to simply adjust the trust level of select users to customize their instance as desired.



  • Trust lvls themselves are just Karma plus login/read tracking aka extra steps.

    Trust Levels are acquired by reading posts and spending time on the platform, instead of receiving votes for posting. Therefore, it wouldn’t lead to low-quality content unless you choose to implement it that way.

    The Karma system is used more as a bragging right than to give any sort of moderation privilege to users.

    But in essence is similar, you get useless points with one and moderation privileges with the other.

    If you are actually advocating that the Fediverse use Discourse’s service you have to be out of your mind.

    You are making things up just so you can call me crazy. I’m not advocating anything of the sort.





  • A system like this rewards frequent shitposting over slower qualityposting. It is also easily gamed by organized bad faith groups. Imagine if this was Reddit and T_D users just gave each other a high trust score, valuing their contributions over more “organic” posts.

    You are just assuming that this would work similarly to Reddit based on karma. I don’t know why you would assume the worst possible implementation just so you can complain about this. If you had read the links, you would know that shitposting wouldn’t help much because what contributes most to Trust Levels in Discourse is reading posts.