One of the central things the Fediverse has to offer in online discussions is being able to pull out of toxic discussions without leaving one’s community. And while this already is nice in itself, it could also result in overall better designed social apps, because due to the possibility of migrating accounts and network effects, site owners are put into a position, in which they want to design their sites less toxic for their own benefit.
By the nature of how they are constructed, walled gardens create an environment, in which site owners are motivated to fuel conflict and design their apps this way, while in the Fediverse, site owners aren’t. This happens because of two things: first, they are motivated to put sufficient moderation tools in place not to lose users to other servers (which is much easier and less costly for users due to account migration) and secondly and more importantly: it doesn’t motivate them to fuel discussion, because escalating conflicts between communities could result in radio silence between communities, meaning less user interaction between its members, most likely leading to less user time spend on the servers. This doesn’t necessarily mean defederation. It is assumed that besides defederation, there are many other possible actions to reduce the interaction with another instance or user, for example by showing their posts less prominently on one’s home feed. In this sense, the number of moderation-actions between defederation and openly federating with an instance is thought of as a span on which communities and individuals dynamically move. And because of the first argument, these moderation actions will be much more powerful than in walled garden social media.
While the first argument is a trivial conclusion of federation: because of the open nature of the Fediverse, servers are motivated to put sufficient moderation tools in place and they will become more powerful than in walled garden, the second one is more interesting: because these advanced moderation actions exist, side owners are not only impartial to designing their applications to prevent conflicts from escalating; but its in fact beneficial for them to prevent escalation between communities and design their applications this way.
In walled gardens, heated and toxic discussions were no problem for the server owner (to a certain degree), because communities had nowhere else to go. In fact, they were even beneficial, because they increased the profit of the platform by generating more attention, which in turn generated more revenue. For the worst cases, rudimentary moderation tools were implemented, but only enough to keep public backlash at bay.
Now in the Fediverse, things don’t completely change: servers will still be motivated to maximize user engagement, however, while in walled gardens, this correlated with fuelling conflicts, in the Fediverse, they find themselves in a new dilemma here: because a community can just pull out of a discussion that it finds too heated or toxic, escalations of discussions can actually hurt the sides owners. In the worst case, communities split and don’t communicating with each other at all, leading to less user time. The possibility of severing the link to other parts of the network motivates the sides owners to prevent this type of behaviour as best as possible and design their sides in this way. While they do want to foster user engagement, they need to find a balance here that keeps the user experience much more in check than before. In contrast to walled gardens, server owners in the Fediverse hold a shared resource with the servers they federate with and therefore can push for a conflict-encouraging UI-design only so far, not only because users have the option to leave the server, but additionally, because it hurts their shared resource, which makes their server less attractive and gives users the motivation to actually go through with changing servers towards healthier parts of the network. While in walled gardens, servers are pulled toward conflict-encouraging designs, in the Fediverse, this pull is reversed towards discussion-encouraging designs.
All of this of course assumes that no instance holds a monopoly in the Fediverse, which in fact again puts them into a position to profit from toxic community interaction; and that a major part of communities is interested in productive interaction with other communities.
To summarize, while of course conflict-encouraging server design decisions can still happen here and the fact that server owners will want to create a healthy yet exciting environment comes with its own pitfalls too, ActivityPub creates a fundamentally different environment that encourages server owners to push for a discussion-encouraging UI-design, which could potentially provide a better ground for online discussions and interaction in the future.
Fungiverse Tales 