What is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network?

That either means "moderates so that everyone posting agrees with what I mean by ethics to a satisfying degree" (and folks do not agree on this)

or just "I have fewer complaints about the moderation of this social network than the other popular ones".

To boil this down to what I actually mean with an example: What are the "ethical" allowed things to post about climate change on your social network? (please don't actually fall into the trap of actually discussing climate change here). I can think of about three or four different answers to this question that large blocks of people would passionately defend.

And so either "ethical" social networks don't exist or there is only one true ethical way to do things and that way is people have to agree with my position and lots of people who don't agree with me are very wrong about ethics.

You can do this for a lot of topics and you'll find that contrary to US politics, there are not actually only two ways of thinking about the world and one of them awful.

I think in this respect they mean ethical to users - no ads, no charging money, features that are built to serve the user instead of optimizing for engagement, etc.

You want a service that both has no ads and doesn’t charge money… and you’re saying it’s unethical do to either?

That is absurd.

I think "ethical" in the context of social media means not doing surveillance capitalism. ie: don't cash on user data. Moderation is a orthogonal topic.

> What is "ethical" when it comes to a social media network?

For me, primarily one does not use a business model that profits from outrage, clickbait, misinformation, etc. Business models that use view-based ad revenue are unethical, for example.

Beyond that, it should make an effort to stifle the spread of harmful content. Where that line is drawn is of course hard to define. Twitter and Facebook largely ignore their responsibilities here, which is one reason I don't use them.

It will be a money black hole but I still think it can work, just not as a business.

If it can not be made profitably, it can not be made into any large scale activity and it will never reach mainstream.

So, if your idea of "can work" is "it works for me and my niche group who all treat it as a hobby" it is already working.

But if your idea of "can work" is "gets us rid of all social network that makes money by selling eyeballs", then the only way to work will be though finding a valid alternative business model.

Mastodon and Bluesky do work and are decently successful

Mastodon is 8 years old and as a whole has 800K MAU. Note that MAU is an optimistic metric still, it says very little about meaningful activity.

So, we agree, Mastodon do work