A vast majority of the fediverse (particularly the threadiverse) is populated by people who have no sense of infosec or privacy, who run stock browsers over clearnet (e.g. #LemmyWorld users, the AOL users of today). They have a different reality than street wise people. They post a link to a page that renders fine in the world they see and they are totally oblivious to the fact that they are sending the rest of the fediverse into an exclusive walled garden.

There is no practical way for street wise audiences to signal “this article is exclusive/shitty/paywalled/etc”. Voting is too blunt of an instrument and does not convey the problem. Writing a comment “this article is unreachable/discriminatory because it is hosted in a shitty place” is high effort and overly verbose.

the fix

The status quo:

• (👍/👎) ← no meaning… different people vote on their own invented basis for voting

We need refined categorised voting. e.g.

• linked content is interesting and civil (👍/👎)
• body content is interesting and civil (👍/👎)
• linked article is reachable & inclusive (👎)¹
• linked is garbage free (no ads, popups, CAPTCHA, cookie walls, etc) (👍/👎)

¹ Indeed a thumbs up is not useful on inclusiveness because we know every webpage is reachable to someone or some group and likely a majority. Only the count of people excluded is worth having because we would not want to convey the idea that a high number of people being able to reach a site in any way justifies marginalization of others. It should just be a raw count of people who are excluded. A server can work out from the other 3 voting categories the extent by which others can access a page.

From there, how the votes are used can evolve. A client can be configured to not show an egalitarian user exclusive articles. An author at least becomes aware that a site is not good from a digital rights standpoint, and can dig further if they want.

update

The fix needs to expand. We need a mechanism for people to suggest alternative replacement links, and those links should also be voted on. When a replacement link is more favorable than the original link, it should float to the top and become the most likely link for people to visit.