Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 173 posts

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#131

Post by Slansitartop »

kolbe wrote: post #81
Slansitartop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems nearly every single post where someone suggests people delete their Facebook accounts always has some comment pointing out that the NYT, or Medium, or whatever the article was published has a Facebook share widget or something like that. IMHO, those comments might as well be "First Post!" for all they add. > it doesn't mean that readers must be burdened with a popup that asks them to log in to Facebook befor…

> IMHO If you need to preface a comment with 'IMHO', especially when your HO is just a dressed up and unsubstantiated insult, it's probably an indication that what you're about to say will add zero value to Hacker News.

I know I would have been happy if this whole thread never existed, but alas, the root comment came to be.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#132

Post by notahacker »

avoidit wrote: post #116
nothrabannosir wrote: post #82

For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative. For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Urugu…

>> For better or for worse Its definitely the latter. Not because there is something inherently bad about staying in touch. It is because you do so despite the knowledge that you are not doing it at zero cost to others who care about their privacy. Analogy: I wish I could just throw all my garbage over into my neighbors premises rather than walk all the way down to the recycle bin. But I don't. I am actually violatin…

I've seen some pretty stupid analogies in my time, but the idea that logging onto a web service other people use to broadcast stuff they want to broadcast to the world is "violating their personal space" in a manner akin to covering their lawn in trash is going to take some beating.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#133

Post by CharlesW »

If you're thinking about using Mastodon, the CounterSocial[1] instance is worth considering. It's run by "The Jester"[2][3], who has experience running secure/hardened systems, and who takes more of an active role in countering bad actors.

[1] https://counter.social/about [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jester_(hacktivist) [3] https://keybase.io/th3j35t3r

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#134

Post by Shoothe »

snvzz wrote: post #66

Something I can't figure out from Mastodon's website is where and how it uses cryptography. I fear it might all be plaintext, despite the insanity of doing that in the present post-Snowden world, rather than the appropriate end-to-end combined with point-per-point encryption.

They are not encrypted but signed with an elaborate algorithm (I worked on ActivityPub server implementation).

Twtxt is minimalist but functional: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#135

Post by tunesmith »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #125
tunesmith wrote: post #119

I don't care about events, but I'd like my friends and weak ties to easily be able to keep up with what's going on with me. The only alternatives I can think of is signing them up all for a mailing list, or starting a website/blog. But if I don't want my blog to be public, I'm faced with doing something like setting up a wordpress blog with membership, and asking them all to register and sign in to see my semi-privat…

Secure Scuttlebutt is this, but suffers from the same problem every non-Facebook social network does: critical mass.

Critical mass is just one of those things that will be a flaw until it isn't.

Facebook has this "decisive competitive edge" in that the fact that it is seen as the only alternative is what reinforces it being the only alternative. It's good that these other solutions are free and open source because most commercial competition would dry up and fail.

But for these things that bump along and grow slowly in a sustainable way, they might actually approach an inflection point where things will snowball. At least I hope so!

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#136

Post by kerng »

nopreserveroot wrote: post #75
kerng wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the sophistication that we just now start to fully realize, adblockers probably dont help that much - i mean they get the obvious stuff out of the way, which is great. But there other forms of tracking (like super cookies), and others we might not even be aware of. The entire combination of what information some companies gather and exchange behind the scene is not that well understood at scale.

They can collect all they like, but if you never see any advertisements, it has little influence over you. I was not commenting on the violation of privacy these bad actors commit through the collection.

I think the implications are way beyond what you see in your browser and perceive as ads.

Imagine a billboard, you drive and the content changes because your GPS is close to that billboard and stuff like that - real world changes like that will happen, if not already.

There is also the product placement and as Cambridge Analytica describes entire personas and website being made just to target individuals and change their perception and opinions - this can all be automated at scale with current technology.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#137

Post by WorldMaker »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #123
nothrabannosir wrote: post #82

For the life of me I can't remember where I originally read this quote, but it forever changed my perspective of FB. Paraphrased: "Facebook is 3 things: the wall, the messaging, and an automatically updating rolodex." Many apps fill 1 and/or 2, but nothing satisfies #3. There is no alternative. For better or for worse: I want to stay in touch with people I've met in the oddest places. In the middle of bumsquash Urugu…

For #3 why not just email? There may be some marginal convenience features to FB, but email has served that purpose reliably since it was invented.

I've known several people that have changed email addresses several times in the last decade, but their FB profile has been stable and always shown the most current email address.

Some of them are less technically proficient that rely on whomever their current ISP or employer is for email. Some of them are more technically proficient and use changing email addresses as an Inbox Zero technique or as a nuclear option in spam fighting.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#138

Post by skybrian »

dhimes wrote: post #101
oldsklgdfth wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to ignore the ads if you know they are ads. What about sponsered content in movies, music, tv, news, etc? We have seen all of these used. The drive to promote a message to someone goes waay beyond advertising.

Exactly. Or that innocuous Medium post that just seems like some guy talking, when in fact it is a carefully crafted piece of psychological manipulation.

Hmmm, how about amateur psychological manipulation that went viral because it's emotionally effective?

I think this is the risk we pay by reading the Internet? The filtering implicit in things going viral is a mixed bag.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#139

Post by WorldMaker »

godelski wrote: post #30

So I question the sustainability of these platforms? How are they supported when they have sufficient mass? If they aren't gathering data on users and selling ads then how are they generating revenue?

It's a relative to the RSS model [ETA: or email is maybe a better analogy]. Scaling happens naturally as both more instances show up (scaling out) and individual instances scale up.

Every instance's own business model is often somewhat unique.

My primary instance at this point is on a domain I registered ages ago that I point to a SaaS host that runs and keeps up to date a growing number of small instances. I'm their customer and I expect them to charge me fairly based on my instance usage (CPU, bandwidth, et al) appropriately subsidized by their scale versus if I was booting my own VMs/containers and running it elsewhere.

If the worst happens, I expect I can move my business elsewhere, and given I control my domain itself, I can (use a data backup to bootstrap a new instance somewhere else and just point my domain DNS to the new instance).

There are a variety in business models among instances and the people hosting them.

Re: DeleteFacebook: Perspective from Mastodon

#140

Post by akkartik »

jonbarker wrote: post #83
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized platforms aren't a business. The decentralized model scales remarkably well for a very small cost because there are hundreds (or thousands!) of instances that run at a small scale and communicate with the broader network. Many volunteers run small instances that cost only a few dollars a month to maintain and are often supported by donations from the users of that instance. You can even run your own ins…

If I am reading fb history correctly they had a business (apple and party poker ads) even when they were distributed (one server and mysql db per school).

They were never distributed as a business, even if they were distributed as a product or as a tech stack. Mastodon allows unconnected people and organizations to make hugely disparate investments in "connection technology" with potentially very different business models. Server A may require a monthly subscription from each of its clients, Server B may be getting micropayments from 0.001% of its clients, server C may be running completely free just for somebody's close friends. All these financial models can coexist on the same platform.
Post reply on HN