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

Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

blog.joinmastodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 85 posts

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#71

Post by _7gt4 »

loceng wrote: post #61
makomk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the ways instance blocks are used, in practice, is to discourage other instances from enforcing boundaries. For example, one of the biggest and oldest Mastodon instances recently blocked an entire up-and-coming instance because they banned one person who has a trail of allegations that they solicited underage kids for sex. A number of other, smaller instances also block instances that ban another alleged seria…

Does the functionality of blocking just a single user from an instance not exist with Mastodon? This does bring up an important point however, in that the largest instances that will exist may not be the one that curates and manages the instance/ecosystem/users on the ecosystem as well or as reasonably, however creates a space (or bubble) of popular reaction - say being only "80%" compassionate vs. fully understandin…

this is a huge wall of text and I haven't necessarily read it all because I'm tired (I'll bookmark this I swear) but the case mentioned is a person with repeated persistent confirmed-by-lots-of-people manipulative bad behavior with at least two independent rape accusations on top of that.

If you're building a purely general purpose instance or a free speech themed one it's fine to not block this sort of instance.

It's okay to have this "net split". It's a system of curation. It encourages smaller instances.

Mastodon is also heavily used by minority / LGBT communities that deal with abuse and harassment a lot, often for merely existing. And often a "free speech" instance or worse a "no moderation" instance will attract that sort of person.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#72

Post by detaro »

sdrothrock wrote: post #55
_7gt4 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon instances are not public spaces. Users can pick how much they want to engage in political discussions by picking their instance or, if they can, hosting their own. (The second part of the argument is flawed because most people can't just throw up a rails app and maintain it, be it cost or lack of knowledge) What most people don't get about "bubbles", mostly because it doesn't affect them, is that sometimes,…

I'm not only thinking about political bubbles here, but linguistic or cultural ones. For example, when I joined a server here, it was federated only with a few other small Japanese servers, resulting in a fairly miserable experience. Another set had multiple languages but was just devoted to art. It's incredibly difficult (or was a year ago) to find servers that are general purpose and federated with both Japanese an…

I think you use "federated with" in a different sense than most people do in these discussions.

A newly created Mastodon instance by default federates with everyone in that allows messages and following from and to every other instance.

But it's federated timeline has no posts from other instances, because that view only shows posts that the instance actually sees. It only shows what people on the same instance actually follow, because otherwise there is no reason for the posts to be sent to it.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#73

Post by fenwick67 »

danso wrote: post #41
yborg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon IS better ... at not stuffing ads in my face. So it's not the same noise as Twitter, in that I don't have to share a home with a billboard in every room.

The appearance of ads is not the only metric that matters for people. The fact that no one is yet apparently spamming or otherwise attempting to profit from Mastadon is more a reflection of how little it is currently used, rather than something inherent to the service.

There have certainly been spammers but they are usually shut down quickly

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#74

Post by iuwhagtr »

kragen wrote: post #70
iuwhagtr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, that one will ban extreme (and not so extreme) right-wingers. But you also have the opposite in other servers. And of course those servers refuse to federate with others. So there obviously are no flame wars like on Twitter... All ideologies are separated. The reason there are no flame wars is not that Mastodon users are somewhat enlightened, as opposed to the Twitter rabble. Instead, clashes are avoid…

Can you give me some examples of a server with extreme right-wingers? That way I can find out whether my server allows me to follow them or not.

There are public blocklists that Mastodon instances associated with the left (most of them) use. They are one Google search away.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#75

Post by ryukafalz »

wpietri wrote: post #68
ryukafalz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I think it's dangerous for programmers to focus on building a thing rather than serving their users. Dangerous for whom? Mastodon isn't a product, it's an open source project. More active users is nice, but isn't fundamental to the project; it will continue as long as there are people interested in working on it.

Your theory here seems to be that usage isn't the point, that people writing code is all that matters. I think that's a fair measure for a repository of code golf examples, or something where it's just a bunch of people scratching their own itches. But Mastodon is an inherently social product. I don't believe it has any meaning without usage. And clearly, the Mastodon people know that, which is why they talk about th…

Sure, at a certain point it doesn't mean anything without usage. But I'd argue Mastodon passed that threshold a long time ago. There's a decent community around it at this point, and people seem to enjoy it.

>But the danger with vanity metrics is that a lot of effort can get wasted.

What makes someone's effort "wasted"? IMO, if the developers enjoy working on it, their effort wasn't wasted. Not every project (even if it's a social network!) needs to appeal to everyone in the world, not everyone needs to be out for world domination, and that's okay.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#76

Post by kragen »

iuwhagtr wrote: post #74
kragen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me some examples of a server with extreme right-wingers? That way I can find out whether my server allows me to follow them or not.

There are public blocklists that Mastodon instances associated with the left (most of them) use. They are one Google search away.

I tried following https://pl.smuglo.li/users/roka (an anti-Semite who posts porn) and got a nondescript error. How can I tell if this is due to a blacklist, and if so, if it's on my instance or theirs?

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#77

Post by iuwhagtr »

kragen wrote: post #76
iuwhagtr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are public blocklists that Mastodon instances associated with the left (most of them) use. They are one Google search away.

I tried following https://pl.smuglo.li/users/roka (an anti-Semite who posts porn) and got a nondescript error. How can I tell if this is due to a blacklist, and if so, if it's on my instance or theirs?

Hmm... I don't see any antisemitism in there?

In any case, you should contact the admins of your instance, but most probably they have blocked that instance, as it appears on blocklists for being a free speech zone.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#78

Post by makomk »

loceng wrote: post #61
makomk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the ways instance blocks are used, in practice, is to discourage other instances from enforcing boundaries. For example, one of the biggest and oldest Mastodon instances recently blocked an entire up-and-coming instance because they banned one person who has a trail of allegations that they solicited underage kids for sex. A number of other, smaller instances also block instances that ban another alleged seria…

Does the functionality of blocking just a single user from an instance not exist with Mastodon? This does bring up an important point however, in that the largest instances that will exist may not be the one that curates and manages the instance/ecosystem/users on the ecosystem as well or as reasonably, however creates a space (or bubble) of popular reaction - say being only "80%" compassionate vs. fully understandin…

While I guess there are arguments for not banning users just because they have a whole bunch of nasty accusations against them, or for requiring high standards of evidence to do so, that wasn't the actual justification from what I can tell. (Indeed, I think arguing that rape accusations shouldn't automatically be believed is probably a bannable offence on all the instances involved.) It's more like they don't think community insiders should be held to the same standards as other people, and reckon any outsiders who do so are so obviously in the wrong as to justify banning the entire instance.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#79

Post by NoGravitas »

RX14 wrote: post #39
AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #32

My only issue with Mastodon is that it does not solve the issue of authenticity - you can't verify that a post sent by a user was not forged or modified by one of the servers in the federation. This is where public key crypto could help.

This is untrue, Actors have a keypair and inbox POSTs are signed with that key to ensure authenticity. For boosts (Announce), mastodon uses a complex signing algorithm based on JSON-LD, and pleroma just re-requests the post from the original instance and uses that, discarding the relayed object.

It also (now) can verify that the @my_cool_username@mastodon.social is the same person/group as runs my_cool_web.site, by using a rel=me link on my_cool_web.site. So it ties verification to DNS, which is centralized enough to serve for that kind of verification. You can also prove that you hold both a mastodon identity and an identity on another social network, if the other social network lets you post rel=me links in your profile.

Re: Mastodon’s 2 Year Anniversary

#80

Post by wpietri »

ryukafalz wrote: post #75
wpietri wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory here seems to be that usage isn't the point, that people writing code is all that matters. I think that's a fair measure for a repository of code golf examples, or something where it's just a bunch of people scratching their own itches. But Mastodon is an inherently social product. I don't believe it has any meaning without usage. And clearly, the Mastodon people know that, which is why they talk about th…

Sure, at a certain point it doesn't mean anything without usage. But I'd argue Mastodon passed that threshold a long time ago. There's a decent community around it at this point, and people seem to enjoy it. >But the danger with vanity metrics is that a lot of effort can get wasted. What makes someone's effort "wasted"? IMO, if the developers enjoy working on it, their effort wasn't wasted. Not every project (even if…

If the developers enjoy working on it and they have consciously chosen that as their only intent then the effort isn't wasted. But I don't think the Mastodon developers see the purpose of their software as some sort of technical onanism.

If you look at their web site, it's clear their goal is "social networking, back in your hands". Vanity metrics lead to wasted effort relative to goals like that.

Post reply on HN