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Mastodon and Keybase

keybase.io

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Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#171

Post by JoshTriplett »

StavrosK wrote: post #73
bisby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a concept of a federated timeline, which does get synced to your local instance. If you follow someone on a remote instance, that instance feeds content into your instance so it can be loaded.

It syncs the people you follow, right? So presumably the only additional content on your instance is content from the people you follow, which should generally be low-risk.

I still don't want to host anyone else's content, for much the same reason I'm never going to have an unmoderated comment system on a site.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#172

Post by Leace »

coldacid wrote: post #155
Leace wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage. Nope, that's actually not the problem with Mastodon UX. On Twitter you still have to ask if your friend is @Johnny or @John1256 or @JDoe or depend on visual cues (avatar). The problem with Mastodon UX (and Fedivers…

I find that remote follow is only an issue this way if you've gone directly to the other party's profile rather than following them from your own instance, or when your instance is being banned for some reason by the other party's instance. It could be smoother, but this is what we get for having to defend against XSS. The bigger problem with Mastodon is the explicit support for censorship via defederating instances…

> rather than following them from your own instance

This all requires people to explicitly copy user/page URL to clipboard and paste it on their instance. "Follow me" buttons or twitter.com/share-link URLs are just not possible on Mastodon. Copying and pasting stuff doesn't look like good UX to me.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#173

Post by Leace »

velcrovan wrote: post #160
fermuch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now they're showing every integration possible (as in, every mastodon instance they approve of) on their UI

Again…why? who cares? Why is picking from a pre-approved list better than just letting people type in their instance domain name and allowing every instance by default?

Agreed. Not to mention Mastodon could've a linkback to Keybase with all data pre-filled (username + instance name). For example in Settings a link "Connect with Keybase".

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#174

Post by Kye »

ema wrote: post #144
twblalock wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know you're joking, but if you found your way on to a site called "Hacker News" at a URL like https://news.ycombinator.com , it it really going to be so much more complicated to understand that https://mastodon.social is the website of the Mastodon social network? Yes it is, because when people thing of $something, they assume the website is $something.com. If Mastodon plans to appeal to the general public then i…

Mastodon will only have robustly succeeded in their mission when people don't think of it as joining Mastodon but as joining some particular social hub which happens to run Mastodon. Think of how people aren't joining academia but are joining Foo University.

As far as I know Mastodon has no particular mission. If it exists, not every instance shares it. And that's not even considering other stuff that works on ActivityPub.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#175

Post by rStar »

skybrian wrote: post #65
mirimir wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity. Ummm. I mean, https://keybase.io/mirimir has nothing to do with my "real life identity".

That's a good point but on the other hand, when you have no reason to connect accounts, connecting them in this way might not be good opsec. I guess this could be useful to make switching mastodon servers smoother.

"might"

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#176

Post by feanaro »

Nursie wrote: post #133
feanaro wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative. Citation needed, please. This really sounds like your personal opinion presented as a general statement.

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get. It's not just my opinion.

I'm looking at the news but I'm not reaching the same conclusions.

Public opinion heavily depends on context and evolves continually. Of course people are going to get behind the idea of preventing teen suicides, particularly when it seems that the solution might be preventing a huge, corporate giant do as it pleases.

Given the context of government censorship, which is happening and is likely to increase and become a larger problem in the future, and myriads of smaller, independent entities, people might react differently.

In any case, I don't think it's a good nor strong enough argument to abandon decentralization and anti-censorship efforts.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#177

Post by feanaro »

Nursie wrote: post #169
Mirioron wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme of things censorship is the more dangerous thing though. People often don't care about censorship until it affects them, but once it does, they care a lot. There's a reason why the first amendment protects speech. It's the building block for an improving society.

As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc. So we already have lines on 'speech'. I agree, censorship can be sinister, but I disagree that it's so sinister that we have to allow everything for fear of allowing nothing. Society already doesn't work that way.

> As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc.

Yes, but those are already illegal. That does not (or at the very least should not) mean politicians get to dictate what kind of technology is allowed. You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#178

Post by feanaro »

DanBC wrote: post #134
Nursie wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get. It's not just my opinion.

I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry. See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/onli…

> It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.

Why are you trying to paint this as an extremist position? Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other. Any removal of content is not censorship and that position is clearly nonsense. E.g. a commercial entity can do what it wants with its own property, including removing content.

What is universally negative is requiring all future technologies to have loopholes through which things can be deleted, thereby preventing some designs outright. I think this parent comment sums it up quite nicely why having such systems is something very reasonable and desirable:

> On the other hand, (at least some) end-users see decentralisation as a huge benefit, and at least in my case it gives me confidence that the whim of a single company can't ruin the experience for me, or even take away the platform altogether.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#179

Post by afiori »

rtkwe wrote: post #163
dwighttk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mostly off topic: Most of my friends are on Instagram and think I’m funny for being on twitter anyway. They have a business twitter account that they only use at conferences and socialize on IG. I tried setting up a new ig account (deleted my first when they sold to Facebook) and couldn’t get past the input phone number portion of the signup. Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard. If…

> Anyway trying to convert people from twitter to mastodon is sorta hard. That's because going from Twitter to Mastodon is a downgrade in pretty much every concrete way and only an upgrade in less concrete more esoteric terms. From most people the main benefits I've seen cited are censorship resistance (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?) and decentralization (which only really matters…

> (how many people encounter significant censorship on twitter today?)

The point is not that you user are being censored, but that twitter "lies" to you about social dynamics with their obvious (yet hidden) biases.

Twitter promotes the extremes and hides the middle. If this is not enough they also apply a consistent political agenda (by protecting their main cash cow of liberal journalist) and lie about it.

Perfect example is what happened with the Convington kids and journalist calling for doxxing.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#180

Post by Nursie »

feanaro wrote: post #177
Nursie wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc. So we already have lines on 'speech'. I agree, censorship can be sinister, but I disagree that it's so sinister that we have to allow everything for fear of allowing nothing. Society already doesn't work that way.

> As far as I'm aware, the first amendment doesn't protect the distribution of child abuse images, or allow harassment, etc. Yes, but those are already illegal. That does not (or at the very least should not ) mean politicians get to dictate what kind of technology is allowed. You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralize…

I'm not sure I'm arguing for a ban on decentralised tech as a whole, to go back to my first post on the topic - far from being a selling point, decentralisation is a negative feature for a lot of people. Centralisation provides points of control that are useful way beyond political suppression of speech, to allow (for instance) transaction reversal and material take down.

The post I replied to was singing the praises of decentralisation, as if the idea that nobody can control what's said and done is a universal positive. I'm just putting across the counterpoint that it's not, there are circumstances where unilateral control could be (and is, by large sections of the population) seen as a good thing.

> You cannot outlaw a technology (or require a backdoor) simply because it may not support deletion as a feature by virtue of being decentralized.

I mean, you can. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing to do, but there's no real reason a government couldn't make exactly such a rule. Whether it could be enforceable in any way is a different matter.

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