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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

infosec-handbook.eu

111–120 of 224 posts

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#111
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no algorithmic advertising, no universal tracking, and your instance's mod team is known to you instead of a faceless automation farm.

Are there no fediverse-scraping services that sell your data to advertisers? That seems a prime target for every moderately-evil adtech executive out there.

Even if there are, they still get a lot less data since they only see what you posted publicly. Unlike Twitter/Facebook, scrapers won't see your every mouse movement, how long you stare at any individual post, or any other of the more invasive tracking opportunities that are available to Twitter/Facebook.

The scraping services also won't know your email address unless you post it publicly or they figure it out some other way, so they'll find it much harder to associate the data they scrape with your other online identities, too. This also makes the data less valuable to advertisers, so I imagine there's less incentive to scrape it.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#113
post #3

> The “I read headlines only” problem This remains true for most platforms, not just those in the fediverse. HN is one example! I am reading this article with great interest. I've recently started exploring fediverse platforms with much excitement. I'm more interested in building a community at the moment, and although this can be achieved with a classic bulletin board system, the fediverse had me curious.

If you're interested in hosting a discussion based community similar to HN or reddit, I'm working on a project that might interest you. Link in my bio.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#114
post #71

I am one of the people that got a lot of shares on Mastodon for being critical of Signal. I think this article greatly misrepresents the main arguments going around the Fediverse about Signal, and the arguments for alternatives. 1. Signal holds the only set of signing keys to the only published binaries allowed on the network, compiled by them, that in turn control all signing keys. If pressured they could push a mal…

I wish the Mastodon ad campaigns on Twitter would focus more on the digital sovereignty benefits.

It seems like all anyone takes away from federated protocols is "it's more secure" in some ambiguous way.

On the Signal topic, I've been put off talking about the security concerns of centralized vs decentralized lately as everyone seems to interpret this as "US X NOT Y".

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#115
post #3

> The “I read headlines only” problem This remains true for most platforms, not just those in the fediverse. HN is one example! I am reading this article with great interest. I've recently started exploring fediverse platforms with much excitement. I'm more interested in building a community at the moment, and although this can be achieved with a classic bulletin board system, the fediverse had me curious.

If you're interested in hosting a discussion based community similar to HN or reddit, I'm working on a project that might interest you. Link in my bio.

Thank you - I'm going to check it out. I also had a look at Lemmy recently which promises better fediverse support in the future. Is there a link to a live example? Didn't see one in the README

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#116
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to a post claiming the only novel part of mastodon compared to old message boards is federation. I’m merely pointing out that many old message boards did have federation. To your points (1) yes, everything was slower back then (2) people could and did post streams of their work within the BBS framework, everything from multi-part posts to “owning” a message-board topic, to text/ansi e-zines, but back t…

At this point, the Usenet servers which took massive amounts of bandwidth and disk space take tiny amounts of bandwidth and disk space (assuming you don't allow binary posts). Maybe it's time for Usenet to come back. - Truly federated - Topic focus instead of people-focus - Killfiles! - Proper threading - Standards-based servers and clients

Usenet over UUCP worked just fine, with UUCP serving up email too on the dial-up batch syncs.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#117
post #27

I would argue that what is described in this post is inherent in all social networks. The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different. It’s given me some of the most enjoyable interactions I’ve ever had online in the last ten years. You need to ha…

> The wonderful thing about the Fediverse is that depending on the node you connect to, or the people you choose to federate with (in the event that you have your own instance) that your experience will be vastly different. The same argument works with Twitter, and I genuinely believed so a decade ago (Twitter has been the only social network I still continuously use). I don't buy it at all after the decade-long expe…

Moderation alleviates those issues and the difference between Mastodon instances and Twitter is that the former can moderate content according to local community standards.

It's wrong to think of Mastodon as a 'social network', it's literally what the name suggests a federation of 'micro nations' with their own rules, more like subreddits than Twitter.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#118

I've lurked on Mastodon for a while and honestly your experience will be only as good as your instance you subscribed to. Fosstodon is a very focused instance with like minded people, and the local feed there is pretty top notch. My experience on more "general" focus instances was a lot worse and borderline spammy. Hoping they put effort in making your activity pub profile more portable as move accounts to new server…

I thought it does not matter which instance one choosen, since you see posts from all the other instances?

That's accurate. But there's also a local feed you can consume (all the people on your instance), which is kind of a workaround if you can't be bothered with finding a fair amount of people to follow for your own timeline to be interesting.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#119
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines. I think I even disabled them. If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.

Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.

A lot of people can put themselves onto the Fediverse with little more than a WordPress site and an ActivityPub plugin. You're right though, it goes beyond an average user's technical capability to do so at the moment.

Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.

Re: Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

#120
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines. I think I even disabled them. If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.

Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.

That isn't an option for average users on any social network.
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