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Our experience with the Fediverse, and why we left

infosec-handbook.eu

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

#121

Post by TheJoYo »

bluesign wrote: post #86
TheJoYo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am questioning the presupposition that one chooses to make any account at all. Using your analogy: I don't need to create an account to view a subreddit or reddit. I don't need to create an account to view federated instances. When I publish content on any social network I am always thinking about who it is intended for. I don't post the same things on Facebook that I would on Instagram, for example. Users have to…

Yeah but I am more thinking about not hosting your Instance angle. Mostly topic based federation is what I am against. (When bundled with identity)

You might be mixing up threads here, I didn't mention single user instances in my reply.

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

#122

Post by TheJoYo »

moksha256 wrote: post #93
TheJoYo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

> matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content. Can you elaborate on that a bit? In my experience, Matrix implementations tend to be Slack/IRC-style chat interfaces. Are you saying you find such interfaces to be good for long-form content, or are there other Matrix implementations that work out well for long-form content?

The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org

I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that reguard.

I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.

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

#123

Post by TheJoYo »

kitotik wrote: post #91
TheJoYo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

writefreely has a better UI for reading long form posts and is quite popular among the academic communities on the fediverse. personally I host a gitea server and link to my longer documentation on my federated account. that gives me a bit more freedom to edit the content and easier to reference. matrix servers are also great for hosting federated long form content.

Could you expound on using matrix for long form content? I host a synapse homeserver, and feel like I’m not using it to its full potential.

The recent Bluesky report is hosted on matrix.org I don't host content on a matrix service but I imagine it's similar to Slack in that regard.

I could be way off on matrix' utility here as I don't use it for my primary publication.

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

#124

Post by riffic »

TheJoYo wrote: post #114
lrvick wrote: 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".

Reach out to Eugen about that -- afaik he runs the @joinmastodon Twitter account directly or has someone helping him with it, but he's approachable about feedback.

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

#125

Post by kelnos »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #89
kelnos wrote: post #78

This just reminds me that the problem with discourse isn't centralization, control, lack of privacy or security, or any other thing. The problem is that people act in bad faith online, a lot. Give a bunch of people a platform to broadcast their thoughts, and a lot of people will be lazy about those thoughts. A lot of people will turn it into a competition and be more concerned about creating a following rather than s…

> The problem is that people act in bad faith online, a lot. I think the fundamental problem is that people's values and perspectives can be too different to be in the same room together without going at it. Most people couldn't handle being in the same room as an avowed neo-Nazi saying Nazi things, for example, without at least picking a verbal fight, even if the Nazi wasn't addressing them directly. If they're talk…

Sure, but I think your example of a neo-Nazi vs. non-Nazi meeting up in a room describes a minority, extreme case. Most people are not Nazis, and most of the bad discourse on the internet does not involve Nazis.

Two somewhat-reasonable people, even if they're complete strangers, could have a productive discussion (or at least resolve to agree to disagree, if it gets a little heated) if they were to meet in person to hash things out. But in an online conversation, especially on a limited medium like Twitter or Mastodon, they could both easily devolve into talking past each other, name-calling, and arguing in bad faith.

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

#126

Post by rglullis »

bluesign wrote: post #73
andrewzah wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I recommend self-hosting via pleroma if possible. Mastodon is a huge resource hog compared to pleroma, which can run nicely on a raspberry pi. But yes, the issue gets outsourced to the user, and you have to trust a random individual instead of an entity like twitter.

I don't know much about pleroma, I will definitely check. But when you self host your Mastodon, aren't you losing the benefit of local. What is the point of local if I will be alone there?

Local timelines are at best an attempt to help with content discovery and really too overrated. If the instance is too big, it feels like reading from the firehose and if the instance is too small it is better to just browse the directory and find the profiles that seem interesting to you.

To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.

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

#127

Post by kelnos »

sneak wrote: post #85
kelnos wrote: post #78

This just reminds me that the problem with discourse isn't centralization, control, lack of privacy or security, or any other thing. The problem is that people act in bad faith online, a lot. Give a bunch of people a platform to broadcast their thoughts, and a lot of people will be lazy about those thoughts. A lot of people will turn it into a competition and be more concerned about creating a following rather than s…

Decentralized, opt-in publishing requires decentralized, opt-in moderation. I have designed some solutions around this, but haven't found the right product/ecosystem in which to implement it yet. The basic idea is that you need multiple independent publishers of append-only "credit rating" feeds, publishing their own views/opinions of the reputations of different servers, users, or hashtags across the whole of the ne…

I don't think this is the point. You are trying to solve a social problem via technical means, and that generally does not work.

Spam/scam email isn't a great parallel: that sort of thing is a more-or-less anonymous party intruding into someone else's life in order to try to sell them something or steal something from them. Blocking that kind of communication is the correct solution, and that's what success looks like.

Getting people to have nuanced, respectful conversations online is a completely different thing. If you get to the point where your best option is to block the other person, or moderate/delete their posts, that's a failure, not a success.

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

#128

Post by cbozeman »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #102
cbozeman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to have a thick skin Actually we need the rest of social media to have this, and then we don't need these alternative platforms. There are simply too many people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives - without having someone challenge their ideas and values and making them defend said ideas and values, and they simply do. not. know. how to cope with it.

Why is grinning-and-bearing harrassment by people who want you dead virtuous? “people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives” always feels like a dogwhistle to me, because the people saying this tend to have far more privileged backgrounds than the people being harassed.

"It offends people, but good. They should be offended." - Paul Mooney, from Know Your History: Jesus Is Black; So Was Cleopatra

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

#129

Post by rglullis »

bluesign wrote: post #92
TheJoYo wrote: 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.

It's a cultural issue, not a technical one. When Mastodon started to take off, one of differentiating factors was about the sort of people they wanted to attract. It's very easy to market to a tribe and appeal to their identity, so it started to stick.

One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.

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

#130

Post by cbozeman »

throwaway45349 wrote: post #84
cbozeman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to have a thick skin Actually we need the rest of social media to have this, and then we don't need these alternative platforms. There are simply too many people who have grown up without having any meaningful opposition in their lives - without having someone challenge their ideas and values and making them defend said ideas and values, and they simply do. not. know. how to cope with it.

Is this purely a US phenomenon? I don't see this much at all from people who live here t(the UK), but we're really starting to feel the effects of social media censorship hit hard, and I know a lot of people are really angry about Big Tech pushing their own moralistic world view on our country.

America has a long tradition of being vocal and offensive in its communications. At the very founding of our nation, you could find political cartoons of George Washington on a donkey, with the caption, "An ass being led to Washington."

In general Americans seem to be more thick-skinned than others. Or at least we used to be.

EDIT: Here you go buddy... this is almost a word-for-word of the argument that was used in the actual Supreme Court case, and should illustrate why we're at such a dangerous time in history - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeTuNES82O0

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