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

Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

blog.joinmastodon.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#91

Post by stjohnswarts »

Kaze404 wrote: post #33
nsizx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, actually. Once you restrict what others can say there's no freedom of speech anymore. It's like China saying you can't talk about the regime - I'm sure they consider that "basic human decency" as well.

Freedom of speech isn't freedom to be a bigot. You can say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean the rest of the world has to listen.

Exactly it's why I send money to ACLU and EFF. I'll spend money to help defend your right to say what you want, but I'll be damned if I have to listen to your BS on my own time. I'm just there to stop the government from outlawing freedom of speech.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#92

Post by FeepingCreature »

JadeNB wrote: post #88
dane-pgp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that unless you're really careful to specify what sort of "consequences" you're talking about, it's hard to separate your beliefs from his.

> I'm saying that unless you're really careful to specify what sort of "consequences" you're talking about, it's hard to separate your beliefs from his. Since you refer to them as "my beliefs", I assume that yours are different. With no sarcasm, what are your beliefs? If you argue against the claim that freedom of speech does not entail freedom from consequences, is your position that freedom of speech should come wi…

Different poster, but I believe that freedom of speech not just does, but must come with freedom from consequences to be at all meaningful. Of course, there is nowhere that actually has that level of freedom of speech, but seen as a spectrum it makes sense.

Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences:

- of government reprisals

- of corporate reprisals

- of criminal reprisals

- of employment risks

- of relationship risks.

Pick and choose which matter to you. To me, freedom of speech applies to all, but other rights such as freedom of association sometimes override it. (And sometimes not.)

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#93

Post by FeepingCreature »

cortesoft wrote: post #75
novok wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off your spam filter if you want to, you can't turn off the defederation disconnect. One is opt-in curation, the other is not. I hope we get smart opt-in curation on a user by user basis soon, and you could subscribe to certain curators as you want.

How is spam filtering an opt-in curation? I never enabled it on my gmail account, it was just on. Can Mastodon servers not choose to federate with other servers outside the central Mastodon service?

I wish I could turn my Yahoo spam filter off.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#94

Post by FeepingCreature »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #50
FeepingCreature wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct - as a person who cares deeply about free speech, I certainly place less value on basic decency. To my mind, the correct response to violations of decency is giving people strong tools to screen and filter out content they don't like. The wrong response is centralized enforcement. Inasmuch as centralized enforcement would be better at enforcing "basic decency", I will confirm that I place its priority…

Then you'll like the Fediverse, then. (Though the tools aren't particularly good, yet… perhaps you could help?)

Not sure - I think federation and defederation is the wrong approach. I think a network should decouple routing and moderation, and make both independently subscribable.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#95

Post by wizzwizz4 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #94
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you'll like the Fediverse, then. (Though the tools aren't particularly good, yet… perhaps you could help?)

Not sure - I think federation and defederation is the wrong approach. I think a network should decouple routing and moderation, and make both independently subscribable.

It does, for the most part! Defederation is the last resort, when you've got an instance that nobody wants to deal with (e.g. the people there are tracking down and harassing your users, and you want them to “win” and therefore stop). User-level moderation tools are much more common, though they're currently a bit lacking.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#96

Post by southerntofu »

user-the-name wrote: post #52
southerntofu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> determine whether information they come across online is trustworthy or not Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? Is it a central authority, or a WoT? The former is a very dangerous tool of social control, the latter does not usually address concerns of misinformation, as the WoT forms information bubbles with their confirmation biases. > the project will allow users to vote on content trustworthiness.…

You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate, instead of actually reading and comprehending what is being said. You need to work on that, first of all.

> You are knee-jerk reacting to keywords you have been taught to hate

Quite the contrary, my french culture and education has taught me to have great respect for authority and for startup nation bullshit newspeak. But since then, i have developed some form of critical thinking.

> You need to work on that, first of all.

I tried. In their publications section, out of 7 items, there are: 2 that don't have a link; 1 about text/image similarity analysis; 1 about sentiment analysis; 1 about situated knowledge and the "user-researcher"; 1 that's behind a paywall (the one describing the EUNOMIA project); 1 that's not even a scientific paper but an "information hygiene" guide

In their "Deliverables" section we find more information. I find it strange that documents are labeled "Dissemination Level: Public", or "Type of deliverable PUBLIC" which suggests acquaintance with the surveillance/military industrial complex, as originally exposed in the critique linked in the article i was mentioning: https://hub.libranet.de/wiki/paulfree14/The(20)critical(20)E...

From these documents, a few quotes which may raise eyebrows:

- the [blockchain] framework offers embedded mechanisms for preserving privacy with the use of digital signatures and cryptographic hashes

- each information element that it is stored in the P2P distributed file storage a specific token will be generated by the Storage Serve

- The AAA Server is responsible for the authentication, authorization and accounting. Any entity that wishes to connect to the EUNOMIA infrastructure needs to communicate with this server.

- The Discovery Server provides means to allow the discovery of other services and corresponding metadata, including their public keys

- deleted posts will be removed from associated cascades, P2P databases and the EUNOMIA Blockchain ledger

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#97

Post by southerntofu »

q3k wrote: post #44
southerntofu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> determine whether information they come across online is trustworthy or not Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? Is it a central authority, or a WoT? The former is a very dangerous tool of social control, the latter does not usually address concerns of misinformation, as the WoT forms information bubbles with their confirmation biases. > the project will allow users to vote on content trustworthiness.…

> Who gets to determine what is trustworthy or not? > How are these votes stored? From what I can tell, this is literally a research project attempting to answer these questions. Look at the results tab, then under 'Demonstrators, pilots, prototypes' to see what they have come up with so far.

Yes, i understand that's a research project. I'm just skeptical of a publicly-funded software research project with millions of euros of funding (most researchers i know don't have access budgets like that) and with seemingly some ties to the surveillance/military apparatus.

Also i did some digging, and despite a paywall and some articles without links at all, their publications raise more questions than they answer about the actual trust/governance model and privacy implications (see my other comments quoting some bits).

Moreover, the sentiment/subjectivity analysis via ML leaves me dubious. I have a hard time believing AI can understand human discourse and/or help solve human problems, see also James Mickens USENIX talk "Why do keynote speakers keep suggesting we can improve security?"

Finally, let me put on my paranoid hat: if i were to build a large-scale surveillance network to expose the social graph and flow of information (think XKEYSCORE) for decentralized social media, it would look a lot like EUNOMIA! On the contrary, if i were to build a reputation protocole for decentralized social media, it would be much simpler than the EUNOMIA project, and would probably be based on some kind of Web of Trust / Fog of Trust (since it's aimed at classifying/auditing public data, where the social graph is already, at least partially, exposed).

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#98

Post by southerntofu »

swiley wrote: post #42
southerntofu wrote: post #18

Related discussion: there was recently some move within the community to try and topple the current maintainer. That calls was based on technical/UX disagreements (regarding the local timeline) and on the maintainer allegedly having connection to a surveillance project called Eunomia: https://seedy.xyz/posts/0005-open-letter/ I am not a member of the Mastodon community and i have no clue to the veracity of these stat…

>currently I've been on and off Mastodon since 2016 and there is always tumblr-style drama about how Eugen is a dictator for not doing with everyone's instance.

Yeah that's what i assumed also, which is why i didn't suggest that the maintainer is actually malevolent in my parent comment.

Also, to be fair, if the European Commission is funding a large-scale surveillance program for decentralized social media, i'm glad some of that money is actually going to free-software maintainers to improve the ecosystem, and not all of it into the wrong pockets (as is usually the case).

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#99

Post by shadowgovt »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #92
JadeNB wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm saying that unless you're really careful to specify what sort of "consequences" you're talking about, it's hard to separate your beliefs from his. Since you refer to them as "my beliefs", I assume that yours are different. With no sarcasm, what are your beliefs? If you argue against the claim that freedom of speech does not entail freedom from consequences, is your position that freedom of speech should come wi…

Different poster, but I believe that freedom of speech not just does, but must come with freedom from consequences to be at all meaningful. Of course, there is nowhere that actually has that level of freedom of speech, but seen as a spectrum it makes sense. Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences: - of government reprisals - of corporate reprisals - of criminal reprisals - of employment risks - of relationship…

The only speech that has no impact on that entire spectrum of human interaction is things never said.

I don't think people generally want a lack of response to their speech (if they did, they're saying nothing... Just making babbling noises best ignored). People want freedom from negative consequences. In short, people want to eat their cake and have their cake.

This is why every country ends up with laws that carve out some spectrum of consequences as inappropriate, but those laws are not all-encompassing... It is functionally impossible to eliminate all the consequences you've listed from the table while still giving listeners freedom to be their own independent agents and modify their behavior in reaction to speech. In particular, the last category you listed is a huge infringement on personal liberty of generally applied... I assume you don't expect a person in a committed relationship, hearing their partner say "I hate everything about my partner and I wish we'd never met," to not modify or end the relationship? Any legal infringement on their right to do so is an obvious curtailment of their rights.

In short, sometimes freedom of speech and freedom of association collide. One is a freedom of the speaker, the other freedom of the listener.

Re: Mastodon now a non-profit organisation

#100

Post by JadeNB »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #92
JadeNB wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm saying that unless you're really careful to specify what sort of "consequences" you're talking about, it's hard to separate your beliefs from his. Since you refer to them as "my beliefs", I assume that yours are different. With no sarcasm, what are your beliefs? If you argue against the claim that freedom of speech does not entail freedom from consequences, is your position that freedom of speech should come wi…

Different poster, but I believe that freedom of speech not just does, but must come with freedom from consequences to be at all meaningful. Of course, there is nowhere that actually has that level of freedom of speech, but seen as a spectrum it makes sense. Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences: - of government reprisals - of corporate reprisals - of criminal reprisals - of employment risks - of relationship…

> Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences: … of relationship risks.

Wait, seriously? If I choose whether to have a relationship with someone based on the things they say, then you regard that as an infringement on their freedom of speech? You do later say:

> … other rights such as freedom of association sometimes override it. (And sometimes not.)

… but I don't really understand this as a statement of position. It seems to be saying that freedom of speech should not have consequences, except when it does, except when it doesn't, and I wind up not really sure what position is being espoused.

Post reply on HN