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Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

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Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#271

Post by whoknowswhat11 »

shkkmo wrote: post #210
whoknowswhat11 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think folks really do not understand the difference between Verizon calls (regulated under common carrier rules) and Facebook (a social network). Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks. Even review platforms which are a bit more communication in nature block posting other sites reviews.

> Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks. I don't see how that makes it legal. Herey other examples of potential actions that would also clearly qualify as illegal anti-competive behavior: Microsoft could decide to block the download pages for Chrome and Firefoz from being shown in IE. Google could block results related to Bing in the…

Microsoft does steer you away from Chrome.

When you first search on bing for chrome downloads they will put up a big edge promo above the result. After you download they will pop up a box asking if you are sure you want to switch as edge is "Faster and more secure".

The problem for mastadon is it has a TON of content that is against facebook policies. So facebook can simply say - users are reporting this crap as spam - we've blocked it. Done.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#272

Post by bashinator »

ineedasername wrote: post #24
HideousKojima wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a whataboutism, it's pointing out that with one of the most popular proposed solutions to misinformation, censorship, the cure is worse than the disease.

I like the quote the from the Supreme court on the topic: "If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence" However, I think it's also important to recognize that in today's algorithmically driven content presentation, "more speech" is often comically ineffective because it is ne…

The degree to which social media allows both the amplification, and as you said, siloing of viewpoints to a mass audience, is IMO qualitatively different from the media available pre-Internet.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#273

Post by kixiQu »

rapnie wrote: post #171
tentacleuno wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to Bluesky? They made a bunch of promises and it sort of... disappeared after that.

They recently hired Jay Graber as project lead: https://twitter.com/arcalinea/status/1427314482154414080

They've also started setting up community working groups -- the whole thing's coordinated in a Discord server, which is very weird to me, but you can see what they're up to.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#274

Post by kixiQu »

chucky_z wrote: post #95
thinkloop wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have personally never heard of, or seen, any scams or malware related to mastadon - aren't you giving too much benefit of the doubt? My best guess is that their lists of competitors to keep an eye on got mixed up with other stuff. Or, of course, that they simply don't want to promote competitors on their platform, which would be normal for any non-monopoly.

There are a number of extremely poorly moderated Mastodon instances with a large amount of hateful and hurtful content. I’d imagine they’re automatically blocking a lot of these sites. Source: I used and helped maintain one of the “don’t federate with these instances” list.

I mean, sure, but the post content doesn't mention `examplebarelylegal.moe` or `exampleviolenceagainst.gay` or some such domain -- it's just the project's main instance list, which lists only instances intended to be compliant with a moderation standard.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#275

Post by nightpool »

pokey00 wrote: post #249

I'm just sort of discovering the fediverse "scene". I still have a lot of research to do, but decentralization is very appealing to me. I have some questions, and maybe the answers will help other people too: * What aspects are currently priority for improvements? * What are lower priority problems or features that could be started now and worked on at a slower pace? * Where is a good place for someone with programmi…

Hey, I'm a contributor to Mastodon and while I can only answer for myself, and not the project, here are my current thoughts:

* What aspects are currently priority for improvements?

I really want to see better authorization & authentication features across different instances. Right now, a really high priority feature for users is "Disable replies", but the way replies work, anyone can construct an activity that is set as "replying" to whatever posts they want to reply to, just by linking to those posts. Figuring out some way to "authorize" those replies (we have a few ideas, but need to work out a lot of the details) is important for us. Additionally, we've been thinking for a while about implementing more group-focused experiences, something kind of like old LiveJournal comms or the new Twitter Communities, and now that there are a few different projects looking into similar things, and we think it's an idea whose time has come. And of course, improving on-boarding and general user experience are always at the top of our priority list.

* What are lower priority problems or features that could be started now and worked on at a slower pace?

Interoperable clients. When the ActivityPub network was first envisioned, the idea was that servers would be completely generic, like email servers, and users could connect multiple different, opinionated "clients" to get different UI experiences of the same inbox. However, most of the current fediverse projects implement only the server-to-server federation experiences, and use more standard, domain-specific REST APIs for client communication. I think

* Where is a good place for someone with programming, networking, and/or engineering skills to start getting involved with development?

It depends on your inclination! My perspective is that you should always write code that you know you yourself are going to use, because that's the best way to ensure that you're going to stick to it long term.

As a more practical suggestion, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-bas... and https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-an... are still the two best tutorials out there on how to implement the basic ActivityPub protocol.

* What can someone with little-to-no programming/networking or related "technical" skills do to further the development and uptake of decentralized social media?

Use it! Invite your friends to use it. There are lots of non-programming technical skills that are always in demand for these types of projects—UX, design, product management, support, fundraising, comms—but besides those the biggest way you can support decentralized social media is simply by using it! The more people who are part of the community, the more vibrant, stable, and welcoming its going to be for new members.

* Are there any suggestions for good reading on this topic, both technical and non-technical? Websites, books, people/groups to follow?

There's a lot of good writing out there, but it's hard to recommend anything that I would regard as really authoritative and summing things up. I think we're kind of in a place where we need less people writing about possible futures, and more people building them. As a comparison, you can write all you want about possible startups people could make, but the thing that's really valuable is going to be going out there and trying them. Execution, as always, is 99% of the game.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#276

Post by nightpool »

silisili wrote: post #38
mikeytown2 wrote: post #22

https://joinmastodon.org/ Might as well see what FB is scared about

So, seems mastodon is fragmented or segmented into many independent networks. Do those interact with each other in any way? I'd hate to join one and miss truly interesting content on another...is it possible to distill multiple into one on the user end? Just asking, as I've never tried it before and the concept seems a little confusing.

They're not fragmented or segmented at all. It's like email—just because you have an account on gmail.com doesn't mean that you can only email people who use GMail, you can email anyone who supports the same protocol. In the same way, users with an account on any Mastodon server can follow any other users who support the same protocol, whatever server they happen to be on. (Modulo moderation—many servers with lax moderation policies may find themselves blocked by other server administrators. Again, just like email)

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#277

Post by rglullis »

LinuxBender wrote: post #250
rglullis wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Federation can be disabled and it will still work totally fine. I am just wondering why is it such a hard requirement for you to stop other people to follow someone else that is not part of your server? Costs?

Bleedover between communities. My circle of friends are isolationists.

I am sorry, but I have to ask: why does "isolationists" sound like code for "people who are doing and sharing all types of illegal content and can not leak any info?"

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#278

Post by dredmorbius »

inkblotuniverse wrote: post #265
ineedasername wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining terms here is important, so let's avoid the word bad for a moment because it can be applied in different ways. 1) You can have an empty dataset. 2) You can have an incomplete dataset. 3) you can have a dataset where the data is wrong All of these situations, in some sense, are "bad" What I'm saying is that, going into a situation, my preference would be #2 > #1 > #3. Because I always assume a dataset could b…

I'd argue Facebook's censorship leaves us with 2 and 3. They don't remove things bevause they're wrong; they remove them because they go against the current orthodoxy. Most things are wrong, so most things that go against the modern orthodoxy are wrong... but wrong things that go WITH the modern orthodoxy aren't removed. It's a scientist who removes outliers in the direction that refute his ideas, but not ones in the…

Let's note that this thread's been shifting back and forth between information which is publicised over media and data, with the discussion focusing on use in research.

These aren't entirely dissimilar, but they have both similarities and differences.

Data in research is used to confirm or deny models, that is, understandings of the world.

Data in operations is used to determine and shape actions (including possibly inaction), interacting with an environment.

Information in media ... shares some of this, but is more complex in that it both creates (or disproves) models, and has a very extensive behavioural component involving both individual and group psychology and sociology.

Media platform moderation plays several roles. In part, it's performed in the context that the platforms are performing their own selection and amplification, and that there's now experimental evidence that even in the absence of any induced bias, disinformation tends to spread especially in large and active social networks.

(See "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It". (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...), discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495912 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716)

The situation is made worse when there's both intrinsic tooling of the system to boost sensationalism (a/k/a "high engagement" content), and deliberate introduction of false or provocative information.

TL;DR: moderation has to compensate and overcome inherent biases for misinformation, and take into consideration both causal and resultant behaviours and effects. At the same time, moderation itself is subject to many of the same biases that the information network as a whole is (false and inflammatory reports tend to draw more reports and quicker actions), as well as spurious error rates (as I've described at length above).

All of which is to say that I don't find your own allegation of an intentional bias, offered without evidence or argument, credible.

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#279

Post by dredmorbius »

ineedasername wrote: post #255
ipaddr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad data vs no data at all? I would think no data would put you out of a job while bad data would require more hires to filter the data.

Not quite: if you have no data, you get new hires and news systems to collect and track it. You may be ignorant, but you know it, and can deal with it. Let's call is starting from 0. When you have bad data, you frequently don't know that you have bad data until things go very very wrong. You aren't starting from 0. 0 would be an improvement.

This seems like extending the "known knowns" concept to an additional dimension, involving truth.

In the known-knowns model, you have knowledge and metaknowledge (what you know, what you know you know):

     K   U   -- What you know
  K  KK  KU

  U  UK  UU
   \
    What you know you know
If we add truth to that, you end up with a four-dimensional array with dimensions of knowledge, knowledge of knowledge, truth-value, and knowledge-of-truth-value. Rather than four states, there are now 16:

         TT   TF   FT   FF   (Truth & belief of truth)
        ---- ---- ---- ----
  KK  | KKTT KKTF KKFT KKFF
  KU  | KUTT KUTF KKFT KKFF
  UK  | UKTT UKTF UKFT UKFF
  UU  | UUTT UUTF UUFT UUFF
False information is the FT and FF columns.

In both the TF and FT columns, belief of the truth-value of data is incorrect.

In both the KU and UU columns, there is a lack of knowledge (e.g., ignorance), either known or unknown.

(I'm still thinking through what the implications of this are. Mapping it out helps structure the situation.)

Re: Facebook Censored Me For Mentioning Open-Source Social Network Mastodon

#280

Post by ineedasername »

dredmorbius wrote: post #278
inkblotuniverse wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue Facebook's censorship leaves us with 2 and 3. They don't remove things bevause they're wrong; they remove them because they go against the current orthodoxy. Most things are wrong, so most things that go against the modern orthodoxy are wrong... but wrong things that go WITH the modern orthodoxy aren't removed. It's a scientist who removes outliers in the direction that refute his ideas, but not ones in the…

Let's note that this thread's been shifting back and forth between information which is publicised over media and data , with the discussion focusing on use in research . These aren't entirely dissimilar, but they have both similarities and differences. Data in research is used to confirm or deny models , that is, understandings of the world. Data in operations is used to determine and shape actions (including possib…

An excellent distinction. In the world of data with research & operations, I only very rarely deal with data that is intentionally biased. Counted on the fingers of my hand. Cherry picked is more common, but intentionally wrong to present things in a different light, that's rare.

Well, it's rare that I know of. The nature of things is that I might never know. But most people that don't work with data as a profession also don't know how to create convincingly fake data, or even cherry pick without leaving the holes obvious. Saying "Yeah, so I actually need all of the data" isn't too uncommon. Most of the time it's not even deliberate, people just don't understand that their definition of "relevant data" isn't applicable. Especially when I'm using it to diagnose a problem with their organization/department/etc.

Propaganda... Well, as you said there's some overlap in the principles. Though I still stand by more preference of #2 > #1 > #3. And #3 > 2&3 together.

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