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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

infosec.exchange

111–120 of 386 posts

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#111
> Also, TIL you can put a meta-redirect inside of a data:text/html URI and it will indeed redirect. That will probably come in handy at some point.

> Also TIL, works just fine in data:text/html URIs, despite me having NotScript installed... Also remembering that one for later.

This seems pretty concerning to me… I would’ve expected the browser to prevent this somehow. Any security experts able to verify?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#112
post #51
post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way. However. > you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar. Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebo…

> Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?

Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.

> there are no private messages on Mastodon

It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#113
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, just as likely, mastodon users are elon critics and thus hurt his feelings, which is a bannable offense. Thus mastodon cross-posting and reposting is a proxy for bannable offenses, and therefore a bannable offense.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#114
post #92
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are on Twitter because of accounts like that, across the spectrum. It was the one place where you could find everyone, including politicians, organisations, journalists, experts, and random people with cool interests, and interact on a more or less equal basis. When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your politic…

The audience for far left propagandists is much smaller than they’ve been telling you. They’ve been amplifying each other for years but as that infrastructure is taken away from them, they’ll head back to the margins where they belong. Like the far right trolls they aren’t too different from.

Far-left? On twitter?

A site that famously stated that if they applied their rules equally, they'd have to ban almost all republicans, so they currently don't apply the rules to those?

Twitter is a site where a statement as simple as ACAB, which is legally protected speech [See https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit...] would get you a ban.

Twitter is as center-right as it gets. If you think twitter is far-left, you're living in an extreme filter bubble.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#115
post #68
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People have gotten creative and far more have spoken about it.

Loud minority. The average user's exposure to any of that is minimum, and they're not about to abandon their twitter clout for some unknown platform.

We're not talking about the average user, but about users trying to link to Mastodon.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#116
post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating it.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#117
post #18
post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

Agreed. And the fact they are blocking mastodon shows it must be impacting Twitter user numbers.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you but when they start fighting you, you know you've won.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: if the server you're on is banned, you won't be able to move to a different server.

I don't know if I understood you correctly, but I don't think this is true. I have not tried it but as long as you have your data you can always setup your own instance with it. Ideally you have a server backup but if not there is a script that can convert the ordinary Mastodon export (the one you can do as a regular user in the UI of any instance) into a form suitable to import into the database of your instance.

You can't migrate your followers that way, can you? Which is (arguably) for many people more important than the content of their posts.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#119
post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

Yes, and how smooth it's been going. Human groups are still not well trained to resist this (especially if the rumor of remaining employees being under work visas)

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#120
post #18
post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

Agreed. And the fact they are blocking mastodon shows it must be impacting Twitter user numbers.

Mastodon wouldn't have become so popular if it weren't for all these Elon actions. Elon is single-handedly leading a massive 'Streisand Marketing' campaign to sublime perfection.
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