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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

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Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#121
post #120
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The graphs are quite remarkable. Signups are nowhere near the peak but still 10x+ as high as before, and peaking everytime Musk does something new.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#122
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 i…

Musk's behavior in this whole thing seems far from competent.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#123
post #102
post #73

This link shortener works: https://spacekaren.sucks/ It seems to work by blocking connections to the Twitterbot User-Agent while allowing other connections.

They'll then just ban links they can't open. They should serve some sort of content instead.

It's unlikely that Twitter has the (human) resources at this point to implement comprehensive censorship of Mastodon. They're currently only warning about links to popular instances such as mastodon.social, but links to smaller instances such as the one I use are still fine. One advantage of decentralization.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#124
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…

It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared. If not now, then when?

Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#126
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tw…

Twitter is both. The records hop from 'left wing bias' to 'right wing bias' over and over. Plus, the internet skews left-progressive, which makes even centrist views seem right-conservative.

For every case of ACAB you can find a case of white hate or man hate with loads of retweets left alone or soft-endorsed, with the opposite being flagged for ToS violation. Both those statements are far more dominant among far-left.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#128
post #80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anachronisticm. I don't understand what decentralized intern…

Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.

Yet nobody really showed how to solve p2p in a way that supports: moderation, not downloading massive amount of data, account recovery, safe protocol upgrades. For example scuttlebutt exists and the initial connection involves "This “inital syncing” process can take up to an hour and use a fair amount of data.", you can't lose your keys, and unless something changed, moderation is still just wishful thinking "Presently, there is a "flag" feature, which is an extremely strong negative signal. If somebody is behaving poorly, feel free to flag them."

I acknowledge that Mastodon is not perfect, but raising that as "badly designed and engineered" seems weird, when it's the most decentralised, actually working solution we've got.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#129
post #82
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…

> fragments the community I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there bei…

I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#130
post #16

I wonder how long before Twitter patches this, one thought is that since they've fired so many people they may not be executing well enough to patch this quickly. Also, is there a way to do this where they won't be able to patch? Maybe alternate domain names for these known domain names that are being blocked, similar to what thePirateBay did.

How long before Twitter's knee-jerk, whack-a-mole patching causes some regression due to insufficient QA, accelerating Twitter's demise?

Something about authentication is already failing for me, it keeps thinking I've logged off randomly
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