Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol. Kneecapping competitors is what billionaires do. You dont win capitalism by following all the rules.
It's what all people do when they have the ability.
[deleted]
Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
281–290 of 386 posts
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individual fediverse nodes can implement whatever moderation policies they like, and are free to defederate from nodes whose policies they disagree with. So it's not really "uncensorable".
You're free to leave the node. That's not censorship, it's the node owner's own free speech rights.
Right. I like mastodon's approach to moderation and ownership, it makes sense. But it's wrong to think of it as some sort of 8chan anarchy.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way? Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist. Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower. Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order. Or when that tesla employee post…
> Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way?
I would describe it as what happens when existing personality traits are met by a bunch of sycophants. He’s been like this for as long as he’s been on the public stage, got worse as his wealth grew and social feedback for bad choices lessened, but now he has a bunch of alt-right types cheering on his every move so he’s not only getting positive feedback but it’s coordinated in one direction.
It’s like the difference between someone having alcohol problems and someone having alcohol problems when all of their friends are barflies and they just bought a bar.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people mostly take issue with the hypocrisy of claiming to be a paragon of free speech while censoring all kinds of things because Musk personally dislikes them.
Isn’t the simple answer, just stop using Twitter if you feel so strongly about this n
Sure, but that changes nothing about the hipocrisy or your right to speak up against it. It's fine to point out flaws in something you're not (or no longer) a part of.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners. Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter ba…
Has he really though? Apparently now he's banning journalists asking him for comments on stories. It seems to be getting worse and more arbitrary on his end. https://taylorlorenz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-banned-me-from...
Ariadna Jacobs says that Taylor Lorenz doxxed her, by asking her for her home address for “fact-checking” purposes, promising that it was not for publication, and then publishing it anyway - https://mobile.twitter.com/littlemissjacob/status/1603575149...
Jacobs has been calling on Musk to ban Lorenz for doxxing her. Maybe he (or his staff) have listened. I’m sure Lorenz knows about this, so when she claims she “doesn’t know” why she was suspended, and implies that it was for asking Musk questions or criticising him, I think people should take that claim with a grain of salt
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#286I'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 am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again. I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way th…
> Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media
And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#287Given how clumsy this "censorship" is, I highly doubt that this is a conscious effort of censorship, and is instead an automatic filter that was already in place to prevent malicious activity.
Mastadon's original account was suspended for breaking the new TOS for linking to content that was in violation (the jet tracker), which then prompted many other people to break the TOS.
I suspect there is some algorithm that twitter has had for many years that checks:
IF link is highly associated with TOS violation, THEN flag content as "potentially harmful".
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#288I suspect this whole "Twitter blocking Mastodon links for anticompetitive reasons" narrative is wrong to the point of being disingenuous.
People have been tweeting links ElonJet trackers on Mastodon instances (including the official @joinmastodon account!), getting both themselves and the target Mastodon instance domains flagged. This is edgelord behaviour.
Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information. Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information (https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/privac...). Those tracker accounts are using non-public information.
Jack Sweeney, the guy who runs ElonJet, is on record saying he'll stop tracking if paid money. This is extortion. That is why Elon is pursuing legal action against him.
The only criticism I believe one can make here is that Elon's personal involvement (albeit brought on by attacks on himself and his family) has meant Twitter's moderation team has made enforcement of this particular ToS violation a priority. I agree that the solution to Twitter's previous bias is not more bias, and I look forward to Elon & the Twitter team coming up with a better solution for this.
Unfortunately left-minded techies have uncritically jumped on this narrative of Elon cravenly blocking Mastodon links because 'he feels threatened by it'. Just because someone has been very successful does not mean it is legitimate to mistreat them.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.
I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social. Also, you can't back up your followers.
you dont need to pick a small server like that man. that's what he's saying.
All servers can communicate. You're not locked into servers. This isnt an MMO... infosec.exchange, the one I use, isnt an exclusive thing. It basically just shows my name as: unloco@infosec.exchange.
I can see and talk to mastodon.social. I can use hashtags and people from other servers will see it just like twitter.
The server you pick is just a name and a local server. If you pick a server that's dying, just move to the next one. You keep everything, it just changes from:
unloco@infosec.exhange to unloco@mastodon.social. You wont lose the friends, just the host name changes.
Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
#290I don't think Mastodon has any chance of overtaking Twitter. Here's how I would do it: Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon. Make it possible to easily transfer your data,…
But then you have a platform with all of the architectural problems Twitter but doesn't yet have a disliked leader on charge.
It is basically inevitable that eventually this same thing will happen again and we are back in the same place.
This is why Mastodon is enticing. It provides some architectural advantages that mitigate this problem at a fundamental level.