Private and Public Mastodon
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Private and Public Mastodon
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Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#2[deleted]
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#3This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on?
The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever).
In both cases, you're crippling the software to add an illusory safeguard, which doesn't actually stop bad actors from having access to your posts and hence the ability to record and rebroadcast them.
You know who got the system right? Facebook. Private by default, but the user can decide exactly who can see each of their digital objects. It's easy to define groups of friends, allow sharing to friends-of-friends, one person, the whole world, whatever. The concept of friends (bilateral agreement to share information) makes way more sense than this "follow" thing.
I want my open-source, federated, Facebook already.
Edit: Although, I did just have a flashback to when Facebook announced Graph Search... which lasted about a week until searches that actually worked were deemed creepy and they backpedaled into the stone age. It's so frustrating how these technologies succeed or fail based on fashion rather than technical merit.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#4I don't understand how a license is supposed to prevent people from doing bad things with your content. Does the not-so-nice guy in Russia care that he's infringing on your license?
I think Mastodon makes the correct call (everything here is public, because it's impossible for it not to be and still have the service be what it is), and the community wants a square circle. Yay activists.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#5This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the so…
Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc.
They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them.
Is my experience weird?
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#6Clearly the solution involves web 3.0 Blockchain to provide irrefutable evidence of ownership of each post, with an off-chain oracle providing per-post licenses in machine-readable formats.
...or you know don't say stuff in public if you don't want it to be seen by others. This is - and always has been - Internet 101 stuff: assume that the internet never forgets, and don't say anything publicly if you'd rather not see it on the front page of a newspaper.
I guess each new generation needs to learn that there are bad people out there, and computers make finding a needle in a haystack trivial.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#7This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the so…
You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private.
You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it).
The only way around that would be centralised key management which defeats the whole point.
This is one of those problems where it's probably better to just use Facebook.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#8This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon.
The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is.
And yet, here we are.
I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except your posts don't go to any other person, you just read them yourself?"
I mean, you could use gmail to do this. It would technically work. But it's not what it's designed for, and much better ways to do this already exist.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#9This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the so…
Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, ac…
FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches.
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I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant.
Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.
Re: Private and Public Mastodon
#10Clearly the solution involves web 3.0 Blockchain to provide irrefutable evidence of ownership of each post, with an off-chain oracle providing per-post licenses in machine-readable formats. ...or you know don't say stuff in public if you don't want it to be seen by others. This is - and always has been - Internet 101 stuff: assume that the internet never forgets, and don't say anything publicly if you'd rather not se…
I think it's kind of worse than that. It's not an education problem. People are intentionally using this stuff to talk publicly about an issue. They just don't like the consequences of that.