Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Private and Public Mastodon

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 191 posts

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#21

Post by foobarbecue »

Groxx wrote: post #9
NikolaNovak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. --- 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 t…

I don't think that's true about FB convincing people to over-share. That may have been true years ago (Bob's relationship status has changed to single!) but these days I get warnings and stuff whenever I set anything to public, and all the defaults are friends only.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#22

Post by akuchling »

kfsnd wrote: post #16

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Eve…

So, among the first people you give access to the search are some known harassers? Sharp thinking, there.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#23

Post by foobarbecue »

Groxx wrote: post #17
invig wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how soci…

Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show the…

+1 for topics. Conceptually, pub sub. Maybe also give publisher to have the ability to choose an access policy for their topics (anybody can join, exclude some, only requests I accept).

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#24

Post by swyx »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

This 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…

yeah I did not know about this community policy and this was the first time I was significantly discouraged from using Mastodon.

I use search to do research on links all the time (https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary). If I read something good, usually plonking it into HN search or Twitter search yields a dozen more related points and rabbit holes I can go down. I can even engage with the author or find their thread of thinking or responses to a question I had that may already have been asked (or better, questions I didnt think to ask)

Without Mastodon search all these metaconversations about topics are lost.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#25

Post by [deleted] »

jrm4 wrote: post #8

This 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…

[deleted]

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#26

Post by dmix »

kfsnd wrote: post #16

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Eve…

I'm amazed sometimes at the datasets KFers uses for doxxing. If you care enough, you just need to pay attention to leaks and store them all and you can make a mini NSA X-Keyscore.

During the whole Cloudflare banning thing I remember coming across a dox that deanonymized someone via the Patreon hack dump [1], where a simple Twitter username match turned into a name + address (via credit card details stored by Patreon).

Anonymity and OPSEC requires some serious effort and knowledge.

[1] https://www.christianpost.com/news/patreon-hack-almost-14-gb...

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#27

Post by zmgsabst »

akuchling wrote: post #22
kfsnd wrote: post #16

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Eve…

So, among the first people you give access to the search are some known harassers? Sharp thinking, there.

I mean, look at the facts:

- permanently archiving posts they know people don’t want them to

- gave early access to known trolls

- is now publicly crowing about how there’s nothing you can do about it

- on a throwaway, because like most bullies they’re cowards

Personally, I’m left wondering if there needs to be an organized crime investigation into KF, for organized harassment campaigns which violate local stalking or other laws, and the role people like this account play in orchestrating it.

I think there’s be a certain irony to HN’s record of this comment being used to prosecute an accomplice in organized crime.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#28

Post by BryantD »

zmgsabst wrote: post #27
akuchling wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, among the first people you give access to the search are some known harassers? Sharp thinking, there.

I mean, look at the facts: - permanently archiving posts they know people don’t want them to - gave early access to known trolls - is now publicly crowing about how there’s nothing you can do about it - on a throwaway, because like most bullies they’re cowards Personally, I’m left wondering if there needs to be an organized crime investigation into KF, for organized harassment campaigns which violate local stalking o…

I mean, "kfsnd." KF. They're not exactly hiding who they are.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#29

Post by Ciantic »

tedunangst wrote: post #15

Wait until you hear about how followers only posts actually work. An analogy would be Microsoft can't figure out how to get email addressing to work in Outlook, so they send every email to every server, and then Exchange does some magic filtering and tells Outlook which of the emails in your inbox should be visible. Then somebody writes an alternative SMTP server that allows viewing of these hidden messages, and Micr…

Hmm, to my knowledge, followers only posts are ActivityPub feature, where you just shovel the message to inboxes of just followers. It is not sending it to all servers?

It's also possible to send messages to part of the followers as well, some instances like qoto.org support circles. You make circles from your followers and post to just them.

I wouldn't call these privacy features, but ability for sender to choose what it wants to say for certain group of followers.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#30

Post by NikolaNovak »

invig wrote: post #14
Groxx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. --- 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 t…

G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how soci…

Circles were trivially shareable though. It made it super easy to create... Well, circles of friends :). These are the 15 of us into computers, 12 of us into photography, 6 of us into dnd, whatever.

And then the best feature of all, Sharing of curated circles. A kind of competitive marketplace of topic related circles emerged so you could find these amazing circles of photographers or musicians etc. Best of all you ingested and then owned that (instance of) circle.

Post reply on HN