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Private and Public Mastodon

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81–90 of 191 posts

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#81

Post by kelseyfrog »

Yugomorph wrote: post #48
zmgsabst wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No — I’m tired of saying all of society needs to walk on eggshells due to anti-social people like OP. If you go around a bar with a tape recorder and directional microphone capturing conversations from unsuspecting people and then use those private moments to launch protracted harassment campaigns, you’re an asshole. No matter how much you say “they didn’t have an expectation of privacy!”

When you say things on the internet, you say them publicly, and people are allowed to remember your words.

It the same as dropping wireless mics and facial recognition tech on public sidewalks. It might be legal but social norms make it weird. The people that do it will find out their lives get quite a bit harder when they're found out.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#82

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #75

I am saddened but not surprised at the lack of nuance in these comments. I also think the author is missing some things. We take it for granted now that the public-ness of online content is very nearly binary: it's either public, and therefore hyper-public, globally accessible, indexed, searchable, publicly archived forever, or it is private. But this binary is artificial. Why can't we have things in-between? Perhaps…

(I'm not saying it's the best compromise, I just think it's a legitimate one. On the technical side of things I really think the protocol needs to make it clearer what the author of a post wants the visibility to be.)

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#83

Post by tptacek »

jancsika wrote: post #77
tptacek wrote: post #45

It's also unethical to make promises to users, like privacy for posts published to a semipublic social network, that software can't possibly keep. It's going to be interesting watching the norms of the fediverse collide with the expectations of ordinary software users. Mastodon and ActivityPub have a lot of promise as an alternative to centralized social networks, and there are good reasons to use them even if you do…

> there are good reasons to use them What is one of them?

The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader.

It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason.

Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#84

Post by OctopusLupid »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #75

I am saddened but not surprised at the lack of nuance in these comments. I also think the author is missing some things. We take it for granted now that the public-ness of online content is very nearly binary: it's either public, and therefore hyper-public, globally accessible, indexed, searchable, publicly archived forever, or it is private. But this binary is artificial. Why can't we have things in-between? Perhaps…

I come from the side of "search should exist", but I enjoyed this nuanced read. Thank you.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#85

Post by [deleted] »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #30
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…

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 i…

[deleted]

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#86

Post by mrtesthah »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #70
invig wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, I don't think this is right. The creator of a group or "shared to group Y" chat/posts can generate a shared key for use within that limited friend group. Their individual posts would be encrypted validated by their own private key, but all posts among the group would also be encrypted against the group chat. Struggle here would be that anyone who gets the shared key would have access to view and potentially…

Signal's encrypted group chat management was recently made more robust and may be instructive:

https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#87

Post by _as31 »

LamaOfRuin wrote: post #76
jefftk wrote: post #33

> I can imagine finer-grained exclusions, such as allowing full-text indexing but only for accounts on the same instance, or allowing use for search but no other applications. (No ML model building!) I think it's unlikely that you can prevent ML model building with a carefully designed license. The most common legal position (though not something that has been tested in court yet) is that training models is sufficien…

None of those tools have actually been legally tested, and there is a reason much of it has been using data sets laundered through academics.The companies behind them know this is not at all a given, and academics make for more sympathetic defendants than billionaires. Transformative use, as one part of a fair use consideration, is a defense against copyright infringement. The proposal is to first require agreement t…

There are jurisdictions (the EU, the UK, Singapore, Japan) with copyright exceptions specifically for text and data mining for AI purposes.

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#88

Post by gkmcd »

LightHugger wrote: post #56
shadowgovt wrote: post #51

Does Mastodon have something to the effect of robots.txt (or is robots.txt already robust enough to express an answer to the question "This site administrator is willing to have these toots indexed for search?") At the end of the day, it's a federation protocol. The protocol's creator can have an opinion on whether things should be indexed for search, but it's up to users of the protocol, not the protocol's creator,…

We're already seeing massive searchability problems from the mass migration of communities to discord servers, it's not a good thing and doesn't make anyone safer. The choice of bogeymen makes me suspect the motivation is insincere, though.

It's not insincere. Many of the early adopters were social (queer, trans, furry) or political minorities (socialists, anarchists). They adopted Mastodon because they were sick of being targeted on Twitter and other centralized platforms. I can understand very much why they are protective of their space.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#89

Post by miracle2k »

timbray wrote: post #69

Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and yo…

I don't really get the proposal.

Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon?

If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted?

Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#90

Post by spanktheuser »

kfnvs wrote: post #49
zmgsabst wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrug. They’re on a throwaway because they’re too cowardly to admit who they are and face people like myself who want to hold them accountable for their bullying. I think they’re exactly hiding who they are.

Seems prudent when you have people calling for you to be prosecuted as a criminal accomplice. ;)

Now now. Be fair. Some of us would be quite content with your ongoing persecution.
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