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Private and Public Mastodon

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Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Ciantic wrote: post #44
maxerickson wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though it's pushed to a server, doesn't mean it goes to everyone in that server. Right, the issue being raised is that there's nothing preventing it from going to everyone on the server except the server being nice about it.

How is this different from let's say email? It's in the specs what servers should do if it receives a message. If someone sends a message addressed to just these people the server then delivers it to just these people? Of course if you send something from foo@gmail.com to bar@yahoo.com the server at yahoo.com decides who gets it, hopefully just bar. In fact email analogy in my mind is most apt and easiest to explain,…

> How is this different from let's say email?

E-mail has decent brand separation between the protocol and providers. People don’t talk about joining .social, they talk about Mastodon.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#112

Post by boyter »

OctopusLupid wrote: post #109
boyter wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can. Someone could get your post, then boost it, which distributes it to whoever follows them and so on. Anyone thinking their post is only seen by their followers when they have federation turned on is grossly misinformed.

I was under the impression that boosting follower only posts does not work (via the API too, actually, it returns a HTTP error code if you try to do so), but then again the server code may be modified, or people can just screenshot. I think this is simply a social problem — when sending a post to your followers, you have to trust that they do not share your post. The same applies in private messaging. You have to tru…

I agree with you when it comes to private messages, and anyone sharing those is a jerk.

I don't agree in this case where the system is designed to spread those posts. Fair enough if you don't want that to happen, in which case don't use a federated system where that is a design goal.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#113

Post by drusepth »

OctopusLupid wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes: there are reasons ordinary users might prefer Mastodon to Twitter; as I said: * You can write full posts in Mastodon * You can own your own data, run your own service, or select from a variety of hosted options * The ecosystem encourages good third-party clients and tooling The tooling isn't there, but then, I don't think anybody expected the events of the last few months, so I'm inclined to give it a quarter or…

To add on to this, remember that there is a Fediverse plugin for Wordpress as well.

And lots of other popular sites, like Tumblr, are adding Fediverse support as well.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#114

Post by TylerE »

fattybob wrote: post #110

Looking at the negative opinions on mastodon , my take is that it’s only bad for writers (some may say spammers) who seem to want to subject the world to their writing (perhaps spam) and not leave a choice to the user. I prefer to keep things somewhat as they are, if I want to find some spam, I can go looking for it, if I want to find a blogger, same, it’s just a matter of looking at the local and global fields and m…

It’s negative for me because I don’t find much very interesting going on there. Very few of the Twitter posters I follow (mostly really anoraky military history stuff) have moved over, and the few that have aren’t posting nearly as much.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#115

Post by OctopusLupid »

boyter wrote: post #100

Author of Mastinator here which was linked in the article. Also its back online, so if you want to start testing your implementation it should work for you. I will be adding more functionality as I go. While search is a problem, I think the bigger problem with the fediverse is expectations. People expect that their "follower" only posts are only shown to their followers. However you can get them anyway through so man…

This quote from Eugen is about CWs, but I think it applies here too:

“… It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.” - https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#116

Post by tonypace »

pavon wrote: post #66
foobarbecue wrote: post #3

This 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…

> The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). That one addresses a real threat-model - someone who was your friend and whom you trusted at the time you sent the post, but has since turned against you. That is quite common among teens, which is the main demographic these social networks are targeting. Rather than them having a permanent record of all your online interac…

It's not that rare, but releasing a ton of this kind of screenshot makes you look very untrustworthy.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#117

Post by sneak »

I never got so many death threats from strangers as I did when I wrote a spider for Mastodon.

Then everyone defederated my single user instance, as if that would stop an unauthenticated web crawler.

The idea that you could publish something on the web and expect it to stay private is insane.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#118

Post by sneak »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #31

> People should be able to converse without their every word landing on a permanent global un-erasable indexed public record. Call me crazy. Sure, and they should use Signal instead of publishing their conversations and then getting mad when they turn out to be publicly available.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect Signal groupchats with more than n participants to stay private, where n is more than 5 and less than 20.

Android malware is a thing and Signal Desktop does not encrypt anything at rest on disk.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#119

Post by Spivak »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #31

> People should be able to converse without their every word landing on a permanent global un-erasable indexed public record. Call me crazy. Sure, and they should use Signal instead of publishing their conversations and then getting mad when they turn out to be publicly available.

I do think I should be able to post something publicly and not have it indexed by search engines. If someone screencaps it or copy/pastes it fine but the original should live on the dark web.

This is one of those things that tech needs think is pointless when in reality opting out of search indexing drops your visibility to nothing which is good for making sure your posts don’t “break containment.”

Unless you’re a public figure or social media influencer having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#120

Post by neuronexmachina »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #5
foobarbecue wrote: post #3

This 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…

What Fediverse projects have something analogous to G+ Circles? Based on some quick searching, the only one I could find is Bonfire's "Boundaries": https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/introducing_boundaries/

> Within bonfire, you now have the possibility to define circles and boundaries: a way to privately group some of your contacts and then grant them permissions to interact with you and each piece of content you share at the most granular level.

>Boundaries go beyond the typical permissions on social media (i.e. who can see your content) and include a long list of verbs in order to represent all kinds of meaningful interactions and collaboration that should be possible on a real social network.

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