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Private and Public Mastodon

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121–130 of 191 posts

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#121
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People also talk about "sending email", not "sending gmail". Brand separation naturally emerges over time.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#122
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah there are vanishingly few online queer spaces not on Discord for pretty much this reason. The ability for server admins to bring down the banhammer and actually moderate bad behavior rather than leaving it to central platform moderators that do nothing about all but the most blatant harassment.

Semi-public semi-searchable discourse is really quite nice when your aim is to not have the spotlight on you. Because there are unfortunately people that actively search for people to target and being on Discord makes that in practice impossible.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#123
post #79
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…

On the one hand it's bizarre from a technical standpoint to insist that Mastodon can't search or quote-post, when the software is federated and open source (so I can change my own instance to enable search and quote-posts), and when an API is available (so I can roll my own search index without even running my own instance). If you don't want your stuff archived and indexed by strangers you don't trust, then don't po…

[Edit: I misunderstood what the parent comment meant. My apologies. My original comment's text is left intact below, but it is inherently misdirected because of the misunderstanding. It still can be, of course, argued that a proposed solution is not realistically attainable - it's quite a tectonic shift in the collective psyche. But the parent is correct.]

I'd disagree. It's fundamentally a [techno]logical problem - a flawed design that only "works" because it's not happening at scale. The pen is mightier than a sword, and ink lasts longer than memory. Those millennia-old maxims still stand very true.

It guaranteed to get only "worse" as the system scales up and gains more "bad" actors that don't conform to the behavior. And it never will be solved socially (only mended) just like email spam was never socially solved, despite giant collective efforts like RBLs, community spam filters and IP reputations. Only shoved under the rug or plastered over, to be repeatedly revealed when a next drama happens.

I'd be happy to be wrong (if you know that I am - please give me an example), but I think that social and legal methods are never the solution, they don't ever fix anything (unless we're talking about humanity radically changing - then, maybe). They provide certain safeguards against honest people not accidentally screwing up, they have chilling effects, and they provide some recourse after the trust is broken - but they never fix the core issue.

Sometimes there is no way to change the design. Like - as a possibly silly example - we can't fix theft or murder, so those are social problems because we don't have technologies (such as achieving post-scarcity or immortality) to fix them. But the information security here is essentially math problem and it can be fixed.

Of course, whenever it will be is a matter of cost. Chances are, no one would ever do it, because it'll be too complicated (=costly) and the social approach would be good enough. Like how the world can't even switch to the IPv6. But, again, something like that doesn't really solve anything for real, merely lowers the frequency of occurrences to a tolerable level.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#124
post #80
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand it's bizarre from a technical standpoint to insist that Mastodon can't search or quote-post, when the software is federated and open source (so I can change my own instance to enable search and quote-posts), and when an API is available (so I can roll my own search index without even running my own instance). If you don't want your stuff archived and indexed by strangers you don't trust, then don't po…

Hmm? Masto comes with decent self-search now, you don't need to build it.

Yes, Elasticsearch is an option, but many (most?) instances haven't installed it, including mine.

And even when it is installed, it doesn't do what I want.

In addition to my own posts, I want to index the public posts of those I follow, and I want to organize by topics that aren't found in the text of the post, and I want to "follow" search terms similar to how the latest Masto allows following hashtags.

None of this is available with Elasticsearch even if it was enabled on my instance.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#125
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…

Genuinely, thank you for your service. A real archive doesn't delete a collection because of public pressure like "The Internet Archive" does.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#126
post #117

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.

Harassment and toxicity on Mastodon is a very real thing indeed.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#127
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want your stuff permanently archived then don't post it on public websites. It's sad that people don't give a shit about their privacy and overshare everything these days.

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!”

Posting on Twitter or Mastodon is the equivalent of shouting on a public street. If you don't want to face the consequences of what you say, don't say it publicly (or at least don't do it with your real name).

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#128
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand it's bizarre from a technical standpoint to insist that Mastodon can't search or quote-post, when the software is federated and open source (so I can change my own instance to enable search and quote-posts), and when an API is available (so I can roll my own search index without even running my own instance). If you don't want your stuff archived and indexed by strangers you don't trust, then don't po…

[Edit: I misunderstood what the parent comment meant. My apologies. My original comment's text is left intact below, but it is inherently misdirected because of the misunderstanding. It still can be, of course, argued that a proposed solution is not realistically attainable - it's quite a tectonic shift in the collective psyche. But the parent is correct.] I'd disagree. It's fundamentally a [techno]logical problem -…

> but I think that social and legal methods are never the solution

Just to be clear we're talking about indexing + searching what people post on public internet feeds?

IMO there are only social solutions to this problem. Any legal one would probably kill any federated service that can barely compete with centralized ones as it is... or (more likely) not be enforceable in the first place.

There's two social solutions:

1) don't post things you don't want recorded forever on public networks

OR

2) stop treating every mistake humans makes in their personal history as deal breaker for life

The first is a matter of personal responsibility, which is not a very popular concept in certain communities popular online. The other is more rational and practical but is still a very serious problem in western culture. Countless people have been 'cancelled' (or attempts have been made) based on 10yr old internet posts the posters themselves denounce.

If you want technical solutions use Signal, not a federated Twitter competitor.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#129
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current central…

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…

What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon?

Do you see it as beneficial to have a series of large groups of balkanized servers optionally interconnected rather than a general public network everyone contributes to. I hate the label of "public square", because Twitter should already be opt-in in terms of which content you see based on who you follow, even though it's one big network (ignoring the @jack era AI-feeds which fought this idea).

A key difference in Twitter vs Mastodon UX is that users would have to make different accounts for each "Balkan country" server they join. If one server blacklists or is blacklisted they won't be able to participate in others. And this has implications well beyond US polarized politics once it reaches global scale.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#130
post #129
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…

What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon? Do you see it as beneficial to have a series of large groups of balkanized servers optionally interconnected rather than a general public network everyone contributes to. I hate the label of "public square", because Twitter should already be opt-in in terms of which content you see based on who you follow, even though it's one big network (ignoring the @jack era AI…

I perceive this to be the biggest critique people have of Mastodon and I simply don't care about it at all; it just passes directly over my head. My guess is that it's a consequence of people mostly "belonging" to community servers, with defined (and evolving) community norms. Blog hosts didn't have those, and I don't think Mastodon/ActivityPub servers will for long either. It's going to get easier to run your own server, and there are going to be hosting providers that do that work for you; ultimately, "Mastodon instances" (or some pin-compatible equivalent) are going to be commodities, like Blogger blogs.

I'm on a server (infosec.exchange) that I like just fine for now, but I'd expect to be publishing on my own server within a month or so. At that point, what's the "bubble"? It seems like exactly the same situation as RSS, except I'm not depending on Google to keep Reader going.

I'm not bullish on "the fediverse" as a federation of communities with some global norms (like religiously posting alt tags on images) and lots of local norms (like never posting AI art, or things like that). But having actually used it now, I think the underlying technology is a lot smarter than I gave it credit for, and I think it stands a decent chance of being important.

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