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Private and Public Mastodon

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Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#131

Post by dmix »

tptacek wrote: post #130
dmix wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Right, "bubble" is probably a loaded word to use here.

I personally would prefer going back to the "old" internet where we had niche forums. Mastodon provides that while letting forums connect with a wider set of communities.

I guess my only critique is that it's not often pitched this way. But it will become apparent to most people later on.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#132

Post by drdaeman »

dmix wrote: post #128
drdaeman wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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:…

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

Yes. I've only brought legal here, as there is some movement towards using legal frameworks for privacy ("right to be forgotten" etc.), as I totally misunderstood what kind of social solutions you propose.

> There's two social solutions: [...]

D'oh! Now I see. And I'm honestly sorry, as I completely misunderstood what you meant saying it's a "social problem".

I wholeheartedly agree now - either of those would be an ultimate solution. Not just a solution - I also do believe that this is how things should be.

It can be argued how realistic it is - I mean, it's quite a giant change to how society sees things. But I hope - at the grand timescale - it's well achievable. Many societies had drastically changed during the 20th century, so who knows where we'll end up...

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#133

Post by tptacek »

dmix wrote: post #131
tptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Right, "bubble" is probably a loaded word to use here. I personally would prefer going back to the "old" internet where we had niche forums. Mastodon provides that while letting forums connect with a wider set of communities. I guess my only critique is that it's not often pitched this way. But it will become apparent to most people later on.

The "connected communities" thing doesn't resonate with me. To me, the promise of Mastodon is just integrated publishing and RSS-style aggregation, plus a set of conventions that captures most of what people did with Twitter. I think it's a weird quirk of the evolution of Mastodon/ActivityPub that I'm on someone else's server right now; it's a little bit like being on someone's huge group blog. Group blogs make sense, but not at the scale Mastodon communities operate at.

I think that if Mastodon sustains the growth they've seen over the last few months, then a year from now, it's going to be less common for people to primarily publish on communities like journa.host and FediScience, and more common for them to publish from huge Blogger-style community services --- with very few weird norms, much more comparable to 2021-era Twitter than to Mastodon.social --- or their "own" instances, just like everyone does with blogs.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#134

Post by JumpCrisscross »

drusepth wrote: post #121
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Sure. But users are cognizant they're using Gmail. And when something goes wrong, they're halfway decent at attributing it to their or the recipient's provider. Mastodon servers are eclipsed by Mastodon per se. It's closer to AOL than e-mail.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#135

Post by dmix »

tptacek wrote: post #133
dmix wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, "bubble" is probably a loaded word to use here. I personally would prefer going back to the "old" internet where we had niche forums. Mastodon provides that while letting forums connect with a wider set of communities. I guess my only critique is that it's not often pitched this way. But it will become apparent to most people later on.

The "connected communities" thing doesn't resonate with me. To me, the promise of Mastodon is just integrated publishing and RSS-style aggregation, plus a set of conventions that captures most of what people did with Twitter. I think it's a weird quirk of the evolution of Mastodon/ActivityPub that I'm on someone else's server right now; it's a little bit like being on someone's huge group blog. Group blogs make sense…

> Group blogs make sense, but not at the scale Mastodon communities operate at.

That's interesting. Like I said, this bit will become more apparent to users as it grows, since in the current form that's all it really is (a few sets of big networks). I think you just sold me on the general idea of Mastodon.

Back to your earlier point, it might really come down to the UX issues around communicating on Mastodon itself, if it's going to pull this off. But that doesn't mean there won't be another service that can in the future. Otherwise that's the big thing that scared me away, since I'm a hyper-critical of UIs.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#136

Post by nigamanth »

If mastodon is fully private then how will they get money from their application? Social Media networks can only get money by ads or by selling the user's data, and ads could potentially track the user's data.

Which companies just say NO to getting more profits, every company wants to expand so I don't see why mastodon should promise private access to content when it's really not.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#137

Post by zirgs »

dmix wrote: post #26
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)…

Serious effort - as in - not reusing usernames and not posting embarassing stuff using your real name?

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#138

Post by Matumio »

nigamanth wrote: post #136

If mastodon is fully private then how will they get money from their application? Social Media networks can only get money by ads or by selling the user's data, and ads could potentially track the user's data. Which companies just say NO to getting more profits, every company wants to expand so I don't see why mastodon should promise private access to content when it's really not.

Not sure what you mean. People on mastodon tend to donate to their server admins. Also, this seems pretty okay for now: https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#140

Post by zirgs »

zmgsabst wrote: post #96
zirgs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not comparable to posting messages on public websites that can be read by anyone without an account. You don't know who will read them. If you want to talk privately - talk to people that you trust and use apps like Signal that delete messages after some time.

When you speak in public, anyone can hear you. What specifically do you feel is different?

If you say embarassing shit or shout obscenities in public then don't be surprised if someone pulls out their phone and starts recording it.

It's completely different if someone sneaks into your home and leaves microphones there.

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