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Private and Public Mastodon

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141–150 of 191 posts

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#141
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 Drupal

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#142
post #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.

Can attest to that. The worst online interactions I have had are on it.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#143
> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. [Snip] The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets.

The author implies GG/KF/4chan/whatever are incapable of writing their own scraping tools specifically for the purposes of harassment.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#144
post #119

> 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 pu…

> having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing

Well... Then be careful with what you post tied to your real identity. I have separate accounts for separate use cases. My main on Reddit, for example, can (very) easily be doxxed so I hardly post anything controversial on that account.

Through all the recent data leaks it's getting even easier to dox people based on screen names too. I'm even considering getting a PO box next time I move house, just to decrease the chances of my home address ending up in a data dump.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#145
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…

Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.

Just look at the 'Twitter Files'. It's not great that Elon can access anyone's private messages. It's a great tool to blackmail people.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of security cameras record what's happening on public sidewalks. Lots of cars have dashcams in them.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#149
post #119

> 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 pu…

Do you mean deep web?

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#150
post #122
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I’m a bit confused. Isn’t there a lot of queer-ness on Twitter, Reddit etc?
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