Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Private and Public Mastodon

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 191 posts

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#171

Post by sebzim4500 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #97
kfnvs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course — that’s the difference between us: I act in a way I can publicly own. You act in a way you know that you have to hide — because you’re aware that’s it’s anti-social.

I have no dog in this fight (probably will never use mastodon or this search engine) but I do find it ironic that this guy is being insulted for using a throwaway by people advocating for privacy on mastodon.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#172

Post by OctopusLupid »

zmgsabst wrote: post #166
zirgs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes — and we’re asking about the case of a quiet conversation in a bar, where someone surreptitiously records using specialize equipment. I think it’s very telling you made a strawman rather than respond to that point.

I think both of you are visualising "posting on the Fediverse" differently. One visualises it as a conversation between two people that may be overheard, while the other visualises it as broadcasting.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#173

Post by boring_twenties »

tedunangst wrote: post #15

Wait until you hear about how followers only posts actually work. An analogy would be Microsoft can't figure out how to get email addressing to work in Outlook, so they send every email to every server, and then Exchange does some magic filtering and tells Outlook which of the emails in your inbox should be visible. Then somebody writes an alternative SMTP server that allows viewing of these hidden messages, and Micr…

AFAIK, it doesn't send it to every server -- it sends it to every server with at least one recipient. Exactly how email works. Anyone can in fact write an alternative SMTP server that delivers every mail to every account.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#174

Post by Zak »

I think people who don't want search are underestimating how prevalent it already is.

Mastodon itself officially supports Elasticsearch, but it isn't turned on by default and the UI limits what can be searched. I'm not sure if that's for social reasons or just to make installing a server easier, but there's no "never federate to servers with ES enabled" setting. Friendica has full-text search as well, and I imagine there are others.

Machine-readable copyright licenses as the author suggests could be very useful for situations where legitimate for-profit companies start federating their services. Perhaps I don't want Flickr[0] to show advertisements next to my photos that I share from a self-hosted Mastodon server, for example. I could apply a license that forbids that and have a good chance of enforcing it in court. They're not a good fit for dealing with bad actors though. If somebody sets up fedisearch.ru fed by legitimate-looking public servers, they're probably beyond the reach of the courts I have access to.

[0] The CEO of Flickr has publicly pondered adding ActivityPub support.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#175

Post by _cenw »

nine_k wrote: post #169
_cenw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. You misunderstand. It's layered defense / minimizing exposure. Nobody is suggesting it can't be done, but it not going to be normalized in the current Fediverse, and most potential attackers do not care enough to build throw own search engine. The main reason is quite…

Sorry, I do understand. I think that the particular fortress of highly private communication on a network designed for publishing and dissemination cannot be defended efficiently. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but my last 25 years of experience with social networks of all sorts, from early IRC and web chats to what we have today tells me to keep my current security stance. Anything on a social network has a very hi…

Usually the kinds of people who can direct harassment at you go for the lowest hanging fruit, so any amount of obfuscation or barrier will deter most of them, unless you're a very high profile target (i.e. you're Keffals).

The entire model doesn't even rely on being entirely undiscoverable - the point is that you don't need to step back from public life because a bunch of weirdos like stalking you, it can be as easy as having a publicly visible profile with a lock on it. This prevents following, but unlike Twitter you're not entirely excluded from making public posts that anyone can interact with. You can just do a baseline of filtering when accepting followers and deciding which posts to make public or private. You'd be surprised how many of these stalkers and harassers can't make a profile that passes a basic "vibe check" - they either try too hard at putting together a profile or they don't bother at all.

Fedisearch and related projects are frowned upon because they would make it much more trivial to find people who are not yet targets based on a soundbite and to go through someone's "permanent record" (most implementations do not backfill posts made before the user was initially followed from an account on the same instance).

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#176

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

What would be the ramifications of one of those entities releasing their model as a torrent at the first sign of legal trouble?

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#177

Post by rsynnott »

dmix wrote: post #129
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…

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…

> What about the inherent bubble-y nature of Mastodon?

So, I'd kind of question whether this is a real thing in any important way. In the early days of the Twitter exodus it _did_ look like it was going that way a bit, but in practice most instances quickly sorted out moderation to a reasonable degree. There certainly are largely defederated instances, but they're probably not of much interest to most users.

I would have some concerns about what happens if Twitter goes down for a protracted period and there's a much larger less self-selecting exodus, but for the moment at least fediverse balkanisation feels more like a theoretical problem than a real one which is likely to impact significant numbers of users.

One other potential looming challenge, I suppose, is Tumblr. If that does add ActivityPub support, it'll be, in effect, a very big, extremely poorly moderated, yet culturally very important instance, and how instances treat it could provoke a split.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#178

Post by kelseyfrog »

zirgs wrote: post #146
kelseyfrog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, but that's not really relevant.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#179

Post by jrm4 »

swyx wrote: post #24
jrm4 wrote: post #8

This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon. The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is. And yet, here we are. I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except…

yeah I did not know about this community policy and this was the first time I was significantly discouraged from using Mastodon. I use search to do research on links all the time ( https://www.swyx.io/twitter-metacommentary ). If I read something good, usually plonking it into HN search or Twitter search yields a dozen more related points and rabbit holes I can go down. I can even engage with the author or find their…

Right, but I think the thing is the "protocol" is (or can be) stronger than the policy.

Which is why over there I'm presently unpopular with lots of people on many sides of issues, because (this is rough, but hey) e.g. too many white people are going "ooh, no racism discussion here please, I'm too delicate." and also too many black people are like "if i see the slightest thing that looks a little bit like racism defederate and block that whole server!"

Post reply on HN