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Private and Public Mastodon

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Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#181

Post by Zak »

panarky wrote: post #79
tptacek wrote: 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…

Search and quote-post are very different in this regard.

Quote-post can be a problem because it encourages bad behavior among people who aren't actively malicious. If the most popular Fediverse software doesn't support it, there won't be a widespread quote-poste -> pile-on phenomenon even if a few servers support it without getting widely blocked.

Search becomes a problem when a group of bad actors use it to harass and dox people. It doesn't require widespread adoption, just a small number of bad actors with access to an index. From what I've read about previous organized far-right harassment campaigns, I find it likely that bad actors are already indexing Fediverse posts, but not publicly talking about it. Excluding search features from the most popular software will not help with this. Blocking servers that admit they're indexing posts for search will not help with this.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#182

Post by mariusor »

boring_twenties wrote: post #173
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.

I suspect that the poster you're replying to makes a confusion with public posts, which ActivityPub, unlike email, has. When the public namespace is encountered as a recipient of an Activity, Mastodon indeed iterates over all the instances it is connected to and pushes it to all.

But for follower only posting, you are right, Activities go only to the recipients, theoretically to each individual inbox, practically to the instance's shared inbox.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#183

Post by OctopusLupid »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #53

There is a story [0] from November doing the rounds on Twitter today (but which was flagged on HN) that does a good job of expanding on why there is no search function on Mastodon. Namely, it's* full of child porn, or "lolicon" which is drawn child porn, illegal in many Western nations but not in Japan. In the words of Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko: > Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to…

> I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society?

From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not the case.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#184

Post by TechBro8615 »

OctopusLupid wrote: post #183
TechBro8615 wrote: post #53

There is a story [0] from November doing the rounds on Twitter today (but which was flagged on HN) that does a good job of expanding on why there is no search function on Mastodon. Namely, it's* full of child porn, or "lolicon" which is drawn child porn, illegal in many Western nations but not in Japan. In the words of Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko: > Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to…

> I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not t…

I wouldn't expect them to tell you otherwise... that's my point. What justification have you heard?

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#185

Post by int_19h »

timbray wrote: post #69

Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and yo…

Realistically, what's going to happen with "courts and legislation" is that anyone who wants to do scraping will simply operate from the jurisdiction where it's legal. That's the crucial difference between regulating roads or restaurants, and regulating stuff on the Internet, at least in the absence of Great National Firewalls.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#186

Post by dmix »

vidarh wrote: post #151
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…

Human interaction is inherently bubble-y. Nobody wants to get shouted at by people preaching stuff they don't like or feel harassed by all day long, so we seek together in social groups that by and large are united at least along some axes of interests, and avoid too much talk of the topics we know are controversial within those the groups. Some of us then sometimes seek broader forums to try to spread our groups ide…

> (yes, admins can ride roughshod over users, but users can vote with their feed and migrate their accounts and follows elsewhere)

This is true when you think it's about HN users as the prototypical user. But I'm just imagining having to explain to my mom why she can't participate in [X, Y, Z] set of Mastodon communities, doesn't she already have a Mastodon account? Why does she need accounts for each? Why are her old "tweets", followers, DMs, etc not available on the new server?

This is a much larger barrier than advanced users can appreciate... maybe not right now but it will increasingly be in the future.

Ultimately it's very possible groups of interconnected communities is a superior concept to centralized social networks. But this should be more of an obvious part of the UX w/ Mastodon. It's fine if it's properly communicated AND if porting your old tweets/accounts/followers/etc over to new servers is easy... but even then it's an adoption hazard (people avoid complexity they don't understand).

Currently it's communicated as a Twitter of FB competitor, which may very likely come back to bite them (not to mention the UI sucking).

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#187

Post by dmix »

drdaeman wrote: post #132
dmix wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

Yeah, agreed, the "right to be forgotten" legal could be very expensive to enforce on a federated internet. It's only feasible when Google is all you have to deal with. Even then it's a big hassle.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#188

Post by dmix »

zirgs wrote: post #137
dmix wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, telling people to not reuse passwords is enough of an ask.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#189

Post by vidarh »

dmix wrote: post #186
vidarh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human interaction is inherently bubble-y. Nobody wants to get shouted at by people preaching stuff they don't like or feel harassed by all day long, so we seek together in social groups that by and large are united at least along some axes of interests, and avoid too much talk of the topics we know are controversial within those the groups. Some of us then sometimes seek broader forums to try to spread our groups ide…

> (yes, admins can ride roughshod over users, but users can vote with their feed and migrate their accounts and follows elsewhere) This is true when you think it's about HN users as the prototypical user. But I'm just imagining having to explain to my mom why she can't participate in [X, Y, Z] set of Mastodon communities, doesn't she already have a Mastodon account? Why does she need accounts for each? Why are her ol…

> But I'm just imagining having to explain to my mom why she can't participate in [X, Y, Z] set of Mastodon communities

"X and Y don't like each other, so they refuse to talk to each other. Think of it like how you can't talk to people on Facebook from Twitter". People siloing themselves is not a new concept for people.

Ironically, the new thing with Mastodon is that you don't need accounts for each of X, Y, Z to talk to people there even if X, Y and Z defederate from each other, as long as you can find "neutral territory". Only for a very small set of instances is this a challenge.

Being used to silos seems to also be behind a lot of the confusion over having to pick a server - people end up fretting over the choice when it matters a lot less than they think. I wish joinmastodon defaulted to just suggesting a random "generic" instance, and hid the rest behind an "advanced users" button.

> Why are her old "tweets", followers, DMs, etc not available on the new server?

Her follows and followers are available on the new server if she moves the account. When I moved to my new instance, most followers had auto-migrated within minutes. It can definitely be made simpler, but given the number of non-technical users I've seen migrate, it's not that big a barrier.

That the old posts are not I agree is an issue - it is likely to get solved, as the objections to migrating those with the rest are minor and stupid (you can migrate those too, but it requires a friendly admin willing to do a data import, or running your own instance, so for all practical purposes most users can't)

> (not to mention the UI sucking).

There are multiple UIs competing to improve this, before even considering the Mastodon alternatives that all can talk to Mastodon (e.g. Misskey, Pleroma), so this is improving rapidly. Personally I use the advanced interface and I think all it takes is some custom css and it'd be superior to Twitter in most ways (the advanced interface is somewhat like Tweetdeck; I run it with custom CSS that makes column widths configurable). Because of the total open nature of the API, there's far more room to get something good here than there is for Twitter, which is fairly awful.

Re: Private and Public Mastodon

#190

Post by OctopusLupid »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #184
OctopusLupid wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not t…

I wouldn't expect them to tell you otherwise... that's my point. What justification have you heard?

The communities that publicly shame search providers also publicly shame and block lolicon servers. I don’t see how that means that they are protecting those servers by disliking search.
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