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Flipboard Begins to Federate

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Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#91

Post by sigmar »

calamari4065 wrote: post #87
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

>But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate.

If you post a profile publicly on the internet, people/companies can easily scrape it. Regardless of what is in the threads ToS and whether you're federating with threads... am I missing something?

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#92

Post by jorvi »

calamari4065 wrote: post #87
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

> The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it.

There is no way they kept that in the EU-Threads ToS.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#93

Post by rchaud »

iteratethis wrote: post #80
rchaud wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself. Or you just create a different account on any one of the several Mastodon instances out there. Mastodon doesn't have the ability to ban you from all of the fediverse. It doesn't take away choice, it simply gives an additional option to the instance admin. Don't like it? Start your own instance.

This is the default "just move to another instance" take of Mastodon. It's impractical if not hostile. It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do. This attitude is exactly why there's a trend towards ever larger instances.

> It's impractical if not hostile.

On the contrary, decentralization is exactly neutral. It just feels hostile to users who've simply accepted a centralized vendor as the default, and now may need to consider an alternative.

Most decentralization in practice is messy: homeschooling, homesteading, private health insurance, or rolling your own email server. That is because the majority of the population will have a preference for not doing things this way.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#94

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

calamari4065 wrote: post #87
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it. Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced. But really the cor…

> Meta will scrape all available data about your account

I genuinely don’t see the problem here. If it’s publicly available, why can’t Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc scrape it? It’s like complaining that the wrong folks are reading the poster you just put up: well duh you put the poster up in public, of course it’s gonna get read!

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#95

Post by rchaud »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #59
leotravis10 wrote: post #7

If you can't get past the Medium loginwall, here's a mirrored link: https://archive.ph/uFFy4

FWIW, Medium doesn’t have login walls and hasn’t for a long time. Stories are either paywalled or they aren’t (author’s choice). This link is not paywalled and doesn’t require login.

Medium absolutely has login walls. Scroll past a couple of paragraphs and there it is.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#96

Post by tonystubblebine »

rchaud wrote: post #95
tonystubblebine wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Medium doesn’t have login walls and hasn’t for a long time. Stories are either paywalled or they aren’t (author’s choice). This link is not paywalled and doesn’t require login.

Medium absolutely has login walls. Scroll past a couple of paragraphs and there it is.

That’s a paywall, which is what I said above.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#97

Post by latentcall »

simonw wrote: post #6

I'm excited about this - and about Threads too. I've been on Mastodon for just over a year now. It works really surprisingly well, especially considering it's stitched together from so many independent, non-profit open source instances. But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard. I'd love to see efforts from organizations like Flipboard, and Threads, and Automattic make an impact here. I want to b…

As a nerd, Mastodon wasn’t useful for me. All of my friends are on Snapchat or Instagram, so my mastodon social account sat with zero followers, which means if I post something there is no engagement from anyone and unlikely anyone would see it.

I’m not an online personality by any means, so no followers makes sense.

I think Mastodon is great for people who exist online, just not so much people who exist in real life. I don’t mean any insult by that, just the way it is right now.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#98

Post by apitman »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #40
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E. The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

Embrace isn't the time to worry, Extend is, and then only conditionally. If they come up with sensible features, then maybe the standard should evolve. But if it starts becoming too complex to implement or gives too much power to Meta, then I'm ready to join you in raising the alarm.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#99

Post by apitman »

iteratethis wrote: post #80
rchaud wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it does take away your choice to moderate Threads users and content yourself. Or you just create a different account on any one of the several Mastodon instances out there. Mastodon doesn't have the ability to ban you from all of the fediverse. It doesn't take away choice, it simply gives an additional option to the instance admin. Don't like it? Start your own instance.

This is the default "just move to another instance" take of Mastodon. It's impractical if not hostile. It masks the reality of the situation which is that instance moderators have too much of a say in what individual users get to see or do. This attitude is exactly why there's a trend towards ever larger instances.

Agreed. Sentiments like GP are why I won't take the Fediverse too seriously until support for custom domains is a first class citizen.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#100

Post by apitman »

pietervdvn wrote: post #81
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

Maybe we want it to be a niche place? Also, the effect of Google's presence on XMPP was huge, see https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

I read the article and in my opinion it fails to present compelling arguments or evidence as to why XMPP is much worse off because Google once implemented it. Sounds like there was massive growth thanks to them coming, and massive loss when they left.

Interestingly it sounds like other implementors capitulated to some bad behavior on Google's part to the detriment of others, and there are probably some good lessons to learn there.

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