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Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

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Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#161

Post by sandworm101 »

cmatthias wrote: post #158
sandworm101 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to first get a little more extreem. They have to not just fight but start killing. Look at Napster. Napster was attacked and eventually died. But napster also won. CD sales are dead and we all download/stream music online. Mastadon will soon be attacked directly. It will also probably die as napster: a first cassualty of a revolution. What matters are the long-term changes that survive.

Mastodon will not die in the same way Napster did; it’s decentralized and there’s no way it can be completely shut down since anyone can run an instance.

There are ways. Placing regulatory burdens or legal liabilities on anyone running a social media instance would quickly make Mastadon untenable. Something as simple as manditory age verification might be enough.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#162

Post by yardie »

drexlspivey wrote: post #107
whitepaint wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done. Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening. Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he know…

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

Well that sucks. But commercially businesses fail all the time. Sometimes you get a heads up and can plan accordingly. And other times it’s like FTX and the site is down the next day, after a major scandal.

The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

The internet owes you nothing.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#163

Post by jhgfjhfgjg »

paulgb wrote: post #10

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#164

Post by charcircuit »

malermeister wrote: post #6
charcircuit wrote: post #2

Quoted post unavailable.

Do you have any evidence for 1) ?

This Internet archive link proves that this has existed for years.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201105015447/https://twitter.c...

You can appeal a link from being blocked by using this form.

https://help.twitter.com/en/forms/authenticity/spam

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#165

Post by weinzierl »

codeflo wrote: post #147
vidarh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.

I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social. Also, you can't back up your followers.

You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread.

I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#166

Post by dEnigma »

tiffanyh wrote: post #160

For a free service, there’s a lot of strong opinions here. While I’m no Elon fan, he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns. And he paid a bunch of money to have that right.

I think people mostly take issue with the hypocrisy of claiming to be a paragon of free speech while censoring all kinds of things because Musk personally dislikes them.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#167

Post by throwaway290 »

vidarh wrote: post #64
lukeschlather wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there…

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

Such as Tumblr

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#168

Post by LightG »

tjpnz wrote: post #141
vidarh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

>So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up. I saw that elonjet had found a new home there so assumed I wouldn't have any trouble signing up. The "Create Account" button on mastodon.social seemed promising too.

Just take your time and get familiar. I wemt through some teething troubles but have found it to be worth it.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#169

Post by heather45879 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #149
SilverBirch wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating i…

Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way? Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist. Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower. Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order. Or when that tesla employee post…

So he’s just like Bill Gates in the 90’s. A little douche with an ego and deceptive business practices.

Not sure why no one mentions his asperger's syndrome because that’s an obvious mastodon in the room.

Re: Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

#170

Post by ajross »

codeflo wrote: post #39

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates…

> Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

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