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

Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

privacy.thenexus.today

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 458 posts

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#321

Post by jdp23 »

dcow wrote: post #289
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon-the-software doesn't have to do anything. Mastodon instances have to choose whether to block Threads or not. Of course there is no 'central enforcement', that would be at odds with the very principle of federated social media (namely, that instance admins are free to choose how they run their own instance).

Blocking Threads doesn't prevent your content from getting to Meta. Some other instance that you federate with might not block it. See: TFA.

Blocking Threads is necessary but not sufficient. I should probably be clearer about that in the article.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#323

Post by jdp23 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #246
dcow wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. The community doesn't get to make that call. The protocol makes that call and the protocol allows anybody to view stuff you post publicly. You don't get to say "I publish this but Meta can't view it". Not even legally you don't. That's not privacy and no am…

>Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. A fair point, and one that's not really new either. Don't want something to be public? Don't post it publicly. As I recall, when my employer at the time (mid 1990s) "federated" their email with the rest of the world, they sent out a memo which stated, in p…

The article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair?

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#326

Post by jdp23 »

drdaeman wrote: post #161
jdp23 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of discussion about that! Here's a very good article on the EEE threat. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo... Personally I think it's more an "embrace, extend, and exploit" approach; a decentralized model could work well for Meta, for example if they do revenue-sharing on ads hosted by other instances (think Disney or LA Lakers). Update: here's another good article looking at h…

In my personal (subjective) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers. At the very least, that's why I stopped. It's not like Google had "extinguished" anything, it's more like the "largest server went u…

Agreed that these other issues were a problem for XMPP. Christina Warren made this exact point on Mastodon a few hours ago -- in response to a post from Evan Prodromou that talked about the role that spam and harassment played and how he and others in the XMPP community didn't diversify the network. So, there are multiple factors. That said, I still think the post I linked to is very much worth reading.

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#329

Post by [deleted] »

numpad0 wrote: post #115
cdot2 wrote: post #40

[flagged]

I’m starting to think there are lots of assholes using gender and gender isms as excuse to themselves consistently labeled assholes. Like there are people getting feet dragged by gender dysphoria, and there are people who’s got nothing else to shift their blame to than maybe their biological identities that catches onto it.

[deleted]

Re: Blocking Threads won't be enough to protect privacy once they join the Fediverse

#330

Post by kmeisthax »

echelon wrote: post #255
dcow wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. The community doesn't get to make that call. The protocol makes that call and the protocol allows anybody to view stuff you post publicly. You don't get to say "I publish this but Meta can't view it". Not even legally you don't. That's not privacy and no am…

There's a portion of the far left and the up-and-coming gen-zalpha that takes on a dictatorial "censorship is okay for things we dislike" attitude. They don't realize that in the 90's and 00's free speech was a place of refuge for liberals to escape from evangelical attacks on everything from LGBT rights to Pokemon. They also don't appreciate that the "come one and all" nature of the internet back then led to many pe…

Liberals never actually left the free speech refuge - they just wanted to keep the far right out of it. There's a logic to this; you don't want people advocating for mass censorship to be able to use free speech as a weapon to cut your head off. In other words, it's OK to censor Hitler[0]. Not everyone will agree, I suspect you don't. I put that disagreement in the same category as, say, the BSD vs. GPL arguments back in the day.

The problem with true P2P social networking is that I don't want to have to make individual moderation decisions based on each identity that happens to try and send me a message. That is makework best delegated to someone at least marginally trustworthy so that I can spend my time actually using the network as intended. Moderation is a necessary precondition to any kind of online forum actually, y'know, working as a forum.

In order to actually have effective moderation, you need scarcity of identity. In a completely P2P network, you can just make new identities to spam people with, so blocking them has no effect. Centralized platforms have a certain magic to them in that they can make identities cost money without actually charging people for them. That's why everything wants a phone number now - because phone numbers cost money, and they can limit sign-ups to a few per number per year. The closest Mastodon has to this is domain names, which is why defederation is the first thing instance operators run to when dealing with rule breakers. It forces you to at least burn a domain name to continue harassing someone.

> Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry.

No, this is just Twitter. Twitter is structured to encourage clout-chasing and toxic behavior.

[0] Or spammers. Actually I don't get why people who call for extreme free speech aren't also calling for getting rid of spam filters. Spam filters are censorship, but it's censorship we tolerate in exchange for a functional e-mail system.

Post reply on HN