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I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

blog.joinmastodon.org

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Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#471

Post by blackqueeriroh »

mmooss wrote: post #468
jrm4 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good principle in theory, but did you miss that I mentioned that I am black as well? And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc. But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel compelled to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're…

> A good principle in theory And especially in practice. > I am black as well I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say…

Yeah, basically I agree with mmooss. As a Black person, I don’t really care how weird, wrong, creepy, or exhausting other Black people are, I still feel more kinship and alignment with them than a random white person I don’t know. I can’t really stand white people writ large, but there are a ton of individual white people I love and adore. Because I know the difference between whiteness* and a white person.

And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.

And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#472

Post by mmooss »

jrm4 wrote: post #469
mmooss wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good principle in theory And especially in practice. > I am black as well I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say…

It's not an "argument?" And if anything it's just more of a confirmation of your exact idea of being against a universal Black Person's Association. Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads some-kind-of uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure opinion (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uB…

I can imagine your point about it countering the uBPA perspective, but the comments feel more like what I said above. Are people that dumb about uBPA beliefs that they really need to know about one exception? I hope not.

I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#473

Post by blackqueeriroh »

bakugo wrote: post #295
jrm4 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels very analogous to my experience with the place. As a Black person (who absolutely loves the idea and model), it's weird. Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ev…

> with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything That's exactly the problem, though. Political echo chambers with no diversity of thought ultimately cultivate the expectation that everyone must agree on every topic, at all times. As soon as you dare disagree with what the majority has decided is the "correct" opinion, you will be seen as the enemy.

3% variance on beliefs is way bigger than you think, and also he said “just about” everything, not everything.

And you can have whatever opinion you want, but also be prepared for me to tell you that your opinion is stupid, and when you assert that a falsehood is in fact opinion instead of a lie, I will point out that facts are not opinions and opinions are not facts.

Too many of y’all get this confused.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#474

Post by blackqueeriroh »

vasco wrote: post #313
jrm4 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels very analogous to my experience with the place. As a Black person (who absolutely loves the idea and model), it's weird. Feels very much like a "you become what you hate situation," in my case, interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything -- and yet, (it's mild, no worries, but) I have been on the receiving end of the literal worst behavior I've ev…

> interacting with Black folks with whom I share probably like 97% similar views on just about everything Maybe because you say things like that? In what world is people's skin color related to their views?

Lmao if you have to ask this it tells me a lot

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#475

Post by blackqueeriroh »

rckt wrote: post #357

Decentralisation on Mastodon is an illusion. For me a truly decentralised thing is where I am a node that transmits and can receive transmissions, like radios. When there has to be a server that's being administrated by somebody, this already puts me in a position where I depend on the people who own the server. This means that if for any reason these people don't like me, they can simply ban me and that's it. Basica…

Why do you think that decentralization isn’t real if it’s not at the furthest extreme?

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#476

Post by blackqueeriroh »

pfraze wrote: post #427
bigiain wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's hoping the Mastodon "non profit" is somewhat better set up than Matt's "WordPress Foundation" and that Mastodon is not now completely under control of one person (with two sock puppets) that also owns a company competing in the same space. I just looked up the board of the Mastodon non-profit, I'm not super comfortable with Biz Stone being listed there, but at least the board is not just Jack Dorcey or Jay Gra…

Jay Graber Mike Masnick (techdirt) Jeromie Miller (XMPP) Investor seat

Hi Paul

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#477

Post by blackqueeriroh »

mdasen wrote: post #136
bhhaskin wrote: post #56

Mastodon has been great. The platform and generally most users aren't trying to constantly sell me something or influence me. It people sharing their lives, hobbies and passion. Influencers don't bother because it doesn't have the massive following and reach other platforms have, but that's part of what makes it special imo.

Yea, it just feels calmer, where you can follow neat and quirky people who aren't posting like they're addicted to it. It also feels like one place that can just keep going. With BlueSky, I know they're going to need to find a business model to cover the $36M worth of VC they've taken, many millions in salaries and hardware costs they've paid out, and provide a healthy return for all that risk. Mastodon feels like a…

Do you understand that Bluesky is just the example implementation of a protocol that’s currently in the process of becoming an IETF standard?

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#478

Post by blackqueeriroh »

al_borland wrote: post #303
kstrauser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but there’s nothing special or privileged about it. The others aren’t knock-offs or imitations. They’re all peers.

It seemed like the point was to say they aren’t going to donate money to a project that doesn’t respect their right to free speech. Sure, an account could be made on a other instance, but that doesn’t change the mindset behind how the instance run by the maintainers is handled, which we can only assume will influence the project as a whole.

I’m always amazed at how little people on the internet understand the concept of free speech.

Free speech has never meant that you can say whatever you want anywhere you want with zero repercussions.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#479

Post by berkes »

krapp wrote: post #450
berkes wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one is the result of the other. It is a nice place because there are few people there. Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc. The reason I am convinced the low number of people makes the place overall nice is that its a niche, like HN is a niche. That…

>Or, more cynical, reversed: I am convinced Mastodon will be a horrible platform if it grows to a size of e.g. twitter, reddit, and far, far worse if it grows to sizes of insta, tiktok, facebook etc. The thing is Mastodon isn't a platform like twitter, reddit, etc, it's a decentralized network of platforms. A few instances might become popular (like mastodon.social) and become a default for newcomers but there will a…

But these instances are part of the platform. Or, a better term, part of the system.

So "doing their own thing" is very limited. Do "too much of it" and you'll be fediblocked. Too little of your own thing and you're essentially getting what the large instances dictate. Sure, your instance can e.g. block meta instances because it dislikes Facebook. But that doesn't isolate you from meta content completely - or even at all - it depends. If your instance wants that, it'll have to also block all instances that don't block meta. Basically defederating almost entirely.

And this doesn't even consider the numerous malicious practices that one can do, but aren't interesting currently due to the limited reach of this fediverse. Like scooping up expired domains of previous instances and using that to spam. Or like impersonating famous people and scamming users that way. Or like taking over accounts and spamming or scamming that way. Or even taking over entire instances by hacking the server or social engineering access. Etc. etc.

The fediverse has nothing technical that protects it against the real and expensive threats that "common social media platforms" face on a daily basis. Federation doesn't suddenly make any of these attacks more difficult. If anything, it makes it easier, because the instances themselves are ran by volunteers who in many cases will not have security budgets to protect against such attacks. The only thing that the fediverse has going for it, in this regard, is that the blast radius is smaller. The attack easier, the result contained. But it's not unthinkable that malware, fake news, or other malicious content can easily be spread this way.

Re: I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon

#480

Post by berkes »

Nextgrid wrote: post #451
berkes wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your understanding is right. Though some downtime is usually handled by servers with "backoff retries" eventually you're server will be marked as offline and servers might never bother contacting it anymore. Similar to email which - at least technically - has the idea built into its protocol that servers are going to be down. But mastodon was built with more modern web in mind, so having a server that's offline more…

> I guess one could solve this with buffering proxies That’s essentially Nostr. There the servers are untrusted relays and cryptography is used to enforce authenticity. (One of the) issues with Mastodon is that it was initially designed for browser-based use and browsers require an origin (aka a domain or IP) to talk to, because originally there were no clients. Having actual clients would remove the need for this si…

> I’ve got plenty more (negative, but IMO constructive) criticism about Mastodon and the broader “fediverse”

Same here. And I too, have planned such a blog post for a while now. Just not sure if it's worth criticizing something that's far from perfect but in many ways still better than many other systems. A bit like the vegan criticizing the vegetarian for not being animal-friendly enough (or worse, the carnivore criticizing my vegetarian diet for not being good enough because I wear a leather belt).

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