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A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network nod

A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network node, never built up the real world trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow out because we are all mortal. The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.

swyx 4y ago
yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
johnchristopher 4y ago
> The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems. This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc. If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why clone it ?
- wmf 4y ago
  Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.
  - zeroxp 4y ago
    Social media inevitably becomes a reflection of the users, and humans all have a thread of toxicity running through them.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging platforms aren't trying to recreate these abusive systems. They don't show boost/favourite counts, don't offer paid promotion or adverts, don't have the manipulation of the timelines or the other abusive dark patterns used to keep people hooked on the toxic pipes. I feel that being able to show appreciation for a post, or send it to the people who are interested in you, are both important ways to interact and can be implemented without the unhealthy byproducts of the corporate social media orgs.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot, and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list of people who have boosted/favourited The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing. I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most for my own use. Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent way the user has little control over is.
    - johnchristopher 4y ago
      I also believe character limits is a problem and that it ultimately leads to polarization.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users because most other instances will have a hard limit above which they'll drop or truncate posts. But overall it's easy to iterate on this, and you can try things on your own instance or your own "corner" of likeminded instances while still be able to interoperate on most things.
klabb3 4y ago
> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being used this way on other nodes. To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or even federated) world. We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and invite only "groups" should be. Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps Matrix is best positioned in this space. (Please correct me if I got any details wrong)
- smoldesu 4y ago
  If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastodon doesn't advertise itself as a private protocol. A glorified microblogging platform doesn't really have a whole lot of data to leak besides maybe your DMs. > We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it That's called heterogenous encryption, and it's the technological equivalent of Mythril. End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data. In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account. These operators literally need to read your data to operate on it. I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here. If you want to talk about architectures designed for malicious actors, you probably shouldn't start with distributed systems. Monolithic, profit-driven corporations like Twitter are much easier to tempt with salacious "data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds""

swyx 4y ago

yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

johnchristopher 4y ago

> The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems. This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc. If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why clone it ?

wmf 4y ago
Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.
- zeroxp 4y ago
  Social media inevitably becomes a reflection of the users, and humans all have a thread of toxicity running through them.
proactivesvcs 4y ago
Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging platforms aren't trying to recreate these abusive systems. They don't show boost/favourite counts, don't offer paid promotion or adverts, don't have the manipulation of the timelines or the other abusive dark patterns used to keep people hooked on the toxic pipes. I feel that being able to show appreciation for a post, or send it to the people who are interested in you, are both important ways to interact and can be implemented without the unhealthy byproducts of the corporate social media orgs.
- vidarh 4y ago
  It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot, and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list of people who have boosted/favourited The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing. I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most for my own use. Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent way the user has little control over is.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    I also believe character limits is a problem and that it ultimately leads to polarization.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users because most other instances will have a hard limit above which they'll drop or truncate posts. But overall it's easy to iterate on this, and you can try things on your own instance or your own "corner" of likeminded instances while still be able to interoperate on most things.

klabb3 4y ago

> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being used this way on other nodes. To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or even federated) world. We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and invite only "groups" should be. Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps Matrix is best positioned in this space. (Please correct me if I got any details wrong)

smoldesu 4y ago
If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastodon doesn't advertise itself as a private protocol. A glorified microblogging platform doesn't really have a whole lot of data to leak besides maybe your DMs. > We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it That's called heterogenous encryption, and it's the technological equivalent of Mythril. End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data. In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account. These operators literally need to read your data to operate on it. I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here. If you want to talk about architectures designed for malicious actors, you probably shouldn't start with distributed systems. Monolithic, profit-driven corporations like Twitter are much easier to tempt with salacious "data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds""