5 ms·

Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs).

Also, instance owners can unilaterally control what you see and who may follow you (by blocking individual users and whole servers from federating with theirs). Whether or not such a block exists is transparent to you as a user (this is different from earlier, similar approaches, like NNTP-Servers, where it was pretty clear when a particular group was not being distributed by your server - also, differently from Mastodon, NNTP did not represent your identity identifier - using different servers for different groups was perfectly usable with the same identity (which came down to your email address). They sell this as a feature and celebrate when "undesirable" servers get blocked. Mastodon is a good idea turned bad by building in pretty dystopian functionality.

guipsp 4y ago
No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed
- lrvick 4y ago
  Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
  - nkrisc 4y ago
    When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
  - systemicdanna 4y ago
    Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
    - drewzero1 4y ago
      Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
      - systemicdanna 4y ago
        Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
        drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
        DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
  - jrnichols 4y ago
    unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.
moron4hire 4y ago
It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
    - eduction 4y ago
      > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.
mcv 4y ago
Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225
jackthetab 4y ago
Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?
- ok123456 4y ago
  That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
    - syntheweave 4y ago
      The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
    - ok123456 4y ago
      Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.

guipsp 4y ago

No thanks, I don't want illegal stuff on my feed

lrvick 4y ago
Then do not follow people that post illegal stuff.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  When I first created an account on some instance, I saw other people’s content even though I hadn’t followed anyone yet, so that advice seems insufficient.
  - lrvick 4y ago
    You can choose to look at instance wide content but that is a firehose of potentially illegal nonsense on any large server. You can stream illegal content from the firehose on Twitter too btw. https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-users-are-exploiting-illegal-images-of-children-3693085.html https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/some-twitter-us... In general just following topics or people that interest you is a safer bet on any platform with user generated media.
- systemicdanna 4y ago
  Content from all federated instances is added to the feed in your instance, so you personally don't need to follow illegal stuff for it to appear in your feed. This is actually the most off-putting feature of Mastodon for me.
  - drewzero1 4y ago
    Sure, on the federated feed; that one can be a bit of a free-for-all. Once you follow a good handful of people you can spend most of your time on the home feed and only see stuff from people you follow and the things they boost.
    - systemicdanna 4y ago
      Have you ever tried to follow anyone from an instance that your instance refused to federate with? I am wondering how big of a problem this is. Not that I have encountered it, mostly just see this as potential a drawback of Mastodon's approach to federation.
      - drewzero1 4y ago
        Good question! I hadn't tried, but just found a random user on an instance that mine doesn't federate with and clicked Follow. It took me through the remote follow and that user did appear on my list and showed up in searches when they didn't before. Unfortunately I seem to have chosen an abandoned or dormant account for my test, so I can't say for certain whether posts will show up in Home, but I would expect so given the other visibility changes. Hopefully someone else with some fedi experience can chime in.
      - DocTomoe 4y ago
        Given how discovery in Mastodon works, by following "boosted" (think: re-tweeted) content creator or reading new people in a discussion, you wouldn't even know these accounts exist - sure, you can manually enter a mastodon id in the search bar to go directly to an account somewhere else (and thus try to access a potentially blocked node), but that's not the common use-case. Now, if that increases or decreases the problem space is a philosophical question. I personally do have issues with blocking instances as a whole because one admin disagrees with another admin on unrelated issues. If I get denied access to other people to organise around, e.g. building our own zen retreat because my admin and their admin disagree on political factions or because one admin nuked the connection to another instance for not being trigger-happy enough against their own users, everyone loses. Such technical possibilities and - in fact - recommendations run against the ideas of a civil society.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
For all its faults, I've never exactly seen masses of greatly illegal content on Mastodon.
- jrnichols 4y ago
  unfortunately I have. an instance was brigaded and flooded with very illegal content. and then the instance was taken down forever by authorities. all the instance users could do was try to flag everything they could but it was too much. edit: it was called sinblr and rumors are that it was an instance called pawoo that flooded it with seriously illegal content.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  An open question is whether this property will persist through growth.

moron4hire 4y ago

It's pretty easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. So if you don't like the policies of your current instance, there isn't anything keeping you there.

nickthegreek 4y ago
Just the pain of actually figuring out its going on or atively monitoring, and the the non-zero hassle of finding, choosing and transferring to another instance. And then be prepared to do it all again. This is not stuff the average user wants to ever be bothered with.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  But Mastodon instances do tell you what is going on. They provide lists of the other instances they have banned from their own, with a statement on why. Here's the one I'm on right now: https://mstdn.social/about https://mstdn.social/about (scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section). Centralized social media platforms also control everything you see, to the point that it can be very difficult to see the full range of posts from accounts in good standing that you follow within their platform, in favor of posts they think would keep you more "engaged". And they are famously opaque on how they do that. If you can guess at what they've done and decide you don't like it, you don't have any recourse. After you've spent time to build a network of people you follow and follow you, they have you locked into their platform, holding your subscriptions hostage against you. I guess I don't understand what you want. Twitter is too much censorship, right? But we don't know how Twitter censors content, and even if we did, what would you do about it? Mastodon instances censor content, yeah. Why not? It's a person running their own site, they can let whatever they want through it. But they tell you how, when, and why they censor. And if you don't like it, you don't have to put up with it.
  - eduction 4y ago
    > scroll to the bottom and expand the "Moderated servers" section Wow. As much as I disliked Twitter deciding who I can and can’t follow (via bans), and what people can and can’t say, at least they put some rigor into it. I don’t think I’d ever want some self anointed little server god king banning so many peers for such soft reasons. I thought it would be csam, armed groups - this has reasons like “Trump fanbase”, “offensive content”, and over and over again “a-holes”. No thanks.

mcv 4y ago

Calling it dystopian is a bit harsh. Some degree of moderation is unavoidable or you end up with 4chan (actually, even 4chan had moderation, I think; it's just unavoidable). Ultimately of course you're supposed to choose a server that you like and trust. At least here you have that choice. On Twitter or Facebook you don't. Of course it should have had end to end encryption. It sounds like a massive omission. I found a discussion about adding that to ActivityPub[0] where someone points out that if you don't want server admins able to read messages, you can't store private keys on the server, which sounds to me like it would hurt usability. Makes you wonder how unbreakable the end-to-end encryption of other systems really is. I'm not enough of an encryption guru to say how big of a problem this really is. [0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225 https://github.com/w3c/activitypub/issues/225

jackthetab 4y ago

Then don't go to those servers. Isn't that what "freedom of association" is about? Also, is the functionality dystopian or the application thereof?

ok123456 4y ago
That breaks the idea of having a federated network, if you have no guarantees that sending a message on one end of it reaches its recipient. Now we just have all the same problems of email but with the mechanics of a multicast medium. Eventually, you'll reach the point where a duopoly will effectively control who is allowed to be part of the larger network. And this was the original problem people were trying to solve by creating a federated network.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > That breaks the idea of having a federated network What fresh nonsense is this? There's never been a federated system with anything like a perfect guarantee of connectivity to literally anything. There are always limits, both social and technical. Where do people get these ideas?
  - syntheweave 4y ago
    The argument is a case of begging the question: Start with your conclusion, then reason backwards to the justification. It's the case that a federation tends to erode. Likewise, it's the case that a centralized system tends to collapse. The question to ask is really one of backing a horse to ride on to be pragmatically useful; winning the technical argument is academic. The fediverse has a few core principles in mind, and they tend to get centered in Mastodon's marketing. So it does make some sense that it gets attacked for being an imperfect realization of those principles, and for being unprincipled in other respects. But in a head-to-head comparison with other implementations of social media it can still claim to be more principled on those things it tried to pursue.
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Having the inability to know if a message is propagated federation wide, based on an arbitrary value judgement based on ????, renders it useless as a communication medium. For this to work it needs to be treated as a common carrier, and not a social network.