15 ms·

Private and Public Mastodon

240 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
foobarbecue 4y ago
This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the software to add an illusory safeguard, which doesn't actually stop bad actors from having access to your posts and hence the ability to record and rebroadcast them. You know who got the system right? Facebook. Private by default, but the user can decide exactly who can see each of their digital objects. It's easy to define groups of friends, allow sharing to friends-of-friends, one person, the whole world, whatever. The concept of friends (bilateral agreement to share information) makes way more sense than this "follow" thing. I want my open-source, federated, Facebook already. Edit: Although, I did just have a flashback to when Facebook announced Graph Search... which lasted about a week until searches that actually worked were deemed creepy and they backpedaled into the stone age. It's so frustrating how these technologies succeed or fail based on fashion rather than technical merit.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc. They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them. Is my experience weird?
  - Groxx 4y ago
    FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant. Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.
    - invig 4y ago
      G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.
      - Groxx 4y ago
        Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
- invig 4y ago
  You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private. You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it). The only way around that would be centralised key management which defeats the whole point. This is one of those problems where it's probably better to just use Facebook.
  - foobarbecue 4y ago
    Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.
    - donkeyd 4y ago
      Just look at the 'Twitter Files'. It's not great that Elon can access anyone's private messages. It's a great tool to blackmail people.
  - LamaOfRuin 4y ago
    I believe that option 2, where it relies on individual encryption at the cost of reading history, is how matrix does it (or can do it if chosen).
  - neodymiumphish 4y ago
    Actually, I don't think this is right. The creator of a group or "shared to group Y" chat/posts can generate a shared key for use within that limited friend group. Their individual posts would be encrypted validated by their own private key, but all posts among the group would also be encrypted against the group chat. Struggle here would be that anyone who gets the shared key would have access to view and potentially add to the group.
    - mrtesthah 4y ago
      Signal's encrypted group chat management was recently made more robust and may be instructive: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
- pavon 4y ago
  > The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). That one addresses a real threat-model - someone who was your friend and whom you trusted at the time you sent the post, but has since turned against you. That is quite common among teens, which is the main demographic these social networks are targeting. Rather than them having a permanent record of all your online interactions since you met including embarrassing photographs, it just becomes he-said-she-said like it has been for ages, unless they were actively subverting the program to archive content while you were still friends, which is rare.
  - foobarbecue 4y ago
    Fair point.
  - tonypace 4y ago
    It's not that rare, but releasing a ton of this kind of screenshot makes you look very untrustworthy.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
invig 4y ago
I don't understand how a license is supposed to prevent people from doing bad things with your content. Does the not-so-nice guy in Russia care that he's infringing on your license? I think Mastodon makes the correct call (everything here is public, because it's impossible for it not to be and still have the service be what it is), and the community wants a square circle. Yay activists.
- pavon 4y ago
  I don't think you can split the thinking into those two groups, when the maintainers of the large instances that are pushing back against search are also lead developers.
mattlondon 4y ago
Clearly the solution involves web 3.0 Blockchain to provide irrefutable evidence of ownership of each post, with an off-chain oracle providing per-post licenses in machine-readable formats. </sarcasm> ...or you know don't say stuff in public if you don't want it to be seen by others. This is - and always has been - Internet 101 stuff: assume that the internet never forgets, and don't say anything publicly if you'd rather not see it on the front page of a newspaper. I guess each new generation needs to learn that there are bad people out there, and computers make finding a needle in a haystack trivial.
- invig 4y ago
  I think it's kind of worse than that. It's not an education problem. People are intentionally using this stuff to talk publicly about an issue. They just don't like the consequences of that.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    I think the problem is its public for way longer than people are used to, its like Snowden said, a permanent record. You could've tweeted something 10 years ago with an anonymous account, and called it a day. Yet, after more than a decade it can crash your life because you got caught by stylometry analysis. This certainly applies to HN even more.
jrm4 4y ago
This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon. The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is. And yet, here we are. I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except your posts don't go to any other person, you just read them yourself?" I mean, you could use gmail to do this. It would technically work. But it's not what it's designed for, and much better ways to do this already exist.
- m-p-3 4y ago
  But on the other hand you have a popular platform, with a lot of people who can help, and with which some people are already used to, that you could deploy internally and use as some sort of internal messageboard that can be easily used from anywhere, with an official and third-party mobile apps already available.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    That's fine, but I'm pretty sure that's not the design/use the author is talking about.
- nightpool 4y ago
  I think it's more like "What if you could have email, but your posts only go to the people you want them to?" I think that's pretty easy with Gmail, for the most part, but with Mastodon it's harder because it inverts that control—anyone can follow you (or send a follow request), and it's harder to police every follower individually. This is combined with the fact that most accounts are available anonymously on the web, but it's not really necessary (many are not, for instance, and even the ones that are aren't really convenient to access that way—for bad-faith actors, it's more convenient to sign up for an account on mastodon.social or some other "well known" server and then find posts that way by browsing timelines).
  - jrm4 4y ago
tedunangst 4y ago
Wait until you hear about how followers only posts actually work. An analogy would be Microsoft can't figure out how to get email addressing to work in Outlook, so they send every email to every server, and then Exchange does some magic filtering and tells Outlook which of the emails in your inbox should be visible. Then somebody writes an alternative SMTP server that allows viewing of these hidden messages, and Microsoft sues them.
- Ciantic 4y ago
  Hmm, to my knowledge, followers only posts are ActivityPub feature, where you just shovel the message to inboxes of just followers. It is not sending it to all servers? It's also possible to send messages to part of the followers as well, some instances like qoto.org support circles. You make circles from your followers and post to just them. I wouldn't call these privacy features, but ability for sender to choose what it wants to say for certain group of followers.
  - password4321 4y ago
    I believe followers-only posts are sent to all servers with at least one follower.
    - Ciantic 4y ago
      That is given, how else could it work? This is pub/sub, it's not pull based, so every time you release something it is pushed to the subscribers, your followers servers. I would like to have a bit of pull based things as well, but ActivityPub is not built for it. Even though it's pushed to a server, doesn't mean it goes to everyone in that server.
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        Even though it's pushed to a server, doesn't mean it goes to everyone in that server. Right, the issue being raised is that there's nothing preventing it from going to everyone on the server except the server being nice about it.
kfsnd 4y ago
> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Eventually, we'll give this data to the Internet Archive or put it in a torrent or something. It includes a decent amount of now-deleted content too. Really, it's no different to what others, e.g. Pushshift, are doing with other sites. Except there's no opt-out. Anything you've already said is almost certainly in our data set, and it's there permanently. > That’s extremely hard to prevent but isn’t really the problem: The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets. Also correct. A couple of KFers we know already have access to search the data we've collected. It points them towards interesting posts or accounts to archive. People say some pretty wild things when they think they're not being recorded for posterity!
- akuchling 4y ago
  So, among the first people you give access to the search are some known harassers? Sharp thinking, there.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    I mean, look at the facts: - permanently archiving posts they know people don’t want them to - gave early access to known trolls - is now publicly crowing about how there’s nothing you can do about it - on a throwaway, because like most bullies they’re cowards Personally, I’m left wondering if there needs to be an organized crime investigation into KF, for organized harassment campaigns which violate local stalking or other laws, and the role people like this account play in orchestrating it. I think there’s be a certain irony to HN’s record of this comment being used to prosecute an accomplice in organized crime.
    - BryantD 4y ago
      I mean, "kfsnd." KF. They're not exactly hiding who they are.
michaelmrose 4y ago
Child Porn is a huge image problem that can only be solved by governments in the relevant jurisdictions. Search makes this image problem drastically worse. Lots of discussion about what privacy means no discussion about the elephant in the room. Networks that make acceptable use a choose your own adventure for instance by allowing people to self host and set policy on their own server end up with some people using it for things that the rest of planet earth doesn't find acceptable. For instance I'm certain that common web frameworks and servers are used to promote things both odious and illegal but because that machinery is invisible to most users the blame accrues entirely to the criminal. With Mastodon the branding makes it possible for the blame to accrue to Mastodon as opposed merely the criminal because people are more apt to understand Mastodon as an open source twitter as opposed to a tool like Apache. Whereas this problem accrues to Mastodon the tool is in no position to dictate how users use the tool the relevant governments are and if prosecution becomes common hiding illegal porn from prying eyes will be done by the users themselves. If Mastodon suggests not federating with servers in countries that don't handle this issue eg Japan then search will tend to show off less negative content and indeed countries can be shamed into handling such issues better.
Ciantic 4y ago
Eugen Rochko, the developer of Mastodon had written about Search that if it comes it should be for the home timeline and own posts. It would help a little bit, at least you'd find old posts from people you follow. It would suit some, but since this is federated, there are already instances with a search like qoto.org with a full-text search. It's really odd that they made "no index" checkbox, but it's not cool to index. If they thought it is unpopular they should have made indexing opt-in not opt-out. Going forward this will be instance specific thing, a lot of people want to be able to do searches.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
> People should be able to converse without their every word landing on a permanent global un-erasable indexed public record. Call me crazy. Sure, and they should use Signal instead of publishing their conversations and then getting mad when they turn out to be publicly available.
- tensor 4y ago
  This is my position too. What I'm looking for in a twitter alternative is something public that I can post to the entire world, and search. If I want to post to my friends I already use Signal and vastly prefer that to something like Mastodon. The add the extra complexity of follower only things and instances and I just don't understand who this service is aim at other than the people who created it. Hence, to me, it is and will always be some niche thing (that isn't terribly interesting to me). All that said I still read these threads because there needs to be a good twitter alternative.
- sneak 4y ago
  I don't think it is reasonable to expect Signal groupchats with more than n participants to stay private, where n is more than 5 and less than 20. Android malware is a thing and Signal Desktop does not encrypt anything at rest on disk.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I do think I should be able to post something publicly and not have it indexed by search engines. If someone screencaps it or copy/pastes it fine but the original should live on the dark web. This is one of those things that tech needs think is pointless when in reality opting out of search indexing drops your visibility to nothing which is good for making sure your posts don’t “break containment.” Unless you’re a public figure or social media influencer having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    > having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing Well... Then be careful with what you post tied to your real identity. I have separate accounts for separate use cases. My main on Reddit, for example, can (very) easily be doxxed so I hardly post anything controversial on that account. Through all the recent data leaks it's getting even easier to dox people based on screen names too. I'm even considering getting a PO box next time I move house, just to decrease the chances of my home address ending up in a data dump.
jefftk 4y ago
> I can imagine finer-grained exclusions, such as allowing full-text indexing but only for accounts on the same instance, or allowing use for search but no other applications. (No ML model building!) I think it's unlikely that you can prevent ML model building with a carefully designed license. The most common legal position (though not something that has been tested in court yet) is that training models is sufficiently transformative to count as fair use, and does not require any sort of license to the data. You can see this in all the state of the art tools that are trained on all the publicly available data that they can scrape, without regard for license: translation (text), GPT-3 (text), Stable Diffusion etc (images), Co-Pilot (code). For preventing trolling and harassment a licensing approach is an even worse fit, since those are not people who care about respecting licenses.
- LamaOfRuin 4y ago
  None of those tools have actually been legally tested, and there is a reason much of it has been using data sets laundered through academics.The companies behind them know this is not at all a given, and academics make for more sympathetic defendants than billionaires. Transformative use, as one part of a fair use consideration, is a defense against copyright infringement. The proposal is to first require agreement to a separate license before even being able to access the content. This is an additional layer, which may or may not be enforceable but would definitely establish either negligence or intent, and also brings things like unauthorized access into it. The fact that all of this also includes huge amounts of PII means that in a growing number of jurisdictions misuse of it will not be protected by any copyright exceptions. It would be an endless battle to stop smaller abusers, but you could definitely prevent GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, and Co-Pilot, since they are all coming out of well-defined legal entities with assets and identifiable humans to go after.
  - _as31 4y ago
    There are jurisdictions (the EU, the UK, Singapore, Japan) with copyright exceptions specifically for text and data mining for AI purposes. https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-up-in-singapore-new-copyright-exception-for-text-and-data-mining https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...
friend_and_foe 4y ago
How I see it: any and all attempts to kneecap user functionality is shameful, anything that you're relying on goodwill for will fail miserably and be exploited. If your plan for handling a full text search of the network is to browbeat the developer into not doing it your days are numbered. If your plan for keeping your words private is to put them publicly on the internet and then call people Nazis or whatever for looking at them without your permission you're not very bright.
tptacek 4y ago
It's also unethical to make promises to users, like privacy for posts published to a semipublic social network, that software can't possibly keep. It's going to be interesting watching the norms of the fediverse collide with the expectations of ordinary software users. Mastodon and ActivityPub have a lot of promise as an alternative to centralized social networks, and there are good reasons to use them even if you don't buy into the ethos of the fediverse. If Mastodon is going anywhere, those users will soon drastically outnumber the keepers of the fediverse norms.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > there are good reasons to use them What is one of them?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason. Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.
    - jancsika 4y ago
      I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
From a technical point of view, there is no meaningful way to put any access controls in place other than server admins choosing to un-federate any misbehaving servers and create their own little bubble. And cutting off most of the fediverse would defeat the point of having one. Making the information public kind of is the point of putting it on the web on a public url without authentication. Don't do that if you don't want it. And think twice before you publish something you are not comfortable with sharing in public. Not that hard. But yes, it's a matter of time before these things get crawled, scraped, etc. by all sorts of media organizations, marketing companies, etc. Once you have a critical mass of people who are relatively well educated, with disposable income, etc. any self respecting spammer, advertiser, marketing person, etc. is going to want to be all over this. The fact they haven't shown up yet (at least not a lot) has nothing to do with access controls, just with a lack of critical mass. The fediverse just wasn't that interesting until people started showing up a few months ago. Now we suddenly have people like Tim Bray and other tech influencers showing up. The more clued in linked in junkies are already getting mastodon accounts. That kind of is the point of a good public forum. These people will want to be a part of it. There are technical solutions of course but they are going to have to involve making mastodon more like a federated signal/telegram, which does not seem to exist just yet. Mastodon just isn't it. Encryption is what you need if you want things to stay private. Of course it doesn't prevent anyone with their own modified client making some modifications that archives the plain text after decryption and information leaking that way. But it would be a lot harder to scrape everything. You basically have to infiltrate every group you want to scrape. Mastodon with some crypto added would be nice though. The mistake with email was that pgp usage never caught on (too complicated to manage for most people to bother). Signing message content would be a nice start for mastodon. It would allow people to build reputations and verify that messages are coming from who they claim to be. Impersonating people is a thing on Twitter. Without message signatures, it's going to be a thing on mastodon too. And the nice thing with reputations is that they are a great basis for filtering too. If enough servers flag a particular public signature, they might just decline to accept content by that particular signature. Or accept it but filter it out of the public feed by default.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Does Mastodon have something to the effect of robots.txt (or is robots.txt already robust enough to express an answer to the question "This site administrator is willing to have these toots indexed for search?") At the end of the day, it's a federation protocol. The protocol's creator can have an opinion on whether things should be indexed for search, but it's up to users of the protocol, not the protocol's creator, how it's used. (... and I have to comment on this bit from the article. "The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets." This heavily implies that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers can't just build that for their own purposes, which would, of course, ignore robots.txt settings).
- LightHugger 4y ago
  We're already seeing massive searchability problems from the mass migration of communities to discord servers, it's not a good thing and doesn't make anyone safer. The choice of bogeymen makes me suspect the motivation is insincere, though.
  - gkmcd 4y ago
    It's not insincere. Many of the early adopters were social (queer, trans, furry) or political minorities (socialists, anarchists). They adopted Mastodon because they were sick of being targeted on Twitter and other centralized platforms. I can understand very much why they are protective of their space.
    - boyter 4y ago
      Which is why they should move to allow-list federation, and only allow in other instances they can firstly check to ensure it won't happen again.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Yeah there are vanishingly few online queer spaces not on Discord for pretty much this reason. The ability for server admins to bring down the banhammer and actually moderate bad behavior rather than leaving it to central platform moderators that do nothing about all but the most blatant harassment. Semi-public semi-searchable discourse is really quite nice when your aim is to not have the spotlight on you. Because there are unfortunately people that actively search for people to target and being on Discord makes that in practice impossible.
TechBro8615 4y ago
There is a story [0] from November doing the rounds on Twitter today (but which was flagged on HN) that does a good job of expanding on why there is no search function on Mastodon. Namely, it's* full of child porn, or "lolicon" which is drawn child porn, illegal in many Western nations but not in Japan. In the words of Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko: > Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to negative social dynamics I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? I did find this 2017 GitHub issue [1] to be slightly less inflammatory and full of fruitful discussion about legal implications of caching strategies for media content on Mastodon instances. [0] https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847 * "It" being the wider fediverse, where the 2nd and 3rd most popular instances allow "lolicon" content (which is illegal in many jurisdictions). Of course not all of Mastodon is filled with this, but all it takes is an obsessive minority to poison the grapevine with a large amount of content. Also, you can expect generative AI to lead to even more of this stuff.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- timbray 4y ago
  It's well-known where the Lolicon is (pawoo.net and mastodon.jp and some others) and all the mainstream instances have de-federated from those places. Email is also full of disgusting stuff but nobody is going to abandon email because it's "full of child porn", although we all know perfectly well that there's lots of that stuff being emailed around. Well-run Masto instances are actually pretty safe and pleasant spaces these days.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  > I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not the case.
jacooper 4y ago
Use a private group chat, and it can be decentralized too using matrix! The fediverse is a public protocol, and indexing public content is fair use(ML is not indexing, its very different), so any kind of licensing won't matter. Discovery is already crap in mastodon and the fediverse in general, please don't stop people from improving it. It may look like eternal September for fediverse natives, but that's what going mainstream is like, don't like it? Create something with some kind of intentional barrier like HN to stop the masses from joining. I find the fear about getting doxed and having your words watched and used against you from fediverse natives very funny, because I guarantee you that most of them support cancel culture. In general I find old fediverse communities too fragile, one example are the crazy content warnings(just mute words and topics you don't like, simple!) and now this.
kornhole 4y ago
I have been living in the fediverse for years and have adapted this strategy I think can work for most people: -I have a real ID account with my picture and link back to my domain web page. I approve the followers to keep it to mainly people I know and trust. I post mainly to followers only or post publicly rather mundane information that I would not mind coming up in a deep background check. -I have another anonymous account where I am most active and can express political and other views publicly without worry. I tell some of my friends of this account to follow after they have found my real ID one.
nine_k 4y ago
I don't trust any "private" settings in any public social networks, for anything remotely serious. Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. Were I not be comfortable with that, I won't post it. I consider all "private" or "limited" posting provisions on all social networks as paper walls at best, one small devops or SWE mistake from being torn and becoming visible to public. Maybe I'm overshooting a bit, but my past experience shows that it's not much of an exaggeration. So I never use any "private" features and post everything I ever post as openly as possible. Social media is a colander. Expect anything and everything to leak. Embrace being public. If you want something with more real privacy, as in not likely to leak if all parties involved take reasonable care, use something that was built with privacy in mind, like, IDK, Signal, or maybe a private Telegram chat, or a private Mastodon instance only accessible through a VPN which you personally and competently operate. Of course it's unlikely to hide you from state-level actors, but at least it's more likely to protect you from simple operator blunders.
- _cenw 4y ago
  > Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. You misunderstand. It's layered defense / minimizing exposure. Nobody is suggesting it can't be done, but it not going to be normalized in the current Fediverse, and most potential attackers do not care enough to build throw own search engine. The main reason is quite clearly stated in the article, and I'm not sure if you didn't see it or just don't care because you're not affected. > And, if you’re vulnerable, attack you, shame you, doxx you, SWAT you, try to kill you. A lot of people that are being targeted by the likes of KF or Libs of Tik Tok find nice comfortable corners on the Fedivserse because they're not immediately discoverable by someone typing their name into Google.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Sorry, I do understand. I think that the particular fortress of highly private communication on a network designed for publishing and dissemination cannot be defended efficiently. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but my last 25 years of experience with social networks of all sorts, from early IRC and web chats to what we have today tells me to keep my current security stance. Anything on a social network has a very high chance of a public exposure, one way or another. For the defense in depth / layered defense to work, the initial assumptions should be different. They should be like Signal's, not like Mastodon's. The whole approach should be paranoid about not letting things seep through by any chance at all. I don't think that such an approach would be seen as productive by most users and developers. So, I view various access control settings in networks like Mastodon as a convenience filter, not as a security mechanism. > not immediately discoverable This is actually both important and achievable! If you never post your public identity, and things which easily link you to your public identity, it's pretty hard to doxx you and harass you IRL, even if everything you publish were publicly accessible. If you don't advertise your presence where everybody is looking, you have a good chance of not being harassed online, because the harassers won't try hard enough to infiltrate remote corners of the internet. A reliable pseudonymous identity is a great mechanism, if you maintain reasonable opsec. I just won't expect a great level of insulation of your content from fellow pseudonymous users, and occasionally even from general public.
subradios 4y ago
[flagged]
bawolff 4y ago
> [talking about licenses] I’m pretty sure I’m missing important dimensions. I think they are missing fair use. IANAL but it seems unlikely that you need permission to do full text search if you only display snippets. Honestly the whole copyright part seems misplaced. Ask the movie industry how well copyrighgt has worked to prevent people from sharing movies. If the concern is malicious people violating privacy, copyright is the wrong tool. Although what the author is describing sounds more like a contract than copyright.
timbray 4y ago
Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics. Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price. There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Realistically, what's going to happen with "courts and legislation" is that anyone who wants to do scraping will simply operate from the jurisdiction where it's legal. That's the crucial difference between regulating roads or restaurants, and regulating stuff on the Internet, at least in the absence of Great National Firewalls.
- miracle2k 4y ago
  I don't really get the proposal. Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon? If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted? Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?
  - saurik 4y ago
    This is covered in the article and what is missing is a login wall, due to the legal precedents being set in (as one example) the LinkedIn case.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
I am saddened but not surprised at the lack of nuance in these comments. I also think the author is missing some things. We take it for granted now that the public-ness of online content is very nearly binary: it's either public, and therefore hyper-public, globally accessible, indexed, searchable, publicly archived forever, or it is private. But this binary is artificial. Why can't we have things in-between? Perhaps it's easier to understand if we make a real-world analogy. In the real world, there are public spaces where people interact and their interactions are, in general, not recorded, not remembered, not noticed. I can walk to my local public square and scream as much as I like about politics, and only people physically present there can hear me. If I say something strange enough, someone might film me and upload it to the internet, but that's an active choice. Almost everything that happens in these traditional public spaces does not have the hyper-publicity of web content. Likewise, I can have a casual conversation with a friend while walking in a public space, and people standing close to us might hear, they could even join in, but it's very unlikely that conversation will end up in the historical record. By contrast, while something like Twitter bills itself as a public square, it is nothing like it: no public square has cameras and microphones permanently fixed on it that globally broadcast everything happening there and pick up even the faintest voices. It really stretches the traditional conception of publicity. Previously, only celebrities and politicians had the misfortune of history's eyes being permanently fixed on them; what does “public figure” mean now? Meanwhile, the web's conception of private is also an extreme. Conversations that nobody else can overhear and join are the only other option. So, isn't publicly fetchable, but not indexable, content a reasonable compromise? Now, certainly, the fact that there is no technical barrier to indexing means this is, you could say, privacy through obscurity. But that is true of almost all real-world privacy! It doesn't make it meaningless. I also must reject the idea that because things can be indexed and archived, that they should be, especially when it goes against an explicitly expressed desire by affected users. Is mass surveillance only a problem when it is done in secret by a state? The fact bad actors can't be stopped is a strange excuse as well. The world we live in is held together by the fact that most people, most of the time, act in good faith, even though they know a minority do not. If people gave up on caring because other people don't, there would be no society. Finally: the legal aspect of the blog is such a strange attempt at proposing a solution. The fediverse is a system run by volunteers and its enemies (to be crude) are also generally volunteers, and the harms involved are generally at the micro, individual level (even if in aggregate they can be big), rather than having big corporate price tags attached. Licences are almost meaningless because almost nobody is taking anyone to court. The law cannot solve social problems like these.
boyter 4y ago
Author of Mastinator here which was linked in the article. Also its back online, so if you want to start testing your implementation it should work for you. I will be adding more functionality as I go. While search is a problem, I think the bigger problem with the fediverse is expectations. People expect that their "follower" only posts are only shown to their followers. However you can get them anyway through so many other ways, its literally ludicrous that people expect anything they post to only be delivered to their followers. Boosting posts within Mastodon transmits them to federated servers, and this is by design. My point has always been that if you play in a federated system, where you literally distribute your posts to anyone who requests them, you have to accept once it leaves your server you have lost all control. To then complain someone is getting that post is naive. That's the federated system working as intended. If you don't want it public, don't distributed it via a public system. I don't know if people were told otherwise, but they seem to be under the impression their content is fully under their control in the fediverse, when it is far from the case. Deletes/Edits of content are "should" in the spec, meaning yes people should do it, they are under no obligation to do so. The only reaction the fediverse has to anyone they dislike is to block, and in some cases harass people till they leave. That wont work long term, and it isn't working now. Despite being blocked by hundreds of instances Mastinator is still getting thousands of posts an hour delivered to it, including posts from instances that blocked it because someone who is federated with those instances has not blocked mastinator and someone boosted it. The current "elders" of the fediverse want to keep their behaviors and cultures. Which is fine. They should do so by having their own allow-listed federation, not accepting any follow request, or totally de-federating. They should not be bullying others into accepting their behavior. Not only does it not work now, its really not going to work once Tumblr, Flickr and others start integrating, as they will have enough people on that they will be the majority and they will make the rules.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  This quote from Eugen is about CWs, but I think it applies here too: “… It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.” - https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691
fattybob 4y ago
Looking at the negative opinions on mastodon , my take is that it’s only bad for writers (some may say spammers) who seem to want to subject the world to their writing (perhaps spam) and not leave a choice to the user. I prefer to keep things somewhat as they are, if I want to find some spam, I can go looking for it, if I want to find a blogger, same, it’s just a matter of looking at the local and global fields and maybe public figures should simply publish their id’s in their web page for people to find. Not having a stream filled with spam or stuff I’m simply not interested in (I can look at the local and global streams elsewhere) is what I would call efficiency in this type of app.
- TylerE 4y ago
  It’s negative for me because I don’t find much very interesting going on there. Very few of the Twitter posters I follow (mostly really anoraky military history stuff) have moved over, and the few that have aren’t posting nearly as much.
sneak 4y ago
I never got so many death threats from strangers as I did when I wrote a spider for Mastodon. Then everyone defederated my single user instance, as if that would stop an unauthenticated web crawler. The idea that you could publish something on the web and expect it to stay private is insane.
- _as31 4y ago
  Harassment and toxicity on Mastodon is a very real thing indeed.
  - boyter 4y ago
    Can attest to that. The worst online interactions I have had are on it.
nigamanth 4y ago
If mastodon is fully private then how will they get money from their application? Social Media networks can only get money by ads or by selling the user's data, and ads could potentially track the user's data. Which companies just say NO to getting more profits, every company wants to expand so I don't see why mastodon should promise private access to content when it's really not.
- Matumio 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean. People on mastodon tend to donate to their server admins. Also, this seems pretty okay for now: https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon
INTPenis 4y ago
My ToS on my mastodon instance has said the same thing for 4 years. Everything you post on Mastodon should be considered public information. Case closed.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. [Snip] The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets. The author implies GG/KF/4chan/whatever are incapable of writing their own scraping tools specifically for the purposes of harassment.
laughingman2 4y ago
Farcaster(farcaster.xyz) is working towards sufficiently decentralised social network (https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...). It aims to have a model where server admins don't get the power to prevent users from following one another.
laughingman2 4y ago
Worth checking out farcaster (farcaster.xyz). They are working towards a solution where things are "sufficiently decentralised". The server admins can't prevent users from following one another etc. https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...
kuba-orlik 4y ago
But wait, isn't Google already indexing the Fediverse? Public posts are available through http without auth... so I find it hard to understand the opposition from the admins described in this article. What am I missing?
- _as31 4y ago
  Google is indeed already indexing the Fediverse. A Fediverse long-timer I've talked to justified this by saying that Mastodon is "more like speaking" and websites are "more like publishing". However, I pointed out that IndieWeb and influencers exist too. Personally, I am unconvinced by the long-timer's argument. I believe that if you are against Fediverse crawlers ethically, you must be against web crawlers as well, and indeed I spent months without Google, DDG, or any other crawler-based search -- StackOverflow tags, Wikipedia and bookmarks were my friends. It was an enlightening experience, but I now hold the reverse position.
thom 4y ago
Only architecture astronauts care about the fediverse, and by extension how search works on Mastodon. Normal people just wanted a Twitter clone when Twitter started to feel icky or doomed. It doesn’t speak to the platform’s long term growth if basic functionality like this is controversial, especially if it leads to fragmentation. There’s obviously some value to conservatism here - I suspect for most people, Twitter was feature complete years ago and didn’t need more doodads. But search was certainly a core part of that.
- NoboruWataya 4y ago
  Mastodon isn't a public company or a VC-funded startup. It doesn't need perpetual user growth, nor, I suspect, do many of its current users or developers particularly want that. At most it just needs a critical mass of people who are interested in what it has to offer so that it doesn't die as a project/community. I don't use Mastodon (or Twitter) but it seems to me like Mastodon was never really intended to be a pure Twitter clone, and what "normal people" want in this regard isn't really relevant. What's the point in trying to emulate a platform that feels icky and doomed, anyway?
  - thom 4y ago
    I don't use Twitter or Mastodon either, I'm happy spewing my terrible opinions here. But for those that remain, you're absolutely right it needs that critical mass of high quality content (for myriad definitions of quality), positive interactions, and reach. I'm just saying that from a purely utilitarian point of view, the sum total of disappointment will be higher for users if Mastodon's momentum disappears, compared to that of people who have ideological objections to Mastodon having a functional search engine. If nobody cares about that, well, then welcome to the fediverse I guess.
skerit 4y ago
I remember a few months ago some people were already sharpening their pitchforks because Eugen implemented a change that would make local search results a bit more relevant if the instance wasn't using Elasticsearch.
rsynnott 4y ago
> A server should deliver posts only to people logged into the instance, or to other instances it is federated with. This feels like maybe not an unreasonable _default_, but I certainly don't think it should be mandatory. If a user wants to publish something on the internet, it's reasonable for them to be able to do that.
Zak 4y ago
I think people who don't want search are underestimating how prevalent it already is. Mastodon itself officially supports Elasticsearch, but it isn't turned on by default and the UI limits what can be searched. I'm not sure if that's for social reasons or just to make installing a server easier, but there's no "never federate to servers with ES enabled" setting. Friendica has full-text search as well, and I imagine there are others. Machine-readable copyright licenses as the author suggests could be very useful for situations where legitimate for-profit companies start federating their services. Perhaps I don't want Flickr[0] to show advertisements next to my photos that I share from a self-hosted Mastodon server, for example. I could apply a license that forbids that and have a good chance of enforcing it in court. They're not a good fit for dealing with bad actors though. If somebody sets up fedisearch.ru fed by legitimate-looking public servers, they're probably beyond the reach of the courts I have access to. [0] The CEO of Flickr has publicly pondered adding ActivityPub support.
jcarrano 4y ago
"please resist finding ways to scrape the fediverse" that is 100% burying your head in the sand, 100%.

240 points by AndrewDucker 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

This idea that you create privacy by leaving the search feature out of the software is silly. Yes, to some extent security through obscurity does work, and trying to maintain an anti-sharing culture might reduce the spread of your information. But is that really what you want to rely on? The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). In both cases, you're crippling the software to add an illusory safeguard, which doesn't actually stop bad actors from having access to your posts and hence the ability to record and rebroadcast them. You know who got the system right? Facebook. Private by default, but the user can decide exactly who can see each of their digital objects. It's easy to define groups of friends, allow sharing to friends-of-friends, one person, the whole world, whatever. The concept of friends (bilateral agreement to share information) makes way more sense than this "follow" thing. I want my open-source, federated, Facebook already. Edit: Although, I did just have a flashback to when Facebook announced Graph Search... which lasted about a week until searches that actually worked were deemed creepy and they backpedaled into the stone age. It's so frustrating how these technologies succeed or fail based on fashion rather than technical merit.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Interestingly, I find Facebook friend groups a complete dark pattern ever since the days of Google plus. G+ circle were super easy to create, maintain, split, divide, merge, manipulate, and - and this was brilliant - share. FB groups by comparison seem hidden, obfuscated and unmaintainable. Creating a new list or updating an old one is a complete pain with poor screen usage, poor or non existent gestures, control, actions, searches, let alone regexes etc. They exist... But it feels FB has gone out of its way to hide and obfuscate them. Is my experience weird?
- Groxx 4y ago
  FB is very clearly deeply invested in convincing people to over-share by accident or habit, yeah. It makes their network more addictive, and they know it, so they press that button as hard as possible while building things that technically satisfy niches. --- I quite liked G+'s focus on choosing your audience. Because you have sub-groups even within small, tightly-knit friend groups; when you raise that number into the hundreds it's only more true, not less. It was a mostly-effective UX for embracing that, and it led to my feed being dramatically more relevant. Mastodon is filling a similar purpose for me, lately. The server you join has a pretty powerful impact on your local timeline - join a couple, use them as targeted sharing / browsing groups, and it's working much better for me than any algorithmic sorting ever did.
  - invig 4y ago
    G+'s implementation kind of broke communities though? Each individual having their own personal view of their circles meant that you couldn't reliably know which of your friends had seen the stuff your reading. That makes it really hard to talk about (Hey did you see X?, no what's X? Oh... oops?). I like the theory of being able to organise my relationships into nice little buckets, but that's absolutely not how social things work.
    - Groxx 4y ago
      Somewhat, yeah. Personally I'd like to let people define their own publishing "topics" and let people select which ones they want to follow.[1] "Did you see X" is largely killed by algorithmic feeds though IMO, which makes it somewhat irrelevant for any full-scale heavily-used network. Facebook is a prime example - important updates frequently are not seen by many close friends, because Facebook chose to not show them. Assuming nobody knows anything specific has kinda become the norm, sadly. [1]: Obviously many will not, but that's fine. By following them you just get an unfiltered stream. But many of my friends couldn't care less about what programming language of the week I'm looking at (because they're not techy), or what nearby events I'm going to (because they're 1000 miles away) and I'm very much the sort of person who will categorize that for them so they aren't flooded with things they won't be able to join in on. Hashtags are kinda like a crappy in-band version of this, and I have yet to see a system embrace them for this purpose. They're basically always for public purposes, which is part of why you need to use a million near-identical ones to actually get good coverage.
invig 4y ago
You can't really make that either though. Facebook itself can see everything. As soon as you federate that all the admins can see everything and nothing is private. You could try and encrypt it down to the user level but a person added to a group would only see the content added from that point forward (the ability to decrypt would be defined at the time of the post, and new people could never read it). The only way around that would be centralised key management which defeats the whole point. This is one of those problems where it's probably better to just use Facebook.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Oh. Good point about the admins. I somehow missed that.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    Just look at the 'Twitter Files'. It's not great that Elon can access anyone's private messages. It's a great tool to blackmail people.
- LamaOfRuin 4y ago
  I believe that option 2, where it relies on individual encryption at the cost of reading history, is how matrix does it (or can do it if chosen).
- neodymiumphish 4y ago
  Actually, I don't think this is right. The creator of a group or "shared to group Y" chat/posts can generate a shared key for use within that limited friend group. Their individual posts would be encrypted validated by their own private key, but all posts among the group would also be encrypted against the group chat. Struggle here would be that anyone who gets the shared key would have access to view and potentially add to the group.
  - mrtesthah 4y ago
    Signal's encrypted group chat management was recently made more robust and may be instructive: https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/ https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
pavon 4y ago
> The other bad pseudo-privacy idea is time-limited posts ("stories" or snapchat or whatever). That one addresses a real threat-model - someone who was your friend and whom you trusted at the time you sent the post, but has since turned against you. That is quite common among teens, which is the main demographic these social networks are targeting. Rather than them having a permanent record of all your online interactions since you met including embarrassing photographs, it just becomes he-said-she-said like it has been for ages, unless they were actively subverting the program to archive content while you were still friends, which is rare.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Fair point.
- tonypace 4y ago
  It's not that rare, but releasing a ton of this kind of screenshot makes you look very untrustworthy.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

invig 4y ago

I don't understand how a license is supposed to prevent people from doing bad things with your content. Does the not-so-nice guy in Russia care that he's infringing on your license? I think Mastodon makes the correct call (everything here is public, because it's impossible for it not to be and still have the service be what it is), and the community wants a square circle. Yay activists.

pavon 4y ago
I don't think you can split the thinking into those two groups, when the maintainers of the large instances that are pushing back against search are also lead developers.

mattlondon 4y ago

Clearly the solution involves web 3.0 Blockchain to provide irrefutable evidence of ownership of each post, with an off-chain oracle providing per-post licenses in machine-readable formats. </sarcasm> ...or you know don't say stuff in public if you don't want it to be seen by others. This is - and always has been - Internet 101 stuff: assume that the internet never forgets, and don't say anything publicly if you'd rather not see it on the front page of a newspaper. I guess each new generation needs to learn that there are bad people out there, and computers make finding a needle in a haystack trivial.

invig 4y ago
I think it's kind of worse than that. It's not an education problem. People are intentionally using this stuff to talk publicly about an issue. They just don't like the consequences of that.
- jacooper 4y ago
  I think the problem is its public for way longer than people are used to, its like Snowden said, a permanent record. You could've tweeted something 10 years ago with an anonymous account, and called it a day. Yet, after more than a decade it can crash your life because you got caught by stylometry analysis. This certainly applies to HN even more.

jrm4 4y ago

This article echoes what strikes me as a really silly sentiment that I also see on Mastodon because it strikes me as antithetical to Mastodon. The point of the service is to "spread the things you say most everywhere." That is the design. It's literally designed to do what the opposite of "privacy" is. And yet, here we are. I'm sorry, but these kind of discussions to me sound like "What if we could have email, except your posts don't go to any other person, you just read them yourself?" I mean, you could use gmail to do this. It would technically work. But it's not what it's designed for, and much better ways to do this already exist.

m-p-3 4y ago
But on the other hand you have a popular platform, with a lot of people who can help, and with which some people are already used to, that you could deploy internally and use as some sort of internal messageboard that can be easily used from anywhere, with an official and third-party mobile apps already available.
- jrm4 4y ago
  That's fine, but I'm pretty sure that's not the design/use the author is talking about.
nightpool 4y ago
I think it's more like "What if you could have email, but your posts only go to the people you want them to?" I think that's pretty easy with Gmail, for the most part, but with Mastodon it's harder because it inverts that control—anyone can follow you (or send a follow request), and it's harder to police every follower individually. This is combined with the fact that most accounts are available anonymously on the web, but it's not really necessary (many are not, for instance, and even the ones that are aren't really convenient to access that way—for bad-faith actors, it's more convenient to sign up for an account on mastodon.social or some other "well known" server and then find posts that way by browsing timelines).
- jrm4 4y ago

tedunangst 4y ago

Wait until you hear about how followers only posts actually work. An analogy would be Microsoft can't figure out how to get email addressing to work in Outlook, so they send every email to every server, and then Exchange does some magic filtering and tells Outlook which of the emails in your inbox should be visible. Then somebody writes an alternative SMTP server that allows viewing of these hidden messages, and Microsoft sues them.

Ciantic 4y ago
Hmm, to my knowledge, followers only posts are ActivityPub feature, where you just shovel the message to inboxes of just followers. It is not sending it to all servers? It's also possible to send messages to part of the followers as well, some instances like qoto.org support circles. You make circles from your followers and post to just them. I wouldn't call these privacy features, but ability for sender to choose what it wants to say for certain group of followers.
- password4321 4y ago
  I believe followers-only posts are sent to all servers with at least one follower.
  - Ciantic 4y ago
    That is given, how else could it work? This is pub/sub, it's not pull based, so every time you release something it is pushed to the subscribers, your followers servers. I would like to have a bit of pull based things as well, but ActivityPub is not built for it. Even though it's pushed to a server, doesn't mean it goes to everyone in that server.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      Even though it's pushed to a server, doesn't mean it goes to everyone in that server. Right, the issue being raised is that there's nothing preventing it from going to everyone on the server except the server being nice about it.

kfsnd 4y ago

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. Yes, Mastodon traffic either is already or soon will be captured and filed permanently as in forever Correct. This is something I and several others have been doing for some time now. We have a private search engine that covers most of the Mastodon fediverse (including widely defederated instances), and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Eventually, we'll give this data to the Internet Archive or put it in a torrent or something. It includes a decent amount of now-deleted content too. Really, it's no different to what others, e.g. Pushshift, are doing with other sites. Except there's no opt-out. Anything you've already said is almost certainly in our data set, and it's there permanently. > That’s extremely hard to prevent but isn’t really the problem: The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets. Also correct. A couple of KFers we know already have access to search the data we've collected. It points them towards interesting posts or accounts to archive. People say some pretty wild things when they think they're not being recorded for posterity!

akuchling 4y ago
So, among the first people you give access to the search are some known harassers? Sharp thinking, there.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I mean, look at the facts: - permanently archiving posts they know people don’t want them to - gave early access to known trolls - is now publicly crowing about how there’s nothing you can do about it - on a throwaway, because like most bullies they’re cowards Personally, I’m left wondering if there needs to be an organized crime investigation into KF, for organized harassment campaigns which violate local stalking or other laws, and the role people like this account play in orchestrating it. I think there’s be a certain irony to HN’s record of this comment being used to prosecute an accomplice in organized crime.
  - BryantD 4y ago
    I mean, "kfsnd." KF. They're not exactly hiding who they are.

michaelmrose 4y ago

Child Porn is a huge image problem that can only be solved by governments in the relevant jurisdictions. Search makes this image problem drastically worse. Lots of discussion about what privacy means no discussion about the elephant in the room. Networks that make acceptable use a choose your own adventure for instance by allowing people to self host and set policy on their own server end up with some people using it for things that the rest of planet earth doesn't find acceptable. For instance I'm certain that common web frameworks and servers are used to promote things both odious and illegal but because that machinery is invisible to most users the blame accrues entirely to the criminal. With Mastodon the branding makes it possible for the blame to accrue to Mastodon as opposed merely the criminal because people are more apt to understand Mastodon as an open source twitter as opposed to a tool like Apache. Whereas this problem accrues to Mastodon the tool is in no position to dictate how users use the tool the relevant governments are and if prosecution becomes common hiding illegal porn from prying eyes will be done by the users themselves. If Mastodon suggests not federating with servers in countries that don't handle this issue eg Japan then search will tend to show off less negative content and indeed countries can be shamed into handling such issues better.

Ciantic 4y ago

Eugen Rochko, the developer of Mastodon had written about Search that if it comes it should be for the home timeline and own posts. It would help a little bit, at least you'd find old posts from people you follow. It would suit some, but since this is federated, there are already instances with a search like qoto.org with a full-text search. It's really odd that they made "no index" checkbox, but it's not cool to index. If they thought it is unpopular they should have made indexing opt-in not opt-out. Going forward this will be instance specific thing, a lot of people want to be able to do searches.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

> People should be able to converse without their every word landing on a permanent global un-erasable indexed public record. Call me crazy. Sure, and they should use Signal instead of publishing their conversations and then getting mad when they turn out to be publicly available.

tensor 4y ago
This is my position too. What I'm looking for in a twitter alternative is something public that I can post to the entire world, and search. If I want to post to my friends I already use Signal and vastly prefer that to something like Mastodon. The add the extra complexity of follower only things and instances and I just don't understand who this service is aim at other than the people who created it. Hence, to me, it is and will always be some niche thing (that isn't terribly interesting to me). All that said I still read these threads because there needs to be a good twitter alternative.
sneak 4y ago
I don't think it is reasonable to expect Signal groupchats with more than n participants to stay private, where n is more than 5 and less than 20. Android malware is a thing and Signal Desktop does not encrypt anything at rest on disk.
Spivak 4y ago
I do think I should be able to post something publicly and not have it indexed by search engines. If someone screencaps it or copy/pastes it fine but the original should live on the dark web. This is one of those things that tech needs think is pointless when in reality opting out of search indexing drops your visibility to nothing which is good for making sure your posts don’t “break containment.” Unless you’re a public figure or social media influencer having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > having a post tied to your IRL identity blow up is usually a bad thing Well... Then be careful with what you post tied to your real identity. I have separate accounts for separate use cases. My main on Reddit, for example, can (very) easily be doxxed so I hardly post anything controversial on that account. Through all the recent data leaks it's getting even easier to dox people based on screen names too. I'm even considering getting a PO box next time I move house, just to decrease the chances of my home address ending up in a data dump.

jefftk 4y ago

> I can imagine finer-grained exclusions, such as allowing full-text indexing but only for accounts on the same instance, or allowing use for search but no other applications. (No ML model building!) I think it's unlikely that you can prevent ML model building with a carefully designed license. The most common legal position (though not something that has been tested in court yet) is that training models is sufficiently transformative to count as fair use, and does not require any sort of license to the data. You can see this in all the state of the art tools that are trained on all the publicly available data that they can scrape, without regard for license: translation (text), GPT-3 (text), Stable Diffusion etc (images), Co-Pilot (code). For preventing trolling and harassment a licensing approach is an even worse fit, since those are not people who care about respecting licenses.

LamaOfRuin 4y ago
None of those tools have actually been legally tested, and there is a reason much of it has been using data sets laundered through academics.The companies behind them know this is not at all a given, and academics make for more sympathetic defendants than billionaires. Transformative use, as one part of a fair use consideration, is a defense against copyright infringement. The proposal is to first require agreement to a separate license before even being able to access the content. This is an additional layer, which may or may not be enforceable but would definitely establish either negligence or intent, and also brings things like unauthorized access into it. The fact that all of this also includes huge amounts of PII means that in a growing number of jurisdictions misuse of it will not be protected by any copyright exceptions. It would be an endless battle to stop smaller abusers, but you could definitely prevent GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, and Co-Pilot, since they are all coming out of well-defined legal entities with assets and identifiable humans to go after.
- _as31 4y ago
  There are jurisdictions (the EU, the UK, Singapore, Japan) with copyright exceptions specifically for text and data mining for AI purposes. https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-up-in-singapore-new-copyright-exception-for-text-and-data-mining https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-u...

friend_and_foe 4y ago

How I see it: any and all attempts to kneecap user functionality is shameful, anything that you're relying on goodwill for will fail miserably and be exploited. If your plan for handling a full text search of the network is to browbeat the developer into not doing it your days are numbered. If your plan for keeping your words private is to put them publicly on the internet and then call people Nazis or whatever for looking at them without your permission you're not very bright.

tptacek 4y ago

It's also unethical to make promises to users, like privacy for posts published to a semipublic social network, that software can't possibly keep. It's going to be interesting watching the norms of the fediverse collide with the expectations of ordinary software users. Mastodon and ActivityPub have a lot of promise as an alternative to centralized social networks, and there are good reasons to use them even if you don't buy into the ethos of the fediverse. If Mastodon is going anywhere, those users will soon drastically outnumber the keepers of the fediverse norms.

jancsika 4y ago
> there are good reasons to use them What is one of them?
- tptacek 4y ago
  The medium is better for expressing thoughts (you can write a decent-sized blog post in a single Mastodon post). It has most of the effective bits of Twitter, and many of the effective bits of the peak, RSS-soaked blogosphere. If the tooling gets better, I can see it being better than the golden age of Google Reader. It also makes sense that you can stand up your own Mastodon, in the same sense as you could stand up WordPress back in the day. Most people won't, but the fact that you can, and that the ability to do so is baked into protocol, keeps development interesting. It also makes it more interesting for third party clients, which Twitter has spent the last decade trying to eradicate. So that's a second (and probably third) reason. Perhaps ironically, these are also reasons that I think the norms of the "fediverse" aren't going to matter in the long term. I think the software approach is important, and the notion of a single "decentralized social network" is not.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    I thought you were giving reasons for "ordinary software users" to go out and use Mastodon in its current form. I was hoping that perhaps their shitshow onboarding UX got updated to accommodate the influx of users over the past few weeks. Nope-- they just changed the "Create Account" link to "Apply for Account" in their hall of instances. :( But regarding Mastodon as a potential alternative to the the current centralized social networks-- fair enough. I even saw recently that Ted Unangst even made a stripped-down Mastodon server in Go which I'd like to check out when I get a chance.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

From a technical point of view, there is no meaningful way to put any access controls in place other than server admins choosing to un-federate any misbehaving servers and create their own little bubble. And cutting off most of the fediverse would defeat the point of having one. Making the information public kind of is the point of putting it on the web on a public url without authentication. Don't do that if you don't want it. And think twice before you publish something you are not comfortable with sharing in public. Not that hard. But yes, it's a matter of time before these things get crawled, scraped, etc. by all sorts of media organizations, marketing companies, etc. Once you have a critical mass of people who are relatively well educated, with disposable income, etc. any self respecting spammer, advertiser, marketing person, etc. is going to want to be all over this. The fact they haven't shown up yet (at least not a lot) has nothing to do with access controls, just with a lack of critical mass. The fediverse just wasn't that interesting until people started showing up a few months ago. Now we suddenly have people like Tim Bray and other tech influencers showing up. The more clued in linked in junkies are already getting mastodon accounts. That kind of is the point of a good public forum. These people will want to be a part of it. There are technical solutions of course but they are going to have to involve making mastodon more like a federated signal/telegram, which does not seem to exist just yet. Mastodon just isn't it. Encryption is what you need if you want things to stay private. Of course it doesn't prevent anyone with their own modified client making some modifications that archives the plain text after decryption and information leaking that way. But it would be a lot harder to scrape everything. You basically have to infiltrate every group you want to scrape. Mastodon with some crypto added would be nice though. The mistake with email was that pgp usage never caught on (too complicated to manage for most people to bother). Signing message content would be a nice start for mastodon. It would allow people to build reputations and verify that messages are coming from who they claim to be. Impersonating people is a thing on Twitter. Without message signatures, it's going to be a thing on mastodon too. And the nice thing with reputations is that they are a great basis for filtering too. If enough servers flag a particular public signature, they might just decline to accept content by that particular signature. Or accept it but filter it out of the public feed by default.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Does Mastodon have something to the effect of robots.txt (or is robots.txt already robust enough to express an answer to the question "This site administrator is willing to have these toots indexed for search?") At the end of the day, it's a federation protocol. The protocol's creator can have an opinion on whether things should be indexed for search, but it's up to users of the protocol, not the protocol's creator, how it's used. (... and I have to comment on this bit from the article. "The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets." This heavily implies that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers can't just build that for their own purposes, which would, of course, ignore robots.txt settings).

LightHugger 4y ago
We're already seeing massive searchability problems from the mass migration of communities to discord servers, it's not a good thing and doesn't make anyone safer. The choice of bogeymen makes me suspect the motivation is insincere, though.
- gkmcd 4y ago
  It's not insincere. Many of the early adopters were social (queer, trans, furry) or political minorities (socialists, anarchists). They adopted Mastodon because they were sick of being targeted on Twitter and other centralized platforms. I can understand very much why they are protective of their space.
  - boyter 4y ago
    Which is why they should move to allow-list federation, and only allow in other instances they can firstly check to ensure it won't happen again.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Yeah there are vanishingly few online queer spaces not on Discord for pretty much this reason. The ability for server admins to bring down the banhammer and actually moderate bad behavior rather than leaving it to central platform moderators that do nothing about all but the most blatant harassment. Semi-public semi-searchable discourse is really quite nice when your aim is to not have the spotlight on you. Because there are unfortunately people that actively search for people to target and being on Discord makes that in practice impossible.

TechBro8615 4y ago

There is a story [0] from November doing the rounds on Twitter today (but which was flagged on HN) that does a good job of expanding on why there is no search function on Mastodon. Namely, it's* full of child porn, or "lolicon" which is drawn child porn, illegal in many Western nations but not in Japan. In the words of Mastodon Founder Eugen Rochko: > Lack of full-text search on general content is intentional, due to negative social dynamics I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? I did find this 2017 GitHub issue [1] to be slightly less inflammatory and full of fruitful discussion about legal implications of caching strategies for media content on Mastodon instances. [0] https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ https://www.secjuice.com/mastodon-child-porn-pedophiles/ [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1847 * "It" being the wider fediverse, where the 2nd and 3rd most popular instances allow "lolicon" content (which is illegal in many jurisdictions). Of course not all of Mastodon is filled with this, but all it takes is an obsessive minority to poison the grapevine with a large amount of content. Also, you can expect generative AI to lead to even more of this stuff.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
timbray 4y ago
It's well-known where the Lolicon is (pawoo.net and mastodon.jp and some others) and all the mainstream instances have de-federated from those places. Email is also full of disgusting stuff but nobody is going to abandon email because it's "full of child porn", although we all know perfectly well that there's lots of that stuff being emailed around. Well-run Masto instances are actually pretty safe and pleasant spaces these days.
OctopusLupid 4y ago
> I guess you could frame this as a privacy argument, but I don't buy that as the primary reason people were upset with "Fedisearch." They were upset because it exposed their communities of lolicon enthusiasts. Do they deserve privacy or is that more of an excuse to keep their content off the radar of law enforcement and out of reach of polite society? From my time speaking to Fediverse long-timers, no, this is not the case.

jacooper 4y ago

Use a private group chat, and it can be decentralized too using matrix! The fediverse is a public protocol, and indexing public content is fair use(ML is not indexing, its very different), so any kind of licensing won't matter. Discovery is already crap in mastodon and the fediverse in general, please don't stop people from improving it. It may look like eternal September for fediverse natives, but that's what going mainstream is like, don't like it? Create something with some kind of intentional barrier like HN to stop the masses from joining. I find the fear about getting doxed and having your words watched and used against you from fediverse natives very funny, because I guarantee you that most of them support cancel culture. In general I find old fediverse communities too fragile, one example are the crazy content warnings(just mute words and topics you don't like, simple!) and now this.

kornhole 4y ago

I have been living in the fediverse for years and have adapted this strategy I think can work for most people: -I have a real ID account with my picture and link back to my domain web page. I approve the followers to keep it to mainly people I know and trust. I post mainly to followers only or post publicly rather mundane information that I would not mind coming up in a deep background check. -I have another anonymous account where I am most active and can express political and other views publicly without worry. I tell some of my friends of this account to follow after they have found my real ID one.

nine_k 4y ago

I don't trust any "private" settings in any public social networks, for anything remotely serious. Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. Were I not be comfortable with that, I won't post it. I consider all "private" or "limited" posting provisions on all social networks as paper walls at best, one small devops or SWE mistake from being torn and becoming visible to public. Maybe I'm overshooting a bit, but my past experience shows that it's not much of an exaggeration. So I never use any "private" features and post everything I ever post as openly as possible. Social media is a colander. Expect anything and everything to leak. Embrace being public. If you want something with more real privacy, as in not likely to leak if all parties involved take reasonable care, use something that was built with privacy in mind, like, IDK, Signal, or maybe a private Telegram chat, or a private Mastodon instance only accessible through a VPN which you personally and competently operate. Of course it's unlikely to hide you from state-level actors, but at least it's more likely to protect you from simple operator blunders.

_cenw 4y ago
> Anything I publish on any social network I'd be also comfortable seeing posted on every wall in foot-tall letters, with my real name attached to it. You misunderstand. It's layered defense / minimizing exposure. Nobody is suggesting it can't be done, but it not going to be normalized in the current Fediverse, and most potential attackers do not care enough to build throw own search engine. The main reason is quite clearly stated in the article, and I'm not sure if you didn't see it or just don't care because you're not affected. > And, if you’re vulnerable, attack you, shame you, doxx you, SWAT you, try to kill you. A lot of people that are being targeted by the likes of KF or Libs of Tik Tok find nice comfortable corners on the Fedivserse because they're not immediately discoverable by someone typing their name into Google.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Sorry, I do understand. I think that the particular fortress of highly private communication on a network designed for publishing and dissemination cannot be defended efficiently. I'd be glad to be proven wrong, but my last 25 years of experience with social networks of all sorts, from early IRC and web chats to what we have today tells me to keep my current security stance. Anything on a social network has a very high chance of a public exposure, one way or another. For the defense in depth / layered defense to work, the initial assumptions should be different. They should be like Signal's, not like Mastodon's. The whole approach should be paranoid about not letting things seep through by any chance at all. I don't think that such an approach would be seen as productive by most users and developers. So, I view various access control settings in networks like Mastodon as a convenience filter, not as a security mechanism. > not immediately discoverable This is actually both important and achievable! If you never post your public identity, and things which easily link you to your public identity, it's pretty hard to doxx you and harass you IRL, even if everything you publish were publicly accessible. If you don't advertise your presence where everybody is looking, you have a good chance of not being harassed online, because the harassers won't try hard enough to infiltrate remote corners of the internet. A reliable pseudonymous identity is a great mechanism, if you maintain reasonable opsec. I just won't expect a great level of insulation of your content from fellow pseudonymous users, and occasionally even from general public.

subradios 4y ago

[flagged]

bawolff 4y ago

> [talking about licenses] I’m pretty sure I’m missing important dimensions. I think they are missing fair use. IANAL but it seems unlikely that you need permission to do full text search if you only display snippets. Honestly the whole copyright part seems misplaced. Ask the movie industry how well copyrighgt has worked to prevent people from sharing movies. If the concern is malicious people violating privacy, copyright is the wrong tool. Although what the author is describing sounds more like a contract than copyright.

timbray 4y ago

Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation. If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics. Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price. There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.

int_19h 4y ago
Realistically, what's going to happen with "courts and legislation" is that anyone who wants to do scraping will simply operate from the jurisdiction where it's legal. That's the crucial difference between regulating roads or restaurants, and regulating stuff on the Internet, at least in the absence of Great National Firewalls.
miracle2k 4y ago
I don't really get the proposal. Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon? If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted? Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?
- saurik 4y ago
  This is covered in the article and what is missing is a login wall, due to the legal precedents being set in (as one example) the LinkedIn case.

TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago

I am saddened but not surprised at the lack of nuance in these comments. I also think the author is missing some things. We take it for granted now that the public-ness of online content is very nearly binary: it's either public, and therefore hyper-public, globally accessible, indexed, searchable, publicly archived forever, or it is private. But this binary is artificial. Why can't we have things in-between? Perhaps it's easier to understand if we make a real-world analogy. In the real world, there are public spaces where people interact and their interactions are, in general, not recorded, not remembered, not noticed. I can walk to my local public square and scream as much as I like about politics, and only people physically present there can hear me. If I say something strange enough, someone might film me and upload it to the internet, but that's an active choice. Almost everything that happens in these traditional public spaces does not have the hyper-publicity of web content. Likewise, I can have a casual conversation with a friend while walking in a public space, and people standing close to us might hear, they could even join in, but it's very unlikely that conversation will end up in the historical record. By contrast, while something like Twitter bills itself as a public square, it is nothing like it: no public square has cameras and microphones permanently fixed on it that globally broadcast everything happening there and pick up even the faintest voices. It really stretches the traditional conception of publicity. Previously, only celebrities and politicians had the misfortune of history's eyes being permanently fixed on them; what does “public figure” mean now? Meanwhile, the web's conception of private is also an extreme. Conversations that nobody else can overhear and join are the only other option. So, isn't publicly fetchable, but not indexable, content a reasonable compromise? Now, certainly, the fact that there is no technical barrier to indexing means this is, you could say, privacy through obscurity. But that is true of almost all real-world privacy! It doesn't make it meaningless. I also must reject the idea that because things can be indexed and archived, that they should be, especially when it goes against an explicitly expressed desire by affected users. Is mass surveillance only a problem when it is done in secret by a state? The fact bad actors can't be stopped is a strange excuse as well. The world we live in is held together by the fact that most people, most of the time, act in good faith, even though they know a minority do not. If people gave up on caring because other people don't, there would be no society. Finally: the legal aspect of the blog is such a strange attempt at proposing a solution. The fediverse is a system run by volunteers and its enemies (to be crude) are also generally volunteers, and the harms involved are generally at the micro, individual level (even if in aggregate they can be big), rather than having big corporate price tags attached. Licences are almost meaningless because almost nobody is taking anyone to court. The law cannot solve social problems like these.

boyter 4y ago

Author of Mastinator here which was linked in the article. Also its back online, so if you want to start testing your implementation it should work for you. I will be adding more functionality as I go. While search is a problem, I think the bigger problem with the fediverse is expectations. People expect that their "follower" only posts are only shown to their followers. However you can get them anyway through so many other ways, its literally ludicrous that people expect anything they post to only be delivered to their followers. Boosting posts within Mastodon transmits them to federated servers, and this is by design. My point has always been that if you play in a federated system, where you literally distribute your posts to anyone who requests them, you have to accept once it leaves your server you have lost all control. To then complain someone is getting that post is naive. That's the federated system working as intended. If you don't want it public, don't distributed it via a public system. I don't know if people were told otherwise, but they seem to be under the impression their content is fully under their control in the fediverse, when it is far from the case. Deletes/Edits of content are "should" in the spec, meaning yes people should do it, they are under no obligation to do so. The only reaction the fediverse has to anyone they dislike is to block, and in some cases harass people till they leave. That wont work long term, and it isn't working now. Despite being blocked by hundreds of instances Mastinator is still getting thousands of posts an hour delivered to it, including posts from instances that blocked it because someone who is federated with those instances has not blocked mastinator and someone boosted it. The current "elders" of the fediverse want to keep their behaviors and cultures. Which is fine. They should do so by having their own allow-listed federation, not accepting any follow request, or totally de-federating. They should not be bullying others into accepting their behavior. Not only does it not work now, its really not going to work once Tumblr, Flickr and others start integrating, as they will have enough people on that they will be the majority and they will make the rules.

OctopusLupid 4y ago
This quote from Eugen is about CWs, but I think it applies here too: “… It's a decentralized network that doesn't belong to any one party, so by definition there is no single culture on it. Different corners have different expectations and customs.” - https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691 https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323056922301691

fattybob 4y ago

Looking at the negative opinions on mastodon , my take is that it’s only bad for writers (some may say spammers) who seem to want to subject the world to their writing (perhaps spam) and not leave a choice to the user. I prefer to keep things somewhat as they are, if I want to find some spam, I can go looking for it, if I want to find a blogger, same, it’s just a matter of looking at the local and global fields and maybe public figures should simply publish their id’s in their web page for people to find. Not having a stream filled with spam or stuff I’m simply not interested in (I can look at the local and global streams elsewhere) is what I would call efficiency in this type of app.

TylerE 4y ago
It’s negative for me because I don’t find much very interesting going on there. Very few of the Twitter posters I follow (mostly really anoraky military history stuff) have moved over, and the few that have aren’t posting nearly as much.

sneak 4y ago

I never got so many death threats from strangers as I did when I wrote a spider for Mastodon. Then everyone defederated my single user instance, as if that would stop an unauthenticated web crawler. The idea that you could publish something on the web and expect it to stay private is insane.

_as31 4y ago
Harassment and toxicity on Mastodon is a very real thing indeed.
- boyter 4y ago
  Can attest to that. The worst online interactions I have had are on it.

nigamanth 4y ago

If mastodon is fully private then how will they get money from their application? Social Media networks can only get money by ads or by selling the user's data, and ads could potentially track the user's data. Which companies just say NO to getting more profits, every company wants to expand so I don't see why mastodon should promise private access to content when it's really not.

Matumio 4y ago
Not sure what you mean. People on mastodon tend to donate to their server admins. Also, this seems pretty okay for now: https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon

INTPenis 4y ago

My ToS on my mastodon instance has said the same thing for 4 years. Everything you post on Mastodon should be considered public information. Case closed.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

> I’m a bit puzzled by that “But people are already doing it” argument. [Snip] The problem would be a public search engine that Gamergaters and Kiwifarmers use to hunt down vulnerable targets. The author implies GG/KF/4chan/whatever are incapable of writing their own scraping tools specifically for the purposes of harassment.

laughingman2 4y ago

Farcaster(farcaster.xyz) is working towards sufficiently decentralised social network (https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...). It aims to have a model where server admins don't get the power to prevent users from following one another.

laughingman2 4y ago

Worth checking out farcaster (farcaster.xyz). They are working towards a solution where things are "sufficiently decentralised". The server admins can't prevent users from following one another etc. https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com/2022/01/11/sufficient-decent...

kuba-orlik 4y ago

But wait, isn't Google already indexing the Fediverse? Public posts are available through http without auth... so I find it hard to understand the opposition from the admins described in this article. What am I missing?

_as31 4y ago
Google is indeed already indexing the Fediverse. A Fediverse long-timer I've talked to justified this by saying that Mastodon is "more like speaking" and websites are "more like publishing". However, I pointed out that IndieWeb and influencers exist too. Personally, I am unconvinced by the long-timer's argument. I believe that if you are against Fediverse crawlers ethically, you must be against web crawlers as well, and indeed I spent months without Google, DDG, or any other crawler-based search -- StackOverflow tags, Wikipedia and bookmarks were my friends. It was an enlightening experience, but I now hold the reverse position.

thom 4y ago

Only architecture astronauts care about the fediverse, and by extension how search works on Mastodon. Normal people just wanted a Twitter clone when Twitter started to feel icky or doomed. It doesn’t speak to the platform’s long term growth if basic functionality like this is controversial, especially if it leads to fragmentation. There’s obviously some value to conservatism here - I suspect for most people, Twitter was feature complete years ago and didn’t need more doodads. But search was certainly a core part of that.

NoboruWataya 4y ago
Mastodon isn't a public company or a VC-funded startup. It doesn't need perpetual user growth, nor, I suspect, do many of its current users or developers particularly want that. At most it just needs a critical mass of people who are interested in what it has to offer so that it doesn't die as a project/community. I don't use Mastodon (or Twitter) but it seems to me like Mastodon was never really intended to be a pure Twitter clone, and what "normal people" want in this regard isn't really relevant. What's the point in trying to emulate a platform that feels icky and doomed, anyway?
- thom 4y ago
  I don't use Twitter or Mastodon either, I'm happy spewing my terrible opinions here. But for those that remain, you're absolutely right it needs that critical mass of high quality content (for myriad definitions of quality), positive interactions, and reach. I'm just saying that from a purely utilitarian point of view, the sum total of disappointment will be higher for users if Mastodon's momentum disappears, compared to that of people who have ideological objections to Mastodon having a functional search engine. If nobody cares about that, well, then welcome to the fediverse I guess.

skerit 4y ago

I remember a few months ago some people were already sharpening their pitchforks because Eugen implemented a change that would make local search results a bit more relevant if the instance wasn't using Elasticsearch.

rsynnott 4y ago

> A server should deliver posts only to people logged into the instance, or to other instances it is federated with. This feels like maybe not an unreasonable _default_, but I certainly don't think it should be mandatory. If a user wants to publish something on the internet, it's reasonable for them to be able to do that.

Zak 4y ago

I think people who don't want search are underestimating how prevalent it already is. Mastodon itself officially supports Elasticsearch, but it isn't turned on by default and the UI limits what can be searched. I'm not sure if that's for social reasons or just to make installing a server easier, but there's no "never federate to servers with ES enabled" setting. Friendica has full-text search as well, and I imagine there are others. Machine-readable copyright licenses as the author suggests could be very useful for situations where legitimate for-profit companies start federating their services. Perhaps I don't want Flickr[0] to show advertisements next to my photos that I share from a self-hosted Mastodon server, for example. I could apply a license that forbids that and have a good chance of enforcing it in court. They're not a good fit for dealing with bad actors though. If somebody sets up fedisearch.ru fed by legitimate-looking public servers, they're probably beyond the reach of the courts I have access to. [0] The CEO of Flickr has publicly pondered adding ActivityPub support.

jcarrano 4y ago

"please resist finding ways to scrape the fediverse" that is 100% burying your head in the sand, 100%.