5 ms·

Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. IMHO federation is a mistake.

by eli 3y ago

mulmen 3y ago
Federation is great when properly applied. Email is an example of federation done right. But federated social media is a mistake. Not because it is federated, but because all social media is a mistake.
- tssva 3y ago
  > Email is an example of federation done right. That's where you lost me.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Despite their best efforts neither Microsoft nor Google has managed to fully embrace or extinguish email. I’d say it is working very well.
- dawidpotocki 3y ago
  As someone that self hosts email, hell no. SMTP by itself has no authentication and we had to add crap on top of it like SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Don't have it? Oops, sorry, to spam it goes. Oh and don't forget about a reverse DNS record for your IP address with a correct domain, otherwise some mail servers will deny you. Want other mailservers to send you emails via TLS? Well, there is DANE, but that uses DNSSEC so Gmail doesn't support it. MTA-STS exists, but it's kinda silly and was made just for people that don't want DNSSEC for some reason, but at least Gmail supports it. For some reason there is also TLS-RPT for reporting about TLS use, so mail servers will send you emails that they used TLS, yay. Want your email address to have a picture? There is BIMI, but some mail servers won't display it if you don't pay few thousand dollars a year for some special certificate. Oh and it needs to be a pretty small SVG. Oops, your email still went to spam? Maybe your IP is on some obscure blacklist for no god damn reason? Or Outlook just randomly decided to ban your IP, but will offer you to unban it automatically by filling some weird form? Or maybe Gmail decided to randomly put your reply email to spam to someone that emailed you first? Want to retrieve your mailbox? Oh, do you want IMAP or POP? Obviously you don't want POP, you want IMAP, but you remembered that there is this "new" standard JMAP that is saner than IMAP. Oh what's that? Nobody supports it? Oh well.
  - navigate8310 3y ago
    Since some clients pull images from Gravatar, it's advisable to add an image to your Gravatar account and display it instead. While not a universal solution like BIMI, this is still an acceptable option where feasible.
    - dawidpotocki 3y ago
      Never heard of clients using Gravatar, but then that's relying on a centralised service. It further proves my point that email is not a good example of "federation done right".
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I pay Fastmail to deal with the actual hosting but I own my domain so I can go to any other provider if I want. I have never had trouble sending or receiving email. Seems to be working pretty well.
feanaro 3y ago
Federation is the only viable choice unless you want to submit to a central power. If you want strong safety, you shouldn't be broadcasting publicly into the aether.
- eli 3y ago
  Right I’m saying I don’t particularly care about the governance structure of the protocol underlying my social media network. A centralized network run by a nonprofit or a b-corp and a relatively open API sounds great to me. User safety is a dealbreaker though. Pretty sure I’m not alone.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    What nonprofit do you trust to run such a thing? When their employees receive targeted harassment from political vigilantes, what do you think is going to happen? When the nonprofit board is stacked with Musk or Trump acolytes, what do you think is going to happen? Media organizations are hugely vulnerable targets and they — nonprofit or commercial — are not proving resilient to outside pressure and influence. Decentralization is the only sustainable way forward if you want diversity in social media.
    - eli 3y ago
      Political vigilantes? Decentralization cannot possibly increase diversity if it doesn't provide strong user safety measures. And decentralization makes that infamously hard problem much harder. I think you would end up compromising on one or the other.
Zetice 3y ago
It's so much easier to build this into the app (which is what you're saying) rather than try to solve this at the proto level, I'm honestly surprised they even tried to include it into the protocol. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. There's a really large trans community active on Bluesky right now, and they've been extremely vocal about what's important to them, with blocking being the thing demanded the loudest (butts being #2). The dev team blew up their schedule to deliver blocking because of this.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  I’m not sure any of that is accurate. According to The Verge, they added blocking earlier than they wanted to because Matt Yglesias was getting brigaded for his anti-trans views.
  - Zetice 3y ago
    I’m on Bluesky, it’s what I’ve seen. Lots of folks from the trans communities there advocated strongly for the protection of blocking, saying muting didn’t go far enough (I disagreed but nobody cared).
- vincho 3y ago
  [flagged]
SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
There's no shortage of social media that offer "user safety" (ie; arbitrary censorship, unaccountable mods, enforced thought bubbles). Internet without the training wheels should at least be an option, for those of us who have thick enough skin to dismiss the stuff we don't like without needing a self appointed authority figure to decide for us.
- kredd 3y ago
  So, 4chan?
- eli 3y ago
  “Censorship” is popular because it works better than the alternatives. The unfiltered internet is an endless stream of spam and junk and crypto scams. Few people want every message sent to them to land in their inbox.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  You really need to read https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
  - SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
    I generally find my viewpoint aligned with Mike on most issues, however this is where my opinion starts to diverge: > “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.” > That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech. People who use slurs are absolute buffoons, and I have no interest in exposing myself to that sort of garbage (so I choose not to go to spaces where it's prevalent), however once there is a precedent for acceptable/unacceptable speech, and a mechanism where that can be enforced, it's inevitable that the definitions expand over time to things that cause advertisers to get squeamish. The paragraph references that very example. The end result is that anything that could be an idea exchange becomes part of a monoculture of corporate controlled platforms with fairly consistent bounds on acceptable speech. This gives a small group of organisations outsized influence over public discourse, and the consequences of that are significant enough that it's worth exploring it in depth. I want to be able to access diverse viewpoints, and to engage or ignore as I see fit. I'm suspicious of anyone who would want to make those decisions for me. There is also a phenomenon where speech outside these bounds prompts people to themselves call for controls and limits to be put in place. I find that very concerning on a societal scale. It works in the interests of those who want to control speech. Having outlets for fringe thoughts is a pressure release valve for the global conversation, and I worry that sanitising the whole thing will radicalise the people who are collecting in what few low touch spaces there are left.
glenstein 3y ago
>Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features. For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.
- eli 3y ago
  I like Mastodon, but "too complicated" is a legitimate concern and maybe undersells it. It's hard to use and puts a lot of burden on the users. Also seems like it's hard on admins, who have to deal with bad actors on their own server as well as constantly re-evaluate the volume of bad actors on servers they federate with. As a user I don't want to deal with too much abuse but I also don't want to have to worry about my server not being able to connect to my friend's server. These goals seem like they're at odds. I could see it working if most users coalesce around a single server or a small network of servers with similar rules.

Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. IMHO federation is a mistake.

by eli 3y ago

Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. IMHO federation is a mistake.

Federation is great when properly applied. Email is an example of federation done right. But federated social media is a mistake. Not because it is federated, but because all social media is a mistake.

tssva 3y ago
> Email is an example of federation done right. That's where you lost me.
- mulmen 3y ago
  Despite their best efforts neither Microsoft nor Google has managed to fully embrace or extinguish email. I’d say it is working very well.
dawidpotocki 3y ago
As someone that self hosts email, hell no. SMTP by itself has no authentication and we had to add crap on top of it like SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Don't have it? Oops, sorry, to spam it goes. Oh and don't forget about a reverse DNS record for your IP address with a correct domain, otherwise some mail servers will deny you. Want other mailservers to send you emails via TLS? Well, there is DANE, but that uses DNSSEC so Gmail doesn't support it. MTA-STS exists, but it's kinda silly and was made just for people that don't want DNSSEC for some reason, but at least Gmail supports it. For some reason there is also TLS-RPT for reporting about TLS use, so mail servers will send you emails that they used TLS, yay. Want your email address to have a picture? There is BIMI, but some mail servers won't display it if you don't pay few thousand dollars a year for some special certificate. Oh and it needs to be a pretty small SVG. Oops, your email still went to spam? Maybe your IP is on some obscure blacklist for no god damn reason? Or Outlook just randomly decided to ban your IP, but will offer you to unban it automatically by filling some weird form? Or maybe Gmail decided to randomly put your reply email to spam to someone that emailed you first? Want to retrieve your mailbox? Oh, do you want IMAP or POP? Obviously you don't want POP, you want IMAP, but you remembered that there is this "new" standard JMAP that is saner than IMAP. Oh what's that? Nobody supports it? Oh well.
- navigate8310 3y ago
  Since some clients pull images from Gravatar, it's advisable to add an image to your Gravatar account and display it instead. While not a universal solution like BIMI, this is still an acceptable option where feasible.
  - dawidpotocki 3y ago
    Never heard of clients using Gravatar, but then that's relying on a centralised service. It further proves my point that email is not a good example of "federation done right".
- mulmen 3y ago
  I pay Fastmail to deal with the actual hosting but I own my domain so I can go to any other provider if I want. I have never had trouble sending or receiving email. Seems to be working pretty well.

feanaro 3y ago

Federation is the only viable choice unless you want to submit to a central power. If you want strong safety, you shouldn't be broadcasting publicly into the aether.

eli 3y ago
Right I’m saying I don’t particularly care about the governance structure of the protocol underlying my social media network. A centralized network run by a nonprofit or a b-corp and a relatively open API sounds great to me. User safety is a dealbreaker though. Pretty sure I’m not alone.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  What nonprofit do you trust to run such a thing? When their employees receive targeted harassment from political vigilantes, what do you think is going to happen? When the nonprofit board is stacked with Musk or Trump acolytes, what do you think is going to happen? Media organizations are hugely vulnerable targets and they — nonprofit or commercial — are not proving resilient to outside pressure and influence. Decentralization is the only sustainable way forward if you want diversity in social media.
  - eli 3y ago
    Political vigilantes? Decentralization cannot possibly increase diversity if it doesn't provide strong user safety measures. And decentralization makes that infamously hard problem much harder. I think you would end up compromising on one or the other.

Zetice 3y ago

It's so much easier to build this into the app (which is what you're saying) rather than try to solve this at the proto level, I'm honestly surprised they even tried to include it into the protocol. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. There's a really large trans community active on Bluesky right now, and they've been extremely vocal about what's important to them, with blocking being the thing demanded the loudest (butts being #2). The dev team blew up their schedule to deliver blocking because of this.

KerrAvon 3y ago
I’m not sure any of that is accurate. According to The Verge, they added blocking earlier than they wanted to because Matt Yglesias was getting brigaded for his anti-trans views.
- Zetice 3y ago
  I’m on Bluesky, it’s what I’ve seen. Lots of folks from the trans communities there advocated strongly for the protection of blocking, saying muting didn’t go far enough (I disagreed but nobody cared).
vincho 3y ago
[flagged]

SturgeonsLaw 3y ago

There's no shortage of social media that offer "user safety" (ie; arbitrary censorship, unaccountable mods, enforced thought bubbles). Internet without the training wheels should at least be an option, for those of us who have thick enough skin to dismiss the stuff we don't like without needing a self appointed authority figure to decide for us.

kredd 3y ago
So, 4chan?
eli 3y ago
“Censorship” is popular because it works better than the alternatives. The unfiltered internet is an endless stream of spam and junk and crypto scams. Few people want every message sent to them to land in their inbox.
KerrAvon 3y ago
You really need to read https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
- SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
  I generally find my viewpoint aligned with Mike on most issues, however this is where my opinion starts to diverge: > “Right, boss, apparently because you keep talking about freedom, a large group of people are taking it to mean they have ‘freedom’ to harass people with slurs and all sorts of abuse. People are leaving the site because of it, and advertisers are pulling ads.” > That seems bad. Quick, have someone write up some rules against hate speech. People who use slurs are absolute buffoons, and I have no interest in exposing myself to that sort of garbage (so I choose not to go to spaces where it's prevalent), however once there is a precedent for acceptable/unacceptable speech, and a mechanism where that can be enforced, it's inevitable that the definitions expand over time to things that cause advertisers to get squeamish. The paragraph references that very example. The end result is that anything that could be an idea exchange becomes part of a monoculture of corporate controlled platforms with fairly consistent bounds on acceptable speech. This gives a small group of organisations outsized influence over public discourse, and the consequences of that are significant enough that it's worth exploring it in depth. I want to be able to access diverse viewpoints, and to engage or ignore as I see fit. I'm suspicious of anyone who would want to make those decisions for me. There is also a phenomenon where speech outside these bounds prompts people to themselves call for controls and limits to be put in place. I find that very concerning on a societal scale. It works in the interests of those who want to control speech. Having outlets for fringe thoughts is a pressure release valve for the global conversation, and I worry that sanitising the whole thing will radicalise the people who are collecting in what few low touch spaces there are left.

glenstein 3y ago

>Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. The whole philosophy behind Mastodon is the idea that literally the opposite is true. Servers that are aligned in their safety feature preferences are able to federate with each other and de-federate with servers that don't share those safety features. For all of the dissing of Mastodon, one thing even its critics begrudgingly admit is that it has better and more granular controls for privacy and controls that mitigate harassment. Normally when people say Mastodon is bad for this or that reason, they say that these controls are unnecessary or too complicated, but I don't think anyone seriously doubts that they are there. And those controls depend in a fundamental way upon federation. If there's one thing to understand about Mastodon it's that it leverages federation to improve strong user safety features.

eli 3y ago
I like Mastodon, but "too complicated" is a legitimate concern and maybe undersells it. It's hard to use and puts a lot of burden on the users. Also seems like it's hard on admins, who have to deal with bad actors on their own server as well as constantly re-evaluate the volume of bad actors on servers they federate with. As a user I don't want to deal with too much abuse but I also don't want to have to worry about my server not being able to connect to my friend's server. These goals seem like they're at odds. I could see it working if most users coalesce around a single server or a small network of servers with similar rules.