4 ms·

This is justified in the post by: 1) saying it could help mastodon achieve much more significant growth And 2) privacy issues are somewhat moot because much

This is justified in the post by: 1) saying it could help mastodon achieve much more significant growth And 2) privacy issues are somewhat moot because much mastadon content is already public I strongly disagree with these two premises being sufficient to justify the claim that meta should be embraced. Addressing #2 first: there is so, so much more to Facebook’s negative activities and data gathering than harvesting public-facing data. As such, #2 does not come anywhere near to justifying #1 as being worth the huge downside risks if such a move.

WorldMaker 3y ago
I'd add to point 2: I like the "restaurant" analogy. Sure the "restaurant" (most of ActivityPub) is "public" but that doesn't make the conversations inside the restaurant any less private to their participants. In a real restaurant eavesdropping without consent could get you punched or worse. We haven't built the technology to remotely punch corporate employees data gathering for ads and worse so in the meantime, it shouldn't be a surprise that many Mastodon norms are to block/defederate from instances you believe to be eavesdroppers. As for point 1: who cares about growth? Mastodon doesn't need "growth". It's not a single VC-backed entity in search of growth over anything else. Some of my favorite instances are all about restricting growth and being very mindful of the number of people allowed to be around.
- afavour 3y ago
  IMO the restaurant analogy simply isn’t correct. I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. Social networks like Mastodon and Twitter are public (unless your account is private, naturally). Talking to and connecting with eavesdropping strangers is expected.
  - rascul 3y ago
    > I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. But have you tried?
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    I sit (and eat) at bars all the time and sometimes people will ask me what I'm reading and strike up a conversation or sometimes I can't help but overhear a bit and ask if I can join the conversation. Sometimes you go to bars or restaurants to meet new friends, have interesting conversation, be a bit more visible in public. You also try to take "no" for an answer and butt out of any conversation that doesn't want you. All of that applies to Mastodon, whether or not it ever applied to Twitter and Twitter is a very different beast (as an "old timer" on Twitter, I personally preferred when "bar politeness" was much more common than the engagement obsessed public stage it became and wanted to be, and there was a period early on where it felt common). Mastodon is far more follower-focused. Most conversations are assumed to be among followers/mutuals, even on the so-called "public feeds". Most of the so-called "public feeds" are scattershot across instances and only the instances of posting members of a conversation and maybe a subset of their the followers often truly have accurate views. The "distance to the next bar stool" (much less the "next table") on Mastodon is always further than it ever was on Twitter. A lot of people (including myself) like that about Mastodon. (I certainly left Twitter because I thought all the tables were far too close together in 2016 and that was starting to feel claustrophobic, to bend the analogy towards breaking.) On top of that, it's not just good etiquette on Mastodon. Many instances have, for instance, strict robots.txt files that make an even clearer distinction that the "next table distance" entirely excludes crawlers and search engines and archivist bots, and is just for only maybe "the person sipping a drink at the next bar stool over". Many instances have defederation policies designed to maintain "proper table distance" with what they perceive to be bad actors. That's relevant here of course because we're talking about why some instances feel it very necessary for social etiquette to keep Meta at a large "table distance" because they don't trust Meta to understand etiquette. It's somewhat circular logic, but it is entirely rational and logical in how a lot of people see Mastodon as its own sort of quirky "restaurant" and want to defend that quality of it. Which is why I like the restaurant analogy because it is a social norm, it is a social etiquette, it actively needs defending, and the problem isn't that it is a broken "analogy" that doesn't fit Mastodon, the problem is that it is a good analogy that needs to be taught to more people. I'm happy to see you on the bar stool next to me on Mastodon, pull up, take a drink, try to join a conversation, but I want you to take "no" for an answer if I don't want you in that conversation, and I want you to appreciate that I don't want you tape recording the whole conversation without asking or I will feel like punching you (even if I can't find the ssh sudo command to do that easily).
  - dkuntz2 3y ago
    just because corporate social media has trained you to believe the way to interact with it is shouting "i like steak" doesn't mean the way most people using the fediverse right now are doing the same. most of the people in my circle of the network explicitly aren't trying to do that, they're trying to have nice conversations with the people around them. they are, in the analogy, talking at a reasonable volume to the people they're sitting with, not yelling "i like steak" and hoping someone with no connection to them jumps in. in fact, they're not doing that to the degree that most will just block randos without some social graph connection to them who jump in their conversations. one of the big concerns with meta joining the fediverse is that it is going to explicitly try forcing people into their mode of interaction, the yelling "i like steak" and hoping a bunch of random people join in (and this is a well founded fear, considering that facebook literally did that to their own platform, going from "talk with your friends and maybe your friends' friends" to "lets show your posts to whatever random people we think will interact with it"). the thing a lot of people like about the current iteration of the fediverse is that it brings back the more direct social connections of social networks of yore, and isn't the "lets game it to see who can get the most interactions" platform you see with facebook, instagram, twitter, and friends.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  In a restaurant your conversations are not private. Many are listening and no one throws a punch. Someone may talk quieter if things are private. Anyone can signup to an instance and read the local posts or posts from other instances federated. The privacy level is lower than facebooks

WorldMaker 3y ago

I'd add to point 2: I like the "restaurant" analogy. Sure the "restaurant" (most of ActivityPub) is "public" but that doesn't make the conversations inside the restaurant any less private to their participants. In a real restaurant eavesdropping without consent could get you punched or worse. We haven't built the technology to remotely punch corporate employees data gathering for ads and worse so in the meantime, it shouldn't be a surprise that many Mastodon norms are to block/defederate from instances you believe to be eavesdroppers. As for point 1: who cares about growth? Mastodon doesn't need "growth". It's not a single VC-backed entity in search of growth over anything else. Some of my favorite instances are all about restricting growth and being very mindful of the number of people allowed to be around.

afavour 3y ago
IMO the restaurant analogy simply isn’t correct. I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. Social networks like Mastodon and Twitter are public (unless your account is private, naturally). Talking to and connecting with eavesdropping strangers is expected.
- rascul 3y ago
  > I don’t sit in a restaurant and shout “I like steak!” as a prompt to see who else in the room might want to talk to me about it. But have you tried?
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I sit (and eat) at bars all the time and sometimes people will ask me what I'm reading and strike up a conversation or sometimes I can't help but overhear a bit and ask if I can join the conversation. Sometimes you go to bars or restaurants to meet new friends, have interesting conversation, be a bit more visible in public. You also try to take "no" for an answer and butt out of any conversation that doesn't want you. All of that applies to Mastodon, whether or not it ever applied to Twitter and Twitter is a very different beast (as an "old timer" on Twitter, I personally preferred when "bar politeness" was much more common than the engagement obsessed public stage it became and wanted to be, and there was a period early on where it felt common). Mastodon is far more follower-focused. Most conversations are assumed to be among followers/mutuals, even on the so-called "public feeds". Most of the so-called "public feeds" are scattershot across instances and only the instances of posting members of a conversation and maybe a subset of their the followers often truly have accurate views. The "distance to the next bar stool" (much less the "next table") on Mastodon is always further than it ever was on Twitter. A lot of people (including myself) like that about Mastodon. (I certainly left Twitter because I thought all the tables were far too close together in 2016 and that was starting to feel claustrophobic, to bend the analogy towards breaking.) On top of that, it's not just good etiquette on Mastodon. Many instances have, for instance, strict robots.txt files that make an even clearer distinction that the "next table distance" entirely excludes crawlers and search engines and archivist bots, and is just for only maybe "the person sipping a drink at the next bar stool over". Many instances have defederation policies designed to maintain "proper table distance" with what they perceive to be bad actors. That's relevant here of course because we're talking about why some instances feel it very necessary for social etiquette to keep Meta at a large "table distance" because they don't trust Meta to understand etiquette. It's somewhat circular logic, but it is entirely rational and logical in how a lot of people see Mastodon as its own sort of quirky "restaurant" and want to defend that quality of it. Which is why I like the restaurant analogy because it is a social norm, it is a social etiquette, it actively needs defending, and the problem isn't that it is a broken "analogy" that doesn't fit Mastodon, the problem is that it is a good analogy that needs to be taught to more people. I'm happy to see you on the bar stool next to me on Mastodon, pull up, take a drink, try to join a conversation, but I want you to take "no" for an answer if I don't want you in that conversation, and I want you to appreciate that I don't want you tape recording the whole conversation without asking or I will feel like punching you (even if I can't find the ssh sudo command to do that easily).
- dkuntz2 3y ago
  just because corporate social media has trained you to believe the way to interact with it is shouting "i like steak" doesn't mean the way most people using the fediverse right now are doing the same. most of the people in my circle of the network explicitly aren't trying to do that, they're trying to have nice conversations with the people around them. they are, in the analogy, talking at a reasonable volume to the people they're sitting with, not yelling "i like steak" and hoping someone with no connection to them jumps in. in fact, they're not doing that to the degree that most will just block randos without some social graph connection to them who jump in their conversations. one of the big concerns with meta joining the fediverse is that it is going to explicitly try forcing people into their mode of interaction, the yelling "i like steak" and hoping a bunch of random people join in (and this is a well founded fear, considering that facebook literally did that to their own platform, going from "talk with your friends and maybe your friends' friends" to "lets show your posts to whatever random people we think will interact with it"). the thing a lot of people like about the current iteration of the fediverse is that it brings back the more direct social connections of social networks of yore, and isn't the "lets game it to see who can get the most interactions" platform you see with facebook, instagram, twitter, and friends.
ipaddr 3y ago
In a restaurant your conversations are not private. Many are listening and no one throws a punch. Someone may talk quieter if things are private. Anyone can signup to an instance and read the local posts or posts from other instances federated. The privacy level is lower than facebooks