3 ms·
Implement the ability & willingness to police imposter accounts. I know a noted author who tried to move to Mastadon. It was a disaster. He was promptly swar
by toss1 3y ago
Implement the ability & willingness to police imposter accounts.
I know a noted author who tried to move to Mastadon. It was a disaster. He was promptly swarmed by a half dozen imposter accounts posting false content he'd never even think.
He made diligent efforts to report and get those accounts shut down and was basically told both that whatever org Mastadon has, has no inclination to manage imposters, and that even if they did, it would be structurally impossible to do so except by de-federating instances. So he left.
I also know of a Mastadon-based instance (Cointer-Social) that attempts to fight disinformation & trolling, with one measure being to ban all accounts from Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Because of this, CS is banned from federation by Mastadon.
The Mastadon org would need to fix these technical & philosophical flaws to attract any serious users and become a scaled-up 'town square' for serious high-profile people.
As it is, Mastadon is not, and will never be, fit for such a scaled-up purpose.
- nottorp 3y ago> Implement the ability & willingness to police imposter accounts. It's decentralized so that's impossible. However the original question is wrong. Why should people move to Mastodon? Why should they move to Twitter or Facebook? Is it illlegal to maintain a presence in more than one place?
- rsynnott 3y ago> It's decentralized so that's impossible. Hmm, I'm not sure I entirely agree with this, but it does depend on users being aware of the possibility of impersonation. You can "verify" a Mastodon account, in that you can demonstrate that it is connected to a domain that you control. This is better than post-Musk Twitter 'verification', which is, of course, not verification at all. The UX around all this is lacking, though.
- Nextgrid 3y ago> You can "verify" a Mastodon account This is enforced by the instance - any "verification" is only as trustworthy as the instance itself. A malicious actor would just set up their own instance with a fair share of legitimate-looking content (to build credibility within the network and encourage others to federate) before "verifying" the imposter accounts on it. This is just one of many issues with ActivityPub which makes it not fit for any kind of serious, real-world deployment to rival established social networks.
- ecshafer 3y agoWhy do you need to verify anything at all? Musk validation shows someone paid some money for a check mark. Pre-musk validation meant that someone knew someone who worked at twitter. I don't see how one is "better" than another.
- rsynnott 3y agoI was replying to a comment about impersonation. One way to combat impersonation is some sort of verification. Old Twitter verification did this; the new blueticks do not appear to (see all the fake bluetick Elon Musks a while back). The Mastodon approach does, if and only if you trust the provenance of the linked domain.