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> Even on centralised platforms, I've seen endless "screenshots" on Twitter of other web pages and other tweets, aping the form of screenshot-quotations, but ac

by jefftk 2y ago

> Even on centralised platforms, I've seen endless "screenshots" on Twitter of other web pages and other tweets, aping the form of screenshot-quotations, but actually doctored That's a different problem: we're talking here about the equivalent of Twitter/FB/etc saying "this is the image and preview text at this link". Which you can trust the traditional social media platforms for. > Trust should be anchored to the individual toot and its poster, and you should distrust them for misrepresenting link previews in the same way you should distrust them for any other misrepresentations they make. Note that with Mastodon this could also be caused by their server admins.

amiga386 2y ago
> we're talking here about the equivalent of Twitter/FB/etc saying "this is the image and preview text at this link" Even here, you can't trust this. You can vaguely trust that the centralised provider won't modify the link preview, they don't appear have been caught doing that despite the fact they totally could... and possibly do, possibly only to specific people, possibly under duress from governments where they operate their servers. However, it's been shown several times that Facebook won't let you post certain links, including links that are merely uncovering Meta's wrongdoing. So centralised providers still have the power to distort what users see, they just do it more directly and openly than misrepresenting link previews. What Mastodon users want is to pretend they can have that same level of trust as they could with a centralised provider - which they know they can't, but being honest about that hurts adoption, so they go along with a lie, and instead make their link targets pay all the costs, to make themselves look better. That's not right, and if their purpose is to make the internet a better place, they should be willing to compromise, be willing to prioritise being a good neighbour to other web services (e.g. add a disclaimer like "poster supplied this link preview image"), over having millions of link preview services DDoS a target so they can say "we have per-server trust in link previews".

by jefftk 2y ago

amiga386 2y ago

> we're talking here about the equivalent of Twitter/FB/etc saying "this is the image and preview text at this link" Even here, you can't trust this. You can vaguely trust that the centralised provider won't modify the link preview, they don't appear have been caught doing that despite the fact they totally could... and possibly do, possibly only to specific people, possibly under duress from governments where they operate their servers. However, it's been shown several times that Facebook won't let you post certain links, including links that are merely uncovering Meta's wrongdoing. So centralised providers still have the power to distort what users see, they just do it more directly and openly than misrepresenting link previews. What Mastodon users want is to pretend they can have that same level of trust as they could with a centralised provider - which they know they can't, but being honest about that hurts adoption, so they go along with a lie, and instead make their link targets pay all the costs, to make themselves look better. That's not right, and if their purpose is to make the internet a better place, they should be willing to compromise, be willing to prioritise being a good neighbour to other web services (e.g. add a disclaimer like "poster supplied this link preview image"), over having millions of link preview services DDoS a target so they can say "we have per-server trust in link previews".