Creation of multiple hashtags such as #notabs and #nomatrix to enable match-making against people of the opposite opinion (#nobot will match you against an AI, #noindex against the other fingers)
"No u" opt-in option to automatically reply this to anyone attempting to compliment you
"Low-key private" scope that allows everyone except one specific user to read your posts because fuck you, yes you specifically
Fixes:
My posts didn't land in your notification list. All of them should appear again in your notifications and timelines from now on
Catboys quota has been met again, thank you all for your participation
Known issue:
All animals are labeled as dogs
Goth gf shortage
Won't fix:
Keysmashes
The person reading this
Making the Mario emoji a default on all instances
Roadmap:
Having an emoji pack of every single animal by volpeon by 2035
Eugen promises having at least one controversial change per semester
I’ve added #noindex to my profile to opt out of this Bluesky bridge thing. I’m generally not opposed to links to my posts being shared manually but I don’t think automatically opting everyone into a bridge is reasonable.
there is currently a bot inside MIT IP space, address 18[.]4[.]38[.]176, scanning fedi at large. i have confirmed this with 5+ unrelated instance admins, large and small instances, across mastodon/misskey/pleroma/akkoma.
the bot is poorly behaved. i have observed it making repeated requests, multiple times per second, for the exact same paths (the paths being, generally: user profiles, specific posts, and sometimes following links in posts). returning 403s does not stop this activity. one of my domains received hundreds of additional requests despite replying with 403 to all of them. i have also seen it make requests for paths containing html tags - seems like a badly written parser. the purpose of these requests and what data is being gathered is unclear.
PTR on the ip returns sts-drand03.mit.edu. a quick web search for "mit drand" brings back https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/david-g-rand and his personal website: https://davidrand-cooperation.com/ (note: other IPs in the /24 also have names in the PTR which match up with names of MIT faculty, but only the .176 IP appears to be involved in this activity).
seems he's doing research into "misinformation" and "fake news" on social media. he also appears to be on fedi! so @Drand, given this activity is sourced from an IP with your name on it, could you share the purpose of this traffic? what data is being collected and how is it being used? do you plan to respect robots.txt or identify yourself in your useragent? is there a process for instance admins to opt out of this activity other than blocking the source IP?
@Drand I appreciate the response, and that you've shut down the bot for the time being. However, this doesn't answer any of our questions or concerns regarding this project:
Data privacy. Many of the users that you've been harvesting from have specifically requested their accounts not be archived using multiple methods: robots.txt, #nobot, and #noindex. Based on the logs regarding which accounts have been getting scraped, the bot isn't actually respecting the privacy needs of these accounts, which I believe may be in violation of GDPR, especially for instances hosted in Europe.
This research seems to ignore qualitative data that's hidden from a public bot. Considering 95% of my moderating happens behind the scenes, collaborating with other instance admins in a Discord server... How is the research supposed to be aware of that? We intentionally do not make those conversations public in order to ensure a positive experience for our users.
By scraping data and being a bad actor, you are directly poisoning your own research data. Research HAS to be done with consent of everyone surveyed, otherwise, it is considered inethical. There's a reason why peer-reviewed surveys tend to include a long page of terms you have to agree to before you can fill it out. The users you've scraped have NOT agreed to this research, and have NOT agreed to having their data scraped. Due to the lack of ethics, my instances have already blocked your bot at the IP level, which will invalidate your research. And I know of several other instance who have also done the same.
Consider this as us admins being a positive influence on fediverse moderation by confronting a bad actor. However, I very much doubt that this confrontation will show up in your research.
Folks should take a look at the #fullTextsearch function that Eugen is proposing for #Mastodon and how closely it resembles the #search patch of the woman who he kicked off the Mastodon repo GitHub & Discord a couple of months ago. Also, her patch was more configurable that the thing he's bringing to main that has zero attribution of her work. #fediverse#mastodev#MastoDevs
@StevenSaus Sure, I agree, but seeing (particularly Masto) admins only telling their users half the story really sucks when it's never been more likely than ever that those users will be interacting with folks on Firefish, Misskey, Lemmy, and Kbin, and so that tick in their Mastodon account profile or a flag in the Mastodon API actually doesn't do what it claims it does, same as #noindex tags in profiles work better for Google scraping but do little to nothing at all to help other AP platforms flag that you don't want to be indexed. The idea of the fediverse as the Mastoverse is dead. #FullTextSearch
It feels like people are 50%/50% on the search feature on Mastodon and Fediverse in general. Some Fedi software have quite extensive search implemented already in my knowledge. Mastodon barely has any search if you don't count the open text search patch.
@rolle Many of those features are only Mastodon to Mastodon features not federated when you go outside the Mastodon API and interact with other fediverse software through ActivityPub alone. Something that gets missed all the time by folks who have never ventured outside the Mastoverse. Google doesn't care about your #noindex tag when it scrapes the fediverse and the Misskey forks, et al generally don't know what it means. @mpjgregoire@gubi
Look, I have complicated feelings about Meta and them coming to the fedi, but 'giving them the benefit of the doubt' is not remotely one of them.
That platform has been one of the most violent purveyors of bigoted violence and the planet, and somehow, magically, they are going to change overnight if they come to the fedi??
That level of naivety is the exclusive purview of white men with no skin in the game.
That is an absurd stance to take that directly endangers everybody, not white, straight, and male.
@Are0h@thisismissem but he's not honest. He's proven time and again for almost two decades that he's a bigoted fascist and only cares about getting richer.
There should be zero tolerance for this move. This is only happening so he can better scrape federated systems for his profit. He will not respect #nosearch#noindex#noarchive or anything else.
I have no mixed feelings about this. This should be boycotted and blocked as far as possible.
As soon as it's not profitable, it will be dropped and people will just drift back. There needs to be a complete separation. This would be giving up the collective idea behind federation.
This is capitalism at the absolute definition of itself.
It seems that the #privacy strength of the #fediverse was that no one barely knew it existed, not that it was built on a rugged social protocol with privacy built-in. As this post by @@jupiter_rowland has me thinking, how would you actually stop #Meta or anyone hoovering up the Fediverse?
We couldn't even get search sorted with some Fediverse consensus and extended at a protocol level. There's folks who thought #noindex HMTL tags in #Mastodon were readable over #ActivityPub by other services with full-text search that had been around longer than Mastodon. And Google just easily indexed the Fediverse once it gained some popularity so it's publicly searchable anyway and will be even easier once they launch their Perspectives social search tab.
Yet folks thought Universeodon's search patch was so egregious and worth their performative outrage, and again, that defederation would somehow fix things.