This week, I went over to Bluesky and asked people who'd left Mastodon why they left, and lots of people told me. I grabbed the replies and crunched them and wrote up a summary. I think it's really interesting and often kind of wrenching.
Rather than trying to head off the unusual unpleasantness about clout-chasers and the ritually/technologically impure, I will just say this:
I wrote this up for fedi people who are actively curious and interested in other people, and I'm not going to worry too much about how it lands for those who aren't.
@TranshumanBlues@davidrevoy
Think about what Google did to email. SMTP is an open protocol like ActivityPub.
Now think about what Google did to XMPP, also an open protocol.
I bet your answer is "I don't know anything about SMTP or XMPP" and that's the problem, big companies "adopt the protocol" then after getting all the users onboard, they deprecate the open protocol using private APIs instead.
Whenever I explain my #research at Google into mobile text editing, I'm usually met with blank stares or a slightly hostile "Everyone can edit text on their phones, right? What's the problem?"
Text editing on mobile isn't ok. It's actually much worse than you think, an invisible problem no one appreciates. I wrote this post so you can understand why it's so important. https://jenson.org/text #UXDesign#UX
@scottjenson huh, I get intensely frustrated by text editing on mobile, especially on iOS (it's one thing that's actually better on Android, IMO). Thought that feeling was universal.
The hardest thing for me is pasting text. When you tap to bring up the contextual menu with the paste button, the cursor position often moves. Often takes me multiple tries to get it right.
I miss arrows on the iOS keyboard that allow you to move the cursor position left or right through the text!
Ok Fediverse I'm throwing up an SOS.
I need to get my self #FediHired. I've been applying, and working with a recruiter, but so far bubkis.
I can only do #Remote work due to health reasons.
I'm a skilled #PatentSpecialist, but also have years of experience in #Accounting, #Research, and #TechnicalWriting. Pretty much if it involves a computer, I can do it (Yes, including websites and graphics). I'm fluent in #English.
So #Meta's new #Threads app needs your health and fitness info. It also needs your browsing history and your location, and your purchases, and...well, it seems to need everything. If you want to get fully creeped out, here's the whole #privacy policy: https://privacycenter.instagram.com/policy/.
@protonmail Threads doesn't "need your health and fitness info," that is saying that Facebook already has your health and fitness info and will associate that pre-existing data with whoever you say you are when you sign up for Threads. Unless they already know you're someone other than who you say you are, in which case all the data about both those people gets associated with you.
I just realized that there is so much noise about #Meta and very little about creating template legal policies that instances can adopt that prohibit commercial use of user data.
Whatever you think of defederation there are easy ways to do that. Legal policies on the other hand are complex and require expertise and often money.
Maybe #LawFedi can help crowdsource templates of strict noncommercial legal policies for the #Fediverse so instance admins do not have to figure it out themselves?
@franktaber Licensing of posts should be part of the protocol IMO.
Maybe not a support for all kinds of custom licenses, but at least "All rights reserved other than those needed to store and display this message" and all the creative commons.
Just a little tag attached to the post CC-0, CC-BY, All right reserved, etc.
@franktaber This is an excellent point. IANAL, but currently content rights on Mastodon are usually defined only by the instance's Privacy Policy (https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy) and do not include a content license. This creates an implied license for the described uses, but it is nothing like the broad content license in a commercial platform's ToS. You do not, for instance grant any right to monetize or sublicense your content. This will create complexities for Meta federating with the Mastodon.
@ProPublica Just watched “DarkWaters” about West Va and how DuPont poisoned waters. But it didn’t end! Coal waste, fracking etc. caused locals to shut down wells and use bottled water. But many still use their wells, animals drink from polluted streams and WV residents still die from high rates of cancer and heart disease. I witnessed my long time friend die of lung cancer. He loved WV and refused to leave. A beautiful place destroyed by man!
@ProPublica
Between the chemical companies and the fossil fuel companies, we are going to have to build a bunch of new prisons to incarcerate all these murderers. How many have died over the decades? It will be impossible to calculate. Those who knew must be prosecuted.
Not only will #Threads not be launching in the EU (presumably because it'll be sucking up so much personal data that they can't make it GDPR compliant), but now the The European Court of Justice has agreed with Germany’s anti-cartel watchdog that Meta can't share harvested personal data between Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. That ruling will also apply to Threads.
@kfet yeah, I probably could’ve written that better. Not saying they won’t ever launch in the EU, but not anytime soon given the structural changes they need to make to the app and its data sharing with Instagram.
I was invited by #Meta via a third party to join a roundtable about #AI fairness. There was a generous honorarium. They were asking me to sign an NDA. I said I wouldn't do it unless I could publicly declare my participation, the $ involved, and continue to criticise Meta based on public info. They ghosted me ...
HELP: looking for sources on fascist aesthetics. Why fascists (Nazi Germany, other fascist countries, and current fascist movements) like minimalism, Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, and “elegant” beauty.
If y’all are curious why I’m looking this up… I have a theory that we’ve been falling for fascist ideology in certain minimalist and privacy-coded movements in tech recently.
Trying out the new Arc Search app very suddenly felt familiar in a horrifying way.
Chasing homogenous ideals of “elegant” and “perfect” aesthetic leads to fascism whether it’s sculpture or app UI.
"De-anonymising data is surprisingly easy: if you know Tony Blair’s date of birth (a matter of public record) and the two dates during his term in office in which he was treated for a heart condition (ditto), you can pick him out of any “anonymised” pool of NHS data in seconds, and then discover all those facts about his health that aren’t a matter of public record... Dr Ben Goldacre and his team at Oxford created OpenSAFELY, a “Trusted Research Environment” that allows researchers to write programs that analyse NHS data in situ. These programs would be dispatched to run against the data held by NHS trusts, and then the system would return the results to the researchers without ever letting them handle the data – which never left the trusts’ own servers." https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/ #dataProtection#research#NHS#privacy
PS #Palantir, ... is literally named after an evil, all-seeing magic talisman employed by the principal villain of Lord of the Rings (“Sauron, are we the baddies?”)
@pneumaculturist Nitpicking a little, the Palantir were not evil. Rather, they were neutral conduits for stuff, and mind control was one of the stuffs you could pipe through them. That was what Sauron was doing, and sufficiently "strong" minds could resist.
It's not meant to detract from your point, though, quite the contrary. I think it illustrates quite well how neutrality can enable evil.
we have without doubt the intentions of that platform now and if your instance refuses to respond to reality, you should migrate to a new instance ASAP
I would be very surprised if any of the admins who went into talks with Facebook will even acknowledge this information and even more surprised if they act upon it
this platform is going to be the exact same as Facebook in terms of data collection, so if you care about your privacy at all, the time is now to make a move or petition your admin