Coincidentally, this seems to expose a gap in #Fediverse security—since right now there's no way for me to continue posting to a hashtag I use frequently and avoid this user, who openly admits that they use .social to browse hashtags and then quote posts.
The only way I can use a hashtag on this federated network is to make my post publicly visible. Doesn't that make all hashtag-based communities here vulnerable to surveillance and potential abuse?
@tokyo_0 That indeed seems to be a gap. But block should be working on your instance. Why is your instance showing you posts from this user when you have blocked them? That is the gap in my opinion. Even if they at mention you, you should not see them on your timeline.
@adnan I don't see them, but they still see me. If I block someone (by the most widely understood convention of what that means), not only should their posts be invisible to me but my posts should be invisible to them as well. Otherwise they can keep on interacting with my posts and I just don't know about it. That doesn't protect anyone from abuse.
@adnan I didn't see their post, but I saw a reply someone sent to it later that used the same hashtag. It was clear a post wasn't visible to me. I didn't know it had anything to do with me, I was just interested in what had been written in relation to the hashtag/topic and what the reply was referring to (to make sense of that).
When I opened the thread in a private window, it showed they were "quote" posting my own post and adding their own unhelpful commentary about it.
@adnan The solution is genuinely difficult in this case. You can't stop people linking to things — I wouldn't really want to do that. But while I disagree with Gargron about quite a lot of things, I do think his concerns about quote posting are well founded, and I think ideally people should be able to opt in to being quoted, or have some control over when they are.
@adnan What this particular user wrote or did isn't as bad as it could be, either. But the idea of anyone being able to stalk a hashtag via the biggest, most open instance and then potentially direct a mob towards it presents a serious potential abuse vector for the #Fediverse.
I like hashtags. I like that it's possible to view them publicly. But having seen this situation it makes me think there need to be options for people to use them with posts that are only visible within the ecosystem.
@tokyo_0 I think you rightly said that it is going to be quite difficult to prevent linking to posts which is what "quote posting" is. Hyperlinks are one of the fundamental building blocks of the web. I really don't have any good ideas but I will say that Gargron - who only builds Mastodon and not the whole fediverse - can't prevent quote posting any more than they can prevents folks linking out to articles.
Btw threads recently said that they will allow their users to block quote posting
@adnan Maybe the #Fediverse would benefit from some kind of "listed and fediverse-public but not external-public" level of post visibility that would allow people to have their posts on hashtags propagated across the fediverse and visible internally within the federated timeline but not visible via pages like the non-authenticated external search on most instances to people who are not logged in 🤔
@adnan Only the ones admins haven't realised are undesirable yet. If it's within the ecosystem, the mechanisms admins have for blocking instances should work. If it's web-public, nothing will work.
Personally I've been thinking recently about a conceptual social networking platform (perhaps based around AP and interoperable with this) that allows users to limit visibility of their content to within certain degrees of separation. But that's an incomplete idea I don't yet have time to implement.
@tokyo_0 Facebook used to allow something like that - visibility and comments only for "Friends of Friends". It was my preferred option. It led to the most civil and interesting conversations - it was like being at a dinner party with enough new people but not complete strangers.
Add comment