In retrospect, I shouldn't have bothered writing an article regarding #defederation, the #fedipact and the #fediverse because this brilliant gem (back from the 'Endless September' Usenet days) says everything I want to say and then some. Everything old is new again, the same tribalism and existential fears remain. We are creatures of short memories and strong, deeply-felt fears.
@osma@wendyg Yes. And we all seem to suffer myopia about that. Interfaces and design influence behavior as much as anything else.
Not to give Meta any favors here, but it's possible that the reason they reached out to Masto admins prior to launching some abominable interface, was to head some of these obvious self-owns at the pass.
@privacat
It's true that Facebook had abominable threading back in the day, but that was fixed ages ago and they never have been as bad about mixing private and public messaging and lack of quoting capability as Mastodon. I can easily imagine their launch would be with objectively superior user experience, never mind what else one might think of surveillance and rage maximization as engagement features. @wendyg
Mastodon from a privacy perspective is better on certain things, but appalling on others. I wrote a guide on how to fix some of these issues, but it creates a lot of challenges for people who are arguably not thinking about data protection at all.
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