With #Threads and now with the new #Bluesky bridge, I'm really worried that #MastoAdmin s are doing a bad job of communicating what "federated" means.
Your Mastodon posts are PUBLISHED on the internet. As you read this they are being downloaded, legally, by hundreds of other computers. These computers belong to people you want to share with (other fedizens) and people you don't (surveillance capitalists). There is no reliable way to differentiate them.
I really sympathise with people who shared something with their circle of followers and are now surprised to learn that it might end up on Threads or Bluesky or in some data miner's hoard.
The Mastodon software should absolutely do a better job of telling people that when they sign up (it's in the privacy policy, but you know).
At the same time, nobody is helped by pretending that blocking this or that server will effectively control who gets to access public posts.
@joeroe
back in the early 2000s, I had a #FireFox extension that would send a random query to google every N seconds (N adjustable iirc from about 0.1 to 3,600)
I guess somehow fedi could make a similar extension ?
random toots that are muted to everyone except the AI scrapers ?
@joeroe I'm always amazed by this. Somehow this corner of the Internet should not be... umm... on the Internet? I've learned since the 90s that whatever you put to Internet IS ON THE INTERNET.
@rolle “Federation is so great, it’s so unlike these single service provider social networks run by evil capitalists” “No, not like that, actually I don’t want anybody except those that I choose to be able to read what I write.“
If you want or need to control who can read your posts, you should urgently take steps to remove them from Mastodon* and switch to a secure communication protocol. I can recommend #Signal (https://www.signal.org) or #Matrix (https://matrix.org) for secure messaging and #Haven (https://havenweb.org) for private (micro)blogging.
Though note that there is no way of forcing people to honour requests to delete data. Copies will almost certainly remain somewhere, indefinitely.
@joeroe There's a difference between using mastodon ) fediverse and having our content being copied over to another space. Why should someone be allowed to post, using my name, avatar on another platform ?
Being public is a thing, being usurpated and feed to a company I have no business with is another.
@shalien Your server and mine had no prior business with each other, but these posts, our names, and avatars were copied between them. There was no check to see if they were running the same software, or shared the same values - just that they used compatible protocols. Where is the border between "our" space and "their" space?
@joeroe I hate to "well, actually..." but well, actually, you can easily opt out by manually approving followers and posting followers-only. You don't have to share with any person or platform that you don't want to.
@evan Fair point. I'd edit in *public Mastodon posts, but I'm already at the character limit. The Threads federation and Bluesky bridge that people are worried about of course does not affect followers-only posts either.
@joeroe yeah, absolutely. I think the difference is that Public means "everyone except those I explicitly block" (denylist) and followers-only means "only those I explicitly allow" (allowlist). Public gets more engagement at the cost of vigilance; followers-only gets more safety at the cost of lower engagement.
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