Many people have been asking me over the last few months to share my Twitter threads regarding lawsuits threatening Google, Facebook and others over here. I'll try to be better as developments play out but here is one relevant to today. Thanks. https://mstdn.social/@jasonkint/110073102431369061
I.e. many more apps (>2 million) and way over 100k of developers from high-risk foreign countries like #Russia, #China, and #NothKorea, with access to sensitive personal information of users and their #sociographs.
More #US and other countries' #elections can be strongly influenced by (hostile) foreign countries.
For those watching the TikTok hearing - a thread of something most of the public missed two months ago as it was unsealed in a federal court late on a Friday night. Facebook tried to keep it secret for years - a Sep 2018 "Status and Re-scoped Approach" from the unprecedented audit Mark Zuckerberg promised Congress during its Cambridge Analytica scandal. /1
「 In an attempt to self-host a low-cost fediverse node, I started with GoToSocial, but later decided to switch to Mastodon for better compatibility. This transition presented some challenges and got me thinking about whether existing web frameworks are well designed for linked data services 」
Embrace: Look, we've launched a shiny new Twitter clone!
It's not an empty new social platform, like Google Plus was. You can already access all the content on Mastodon and all the other ActivityPub-based platforms!
We've seen the light! We now embrace open networks!
And it's so simple!
All you people who wanted to switch to Mastodon, but freaked out when you read the word "server" and thought it was too complicated for you, no fear! We've done away with the confusing choice for you! It's a super simple UX!
Extend: Our shiny new Twitter clone now integrates seamlessly with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more! You can even get notifications in Horizon Worlds!
Oh, we're not integrating our other platforms to ActivityPub. If you want one easy platform for Meta's social media platforms and ActivityPub, our Twitter clone is your only choice!
To advertisers and media, we'll let you boost posts too, for a tiny fee!
We'll feature you prominently on our new algorithmic feed.
So don't bother spinning up your own Masto instance, join us instead!
Extinguish: As of 1 July, we are depreciating support for ActivityPub.
Also, effective immediately, our privacy terms have been updated. You won't believe what we hid on page 76.
Hot take/rant time for #ActivityPub with the news that #Meta plans to dip their toe in the water.
I would view Meta as an existential threat to a non-corporate, AP-based #fediverse in large part because of the immaturity of and lack of interoperability in the AP spec itself.
Why?
Because when you have that big of a fish involved in your space made up of small players, the big fish gets to set the rules unless you have some pretty strong protections in place.
I place no trust in cultural protections (NO ONE FEDERATE WITH THEM, NO ONE SUPPORT THEM, etc). They might rebuff #meta in this attempt, but they won't work long-term. Especially if Meta/others gets all #EmbraceExtendExtinguish about it.
The kicker of course is that they need to do extensions to even implement the protocol in the first place—making it even easier for them—and where not absolutely necessary still some of the things I would think them likely to add are desperately needed.
Und auch deshalb ist die Digitalisierung, die früher oder später unweigerlich auf eine Post-Privacy-Gesellschaft herausläuft, in erster Linie eine Dystopie:
"As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication – and online platforms like Google and Facebook are helping. "
Google und Facebook/Meta geben Nutzer:innendaten an die US-amerikanische Polizei weiter, damit diese Menschen verfolgen kann, die Informationen zu Abtreibungen suchen.
Und das ist nur ein Beispiel. Morgen kann schon illegal sein, was heute noch legal ist und etwaige Datenschutzgesetze können auch in Europa gelockert werden, während die Überwachungsinfrastruktur, Digitalzwänge/Abhängigkeiten und der Zugriff auf Gesundheitsdaten immer invasiver werden.
Facebook and Google are handing over user #data to help police prosecute #abortion seekers
"As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication – and online platforms like #Google and #Facebook are helping.
This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will stand trial in #Nebraska for performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by #Meta, the parent company of Facebook."
In 1998, two Stanford kids published a paper in Computer Networks: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," in which they wrote, "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is "going meta," so naturally, #Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month "verification" badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:
Well, that's it. My #akkoma instance social.fellr.net is no more. It couldn't even delete my old account properly without getting a timeout on the database. Man, I really don't like the way it's designed. I know it's better for the #fediverse if not every instance is #mastodon, but at the moment there is nothing better in terms of reliability. Again, #gotosocial is very promising, but needs a bit more features. They're coming though! #fediadmin#meta
#Facebook and #Instagram finding themselves in hot water with the Irish Data Protection Commission is an excellent beginning to making some interesting changes at these sites. #Twitter is next on the list, I'd suspect. ;)
If we also consider #Meta, #Twitter, #Amazon and other social media sites downsizing, are we seeing a trend for 2023? Is this a correction for these sites, or possibly the beginning of something more serious?
Also consider: there is an upcoming Supreme Court case involving YouTube that may change the way their recommendation algorithms work...
I feel like it's worth mentioning, re; quote-boosts/QTs, that we can't "just add the feature to Mastodon" in a federation - it's a lot more complicated than a lot of people seem to realise?
The argument about whether or not we should add QTs is an important one, but once we get past that there's the issue of federation.
Mastodon is one software of many using the ActivityPub "skeleton" code. If ActivityPub doesn't have QTs in its code and Mastodon adds a QT feature, any non-Mastodon software (or even server) has to work out how to interpret Mastodon's QTs. If it isn't Mastodon-compatible, QTs will just break. They might even break in a way that harms the person being QTed. And what if someone on another server boosts/reblogs that broken QT?
Also, since we on Mastodon can follow people who are using federated software that isn't Mastodon (e.g. instances/softwares that look and behave like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc), how does that work? Would people on Mastodon be able to QT people on not-Mastodon? How are the OPs going to feel about that? Would they even get notifications about it, since QTs aren't in the ActivityPub "skeleton" of federation?
And since we're a federation of separate servers even "within" Mastodon, there's also the question of how older/outdated Mastodon servers will handle incoming QTs. If you're on an older version of Mastodon and you follow someone on a newer instance and they QT someone, what would that look like? Maybe someone has intentionally chosen a fork of Mastodon with QTs turned off. Can people on other softwares QT them, and how would they feel about that?
My year starts in mid-November (my blog, my rules). Last year, I read an astonishing 85 books! That is too many books. This year I was doing lots of reading for my MSc - which was mostly academic papers. I also didn't have any long relaxing breaks. But, nevertheless, I'm happy to have read 42…
Last Friday a friend of mine had a run-in with the administrators of mastodon.nz. I've written up my thoughts in the hopes that it will spark useful and constructive conversations. Please share with others.
Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this:
Launch a product to great fanfare
Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨
Stop answering emails and pull requests
If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it.
Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The value-proposition is simple.
It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data from a complex web page.
Therefore, let's encourage websites to include metadata which tells our services what they should look at!
OGP works pretty well! When you share a link on Facebook, or Twitter, or Telegram - those services load the website in the background, look for OGP metadata, and display a friendly snippet.
Facebook Meta were the driving force behind OGP - and have now left it to fester.
And, that might be fine. Facebook Meta are a small company with limited resources. They can't afford to fund standards work indefinitely. And, anyway, OGP is complete, right? It has all the tags that anyone could ever possibly want. Why does it need any improving?
This is annoying for developers. Now we have to write multiple different bits of metadata if we want our links to be supported on all platforms.
Standards work is never "finished". Developers want to add new features. Users want to interact with new forms of content.
Tomorrow someone is going to invent a way to share smells over the Internet. How does that get represented in an Open Graph Protocol compliant manner?
<meta property="twitter:olfactory" content="C₃H₆S"> or <meta property="facebook:nose" content="InChIKey/MWOOGOJBHIARFG-UHFFFAOYSA-N"> or <meta property="og:smell" content="pumpkin spice"> or...
We know from bitter experience that having several mutually incompatible ways to implement something is a nightmare for developers and provides a poor user-experience.
So we create standards bodies. They're not perfect, but a group of interested folks can do the hard work to try and satisfy oppositional stakeholders.
This is my plea to Facebook Meta. If you're no longer interested in improving OGP, OK. You do you. But hand it over to people who want to keep this going. Maybe it's the W3C, or IndieWeb, or Schema.org or someone. Hell, I'm not busy, I'll take it on.
Elon Musk is threatening to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information about its spam bot accounts.
#Twitter announced that it would become the #weed-friendliest social platform & start allowing some previously restricted cannabis #ads to appear in the feeds of users in states that have legalized it.
Weed delivery services could be #advertising on Twitter feeds soon.
This new policy sets Twitter apart from other ad giants like #Meta, which bans both CBD and THC ads, #Google, which allows some CBD ads but bans #marijuana ads, including instructional content.