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?
@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.
@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.
I no longer assume that everyone online is familiar with old school net culture. One of its old sayings is; "don't feed the trolls". The point being that most people being flippant ass-hats online do it for the attention, so if they don't get any, it's no fun for them, and they go away.
@strypey Excellent post/thread. I really struggle with this. The failure comes at the point of recognising that the exchange has shifted from good faith to bad. I've reached the point where I'm in the process of adding to my morning reminders a list of negative behaviours I will spot, so that every day I am reminded they exist and to try to recognise them quickly, but I suspect I will still miss some. Is there anything that has worked well for you on recognising these situations quickly?
Our nearby small market town used to have 3 banks; they're all closed (taking their cash machines with them), and this week one of the two remaining cash machines was removed from the supermarket where it was located.
So, we're down to a single cash machine in an area with a radius (I'm guessing) of around 20 miles.
The cashless society doesn't represent consumer choice, its pace is being forced by financial institutions keen to charge fees on transactions!
@ChrisMayLA6 Did you ever read about the town of Totnes that created its own currency to foster localisation? (I'm not suggesting that would solve the problem as it's definitely not a trivial solution and the problem is systemic and much bigger than one town, and the experiment did end after about a decade, but I thought it was an interesting idea and your post reminded me.)
Interesting how Jack Dorsey calls the people who did not want to use Twitter under Musk and who were looking for alternatives like Bluesky or Mastodon “common” …. What a dickhead. These tech lord billionaires are fascist through and through…Amazing that having a moral compass and values that don’t align with bitcoin shilling tech bros is “common”
Trying to work out the best way to distribute an update to a group of ActivityPub users directly (so, like it's being sent to their inbox — like they're followers) but separate from a follower relationship. Then those updates could be displayed for those users in a separate timeline from the main home timeline.
Can you have multiple inboxes? The spec says something about allowing extensions — could you augment it to add your own extra inbox that anyone using your extended protocol would be able to access?
Best way I can think of right now is to deliver the updates to the recipients' inboxes, then have the recipients determine whether to show in the regular timeline or the extra one based on whether the sender is followed. But that would clutter the default timeline for other #ActivityPub clients.
A lot of people have insisted #Meta isn't getting involved with the #Fediverse to embrace, extend and extinguish it...
... but even before fully implementing Fediverse interoperability in #Threads they're already talking openly about changing its protocols to add features like monetization. 🤔
Text in a screenshot reads as follows: McCue riffed on the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content became available to subscribers only, similar to how Patreon works. For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow. Cottle agreed that the model could work with the fediverse, too. He additionally suggested there are ways the fediverse could monetize beyond donations, which is what often powers various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone might even make a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the way some fediverse client apps are paid today.
And aware, no doubt, that quote posts are a divisive, hot-button issue, they're already building into #Threads not only quote post functionality but more refined controls for it than I know of anywhere in the #Fediverse — a feature bound to attract attention and make people consider choosing Threads in preference to other Fediverse software that doesn't offer the same functionality.
"Even in recent days, the Biden administration has taken steps to contain the fallout from the assassination plot. White House officials warned the Modi government this month that The Post was close to publishing an investigation that would reveal new details about the case. It did so without notifying The Post."
@adnan I'm a big fan. The way it's set up here means I end up bookmarking a load of stuff to preserve, which then gets in the way of other things I bookmark to read or reply to, but it's still a vast improvement on the birdsite. I'd be really reluctant now to move to any service that didn't offer automatic deletion. Wish you could set it to remove old favourites, too.
@adnan Yeah, I guess I meant other Fediverse software really - things like Sharkey or GoToSocial, or whatever the new fork is going to be called (if it actually happens)