The features you mentioned are not just possible in theory, but have been implemented by more modern clients.
Anyway, could they trademark the Mastodon name and logo, so that a 3rd party partially incompatible client should be forced to identify itself as something else avoiding confusion? This would bring the next question: can Mastodon (the real one) nodes protect themselves against "compromised" ones?
Yes, you can always defederate from other instances if you want. In fact, a lot of fediverse instances do just that to protect their hugboxes from the rest of us who actually value our ability to communicate with each other. And there are certainly a number of instances that defederate from others on technical grounds rather than social ones.
I'm sure there's a nicer way of saying that. I've worried that I would end up in an echo chamber of my own on there, but saying things like "hugbox" are unnecessarily rude to people who have tended to prefer isolation because of the effect the world has on them. We can't choose how others react to content, but we shouldn't chastise them for wanting to protect themselves from harm, even if we don't agree with the definition of harm.
In any case, instances full of trolls, spammers and nazis also tend to get blocked by others who prefer to communicate normally. Blocking serves a useful function. If FAANG servers show up, I'm sure some would block them out of principle. Others once they start breaking the protocol.
It isn't. "Hugbox" is used pejoratively specifically to attack people with perceived left wing beliefs and associations. The idea is that people who aren't interested in seeing a ton of transphobic content or whatever are too "soft" to expose themselves to "real conversation."
"Echo chamber" is more neutral in orientation, though still carries a negative connotation. "Hugbox" is specifically slanted.
As for not wanting to see transphobic content, I think that's entirely a reasonable position. People shouldn't tolerate abuse. Abuse != "real conversation".
People are weird.
And even apart from that, I think everybody has a right to choose who they associate with, and that does not have to include harassers. That's more relevant to social media and less to teaching classes of course, which do need to be open to everybody. But if you're choosing to follow a class with the specific purpose to harass someone, there's something deeply wrong with you.
California has little to do with it. You won’t be nearly as happy with a site run under the laws of a non-US country though.
Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer.
I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.
The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing".
I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
> I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening
Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines.
The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now?
It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
> Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines.
Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.
Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows are so rare in general, I can watch them all individually.
There are many users that require follow requests where they verify/vet every single follow.
> It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks?
Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass the quick checks of every paranoid person they try to follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad actor.
> Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed
(Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a Followers Only post to the Public timeline.
Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to make it look more legit if I don't want to be so centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly, literally "lurker only" instances?
If your server only has a handful of accounts that obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion.
Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
On top of that, arguably Mastodon is full of weird people who often don't look all that like real people and find themselves trying to be their weirdest selves (which is also why protecting the privacy courtesies on Mastodon is seen as important). Instances looking too much like Twitter or Facebook data are suspicious in their own ways.
> Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
There will always be bad actors, but that's not excuse to ignore common courtesy, throw your hands up, and just claim all private data is public. Mastodon isn't Twitter. Mastodon isn't intended to be 100% public. There is data with an expectation of privacy. Just because people can violate that expectation doesn't mean it isn't private data.
A common analogy here is conversation in public restaurants: just because the restaurant itself is open to the public and serves anyone doesn't give you license to eavesdrop on any conversation you want inside of that restaurant. There's generally an expectation of privacy among the other diners. (And in the real world someone trying that might get their ass beat for trying it.)
The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't spam follow requests and are selective about who you follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a concern.
A privacy model that depends on "admins would probably notice something fishy" is not a model users should rely on.
This extremely nihilistic view is not productive, and ignores that 99% success in mitigating bad actors is much better than no mitigation.
Yeah, their culture doesn't sound very... sane from these descriptions. Neurotic about weird stuff, like someone linking to them.
Some instances don't even allow non-logged in users to view public toots, good luck scraping those toots without sendingba follow request (which will be seen by the account and server admin.
Eternal September
And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices. Forget about core culture: that's gone now.
No. Billions of people are not currently moving from Twitter to Mastodon.
Social networks require a critical mass of popularity to attract most users.
The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server.
Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon server would last for maybe a year before Google gets bored and kills it.
Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people, but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of that server sees any of it?
If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play the long game where your users slowly influence other instances.
I just don't see that happening.
Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few billion people in a new country it would change the global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest in.
The journa.host guy is speed running this just by accident of trying to figure everything out from inside the fire.
What is more likely is some new company comes around, VC backed with some "ActivityPub-for-the-masses" pitch. This startup first comes with development resources; all the sudden 90% of the devs on Mastodon2 are employed by $startup. Not only that but they begin to build very polished native apps which aren't OSS. Because all the developers are $startup, the development process becomes less democratic. Then the VC dollars create marketing; then all your new users equate ActivityPub with $startup2. All the non-technical users are on $startup. Then they hit some critical mass and pull up the ladder. You find out 70% of the people you follow were on $startup, because for them it was easier to use the polished thing, and that 70% won't go back to ActivityPub, because all the people are now on $startup and maybe you should just ditch your crummy server and get with the times. It happens slowly, then quickly.
All of the sudden mastodon looks like IRC in a world where everyone uses Discord.
Okay. Those servers represent what percentage of overall users after this scenario happens? 0.1%? 0.01%?
Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand.
Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers and hosting your own email server grows less and less plausible each day.
Receiving is easy. Sending is much harder than it used to be.
Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair
You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people
That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.
My DNS provider offers a free email account for your domain, but that's the easy way.
I rent a VPS for like $15/yr and run everything myself. Setting up an email server takes like half an afternoon if you follow a good tutorial.
I can't say that Gmail being the biggest provider has had any effect on my email server. I'm not really sure how it would, apart from Google deciding to block private email servers somehow.
sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity.
in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".
Additionally, expecting Google to have the fortitude of the fediverse when it comes to social media is hilarious
We're coming up on year 6 of the ActivityPub standard, and there are plenty of half decade long fediverse participants like myself. If this were Google I would have been through at least one if not two major platform changes (where you generally lose features & your social graph) or a platform shutdown by now.
As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here.
Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation.
Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.
This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one server I can think of off the top of my head which is invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an account there eventually, though I won't say the name and drive unneeded attention to it.
The Fediverse was never built nor intended to be a "Twitter replacement".
Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it.
Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied.
That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
And that is precisely what happened here. Someone started indexing all the posts of a group of largely vulnerable and marginalized folks, without asking for their consent, without trying to understand the community norms, just barging in and doing what they felt like without concern for the consequences to other people's safety.
They got swiftly ejected from the community accordingly.
If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you.
> That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
This is certainly true. The fediverse is not a replacement for Twitter, and it is not meant to be. The toxic Twitter culture is not wanted there. That of course doesn't stop media outlets from completely ignoring that and going for the quickest headline.
This just makes no sense. You can't paint a message on a billboard and then get angry when cars driving by can read it. If a group of people wants to post messages secretly amongst themselves, the Fediverse is the wrong place to do it. Use Telegram or a private Discord server or something, but even then screenshot leaks are bound to happen eventually.
If you are truly concerned about the safety of "vulnerable folks," you should be all for educating them on the true workings of the internet so that they can avoid publishing things they don't want the world to see. You are saying it's fine for them to use a system whose stated purpose is blasting messaged all across the internet to whoever wants to see them and then expecting all the recipients to know about and follow the unwritten rules they are somehow bound to when handling that message. That is not a realistic expectation.
This is what vulnerable folks I follow do to protect themselves, along with their instance admins often blackholing (IP tables dropping & blocking in their instance config) shit holes like https://freespeechextremist.com
I say this as a person banned by https://freespeechextremist.com , apparently my toots on that Pleroma instance should have been racist, and most other speech is unacceptable there.
Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...
will it continue to be?
You might have said the same thing about HTML, once.
Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that it is.
That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.
Sure yeah XMPP is surviving but it's nowhere close to Google chat or FB messenger.
I really enjoyed Dmytri Kleiner’s "You can't code away their wealth" talk [2] introducing the concept.
[1] https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...
Naturally, that would be a proprietary service. Or a service lifted off github and extended - the patches never streaming back upstream.
Imo, that's a W for Mastodon, not a L.
> I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
That's exactly what happened with email, but haven't the folks at Matrix/Elemental built a nice playbook to tackle this? Mastodon can and should be its own company. Today, it largely remains a work of just one eng, and incredibly so!
Meanwhile we’re building out P2P Matrix to avoid being dependent in servers altogether: arewep2pyet.com
Edit added: email is an example. Pain in the butt to not be on MSFT, GOOG, etc but at least it’s possible.
1) Establish a corporate Mastodon server and deeply embed it into your existing platform. ("We love the Fediverse! We love it so much that we've built native support for it into Google mail. That's right! Starting tomorrow, every @gmail address is also a valid Mastodon user! No need to sign up anywhere, you can just follow and toot and boost right from your Gmail app!")
1a) Think influx of a few 1000s of users is bad? How about a billion? [1]
2) Bombard the community with proprietary extensions and attempt to take control of the technical standards. ("We love ActivityPub too! That's why we're planning to add YouTube integration to it! And Google Calendar invites! And Maps locations and advanced emotes and and and... Developers of servers and third-party clients are encouraged to follow our new ActivityPub Extensions living standard. Feedback is encouraged!")
2a) Non-FAANG server admins or client devs now have the choice between continuously playing catch-up on technical features they have to implement or tolerate that a large part of messages become incomprehensible to non-FAANG users.
3) Pull up the drawbridges. ("While ActivityPub is great, we feel that ultimately it limits the platform's potential and does not meet our standards for privacy and security. Therefore, ActivityPub will be sunset at the end of the year for @gmail.com. Third-party clients and servers are invited to implement our web API instead. Just register your server as an app in the API console and apply for a key...")
I think the Fediverse community would do good to think up strategies how to counter EEE takeovers right now, because if at some point Mastodon becomes big enough that there is money or influence to be made by controlling the platform, then someone will try a takeover, sooner or later.
[1] https://financesonline.com/number-of-active-gmail-users/