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   Phantasm (phnt@fluffytail.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jun-2026 05:44:55 JST Phantasm

   • Jupiter Rowland
   • Pawslut420
   @jupiter_rowland @sendpaws
   >About "reply gating"
   >This, or something similar, has been a standard feature at least on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte from the get-go, i.e. from their respective creation on.
   
   I've written extensively about this before. Features like this simply cannot work in a federated network like ActivityPub broadly. Your instance might hide replies/comments to your posts to you and other instances running the same software, but it is visible to everyone else. So at best it creates a false sense of security/control.
   
   The only way to implement it properly is by making the OP instance/user the sole authority of federating those posts, which requires a large paradigm shift in how federation works. FEP-171b: Conversation Containers is one such way and it is effectively broken for every other implementation beyond those listed. Hubzilla implements it. So you either limit your interactions to 4 fedi server implementations that most people don't use, or it doesn't work as expected.
   
   Give my blog post about it a read if you are interested in how these settings can be disregarded.
   • Embed this notice
     Phantasm (phnt@fluffytail.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jun-2026 05:44:54 JST Phantasm

     in reply to

     • Jupiter Rowland
     • Pawslut420
     @jupiter_rowland @sendpaws Not to mention that limiting social interactions on a social media network is kinda sad. There are better ways to filter posts you don't like seeing in your notifs than breaking federation and/or making social media less social.
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Phantasm (phnt@fluffytail.org)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jun-2026 04:48:00 JST Phantasm

     in reply to

     • Jupiter Rowland
     • Pawslut420
     @jupiter_rowland @sendpaws
     >Not the whole Fediverse is social media.
     >Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible...
     
     The protocol is described as a social networking protocol in its abstract. That people managed to bolt on forums and marketplaces on top of it is more of a testament to its stupid levels of extensibility. And to me social media qualifies as anything that isn't a blog that allows comments. Since that is its dictionary definition more or less. AIM was social media, Twitter is social media, Fediverse is social media. They are all medias that allow social interactions.
     
     Abstract
     The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralized social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format.
     ---
     websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites
     - Cambridge dictionary
     
     >It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.
     
     You can't have any of this when using ActivityPub. And if you turn off ActivityPub federation then you've created a website with comments. There is nothing private on this network besides end-to-end-encrypted DMs which are very much in a prototype stage still. This whole network operates on an implied trust that nobody does anything malicious, but that is a faulty assumption that never held up. Trying to make ActivityPub resilient to it would have reinvented XMPP with different semantics and probably much more complicated. Even stuff like Conversation Containers aren't private despite the federation being done only by one party being the sole authority over the conversation. It is trivial to leak those posts as long as they've been sent to one or more malicious instances. They have the same issue as Mastodon lockposts in that regard. The only meaningful difference between the two is that a Conversation Container can stay in the same audience throughout the whole conversation, ie. only for the followers of OP for example, Mastodon lockposts don't have that capability.
     
     >Mastodon is not the gold standard and reference implementation of ActivityPub.
     
     ActivityPub is Mastodon no matter how much that fact sucks. As someone that is very vocal about issues Mastodon brings to the network and as someone that knows how this network works internally (sadly), I know what the implications are. ActivityPub on its own is a useless pile of non-specifications where there's more unspecified things to be filled in than what the non-specification specifies. If you implement ActivityPub as the non-specification says without looking at any other implementations, not only will you probably give up because it lacks lots of details needed to implement it, but if you manage to implement it I can almost guarantee it wouldn't federate with anything. ActivityPub is more a recipe on how to build your own social media protocol than a protocol specification.
     
     >It's a highly Mastodon-centric notion that everything in the Fediverse that doesn't strictly "implement Mastodon" is broken.
     
     If you can't federate with 95+% of the network it's broken in the context of Fediverse. The same way reply/interaction/quote controls are broken because they cannot be enforced over the network.
     
     I genuinely recommend reading my blog post I've linked above even though it is very long. It goes over the details why privacy on this network cannot work properly unless you switch everything to end-to-end-encryption and tries to explain the technicalities for those not in the know.
     
     >Yes, if I disallow comments on a post, anyone on Mastodon can still reply to it, not even knowing that they aren't allowed to do that. But if they do reply, who'll see that reply?
     
     90+% of the network will be able to see that reply. Only Hubzilla and friends users won't see that reply. If Hubzilla implements GoToSocial interaction policies, than that will shrink the audience to everyone that isn't using Hubzilla and friends, Mastodon and GoToSocial. Which eliminates a large portion of the network, but I will still be able to see that reply if it was made on an instance not running either of those listed.
     
     >Simply because both Hubzilla devs oh-so-staunchly refuse to "implement Mastodon" and rip all that stuff out that Mastodon doesn't support.
     
     I have the same mentality. Implement as little to keep Mastodon federation going and ignore the rest. I don't care about any of these restrictions the same way I don't care about restrictions preventing federation from working properly. If you mention me in a conversation container thread, I think those federate as DMs at least when coming from Mitra, so it's useless to me anyway. And in the context of locking a thread to followers-only, I don't like that scope anyway the way Mastodon implements it and what conversation container does to that thread is that it limits the audience even further, so I care about conversation containers even more.
   • Embed this notice
     Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jun-2026 04:48:02 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • Pawslut420
     @Pawlicker @Phantasm Not the whole Fediverse is social media.
     
     Social media is all about unidirectional followers and churning out content to as many people as possible. Mastodon is social media. It's modelled after Twitter which is social media. So are basically all other microblogging server applications in the Fediverse.
     
     In stark contrast, Hubzilla, as well as its ancestors and descendants, is not social media. It is not modelled after Twitter. It is not nomadic Mastodon with unlimited characters. It doesn't even have unidirectional following. Intentionally in all cases. Also, something that has been around for longer than Mastodon can't be modelled after Mastodon.
     
     Rather, at its core, it's modelled after the Facebook of the 2010s. The Facebook of the 2010s was not social media. It was a social network, dedicated to bidirectional interactions between people. To this day, Facebook doesn't have unidirectional following. Instead, it has "friends" which are always bidirectional.
     
     Likewise, Hubzilla has bidirectional "contacts" as a default. Mind you, these are nothing like your usual Fediverse microblogging mutuals. They aren't one following connection plus one being-followed connection. They're one and exactly one connection which goes both ways.
     
     Also, unlike most other Fediverse software, Hubzilla is extremely flexible in its use-cases. Unlike on most other Fediverse server applications, Hubzilla isn't hard-coded to always be public unless it's a DM which still is quasi-public. It can very much be used for enclosed communities as well, protected by a staggeringly advanced permissions system.
     
     Let me put it this way: BlackMastodon was a disaster. Why? Because Mastodon has nothing much between fully public and mention-driven DMs, and its only ways of self-moderation are muting, blocking and calling the mods.
     
     BlackZilla would have been a success (unless phone apps with native mobile UIs would have been a hard requirement). It would have allowed for discussions with restricted permissions, made absolutely impenetrable even for Mastodon users. It would even have allowed for discussion groups which would have been both fully private and hidden from all directories. Most importantly, it would have empowered its users to moderate their own streams themselves with a whole arsenal of countermeasures, all the way up to the thermonuclear option of turning ActivityPub off entirely.
     
     Just because you use software that can federate with Mastodon, doesn't mean it has to work like Mastodon, and it means even less that it has to always work like Mastodon. Mastodon is not the gold standard and reference implementation of ActivityPub. It's a highly Mastodon-centric notion that everything in the Fediverse that doesn't strictly "implement Mastodon" is broken.
     
     By the way: The way that permissions are worded on (streams) and Forte make much clearer what they're actually for than the way they're worded on Hubzilla. They aren't always there to prevent everyone from doing things. Rather, they're there to keep your stream clean from unwanted content.
     
     Yes, if I disallow comments on a post, anyone on Mastodon can still reply to it, not even knowing that they aren't allowed to do that. But if they do reply, who'll see that reply?
     
     Anyone else in the conversation who's on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Forte or Lemmy or /kbin or Mbin or PieFed or anything else that knows a thing or two about enclosed threaded conversations won't. That's because they all receive the reply not from the Mastodon poster, but from me. But I don't let that reply from Mastodon in. And if I don't let it in, it won't spread to the users on the aforementioned applications.
     
     That is the intention. And it has been since Mike Macgirvin designed Friendica 16 years ago.
     
     Really: If Hubzilla has enclosed conversations backed by a FEP created on (streams) and an advanced permissions system, and Mastodon doesn't have either, and this causes malfunctions, it's Hubzilla that's broken.
     
     If Mastodon has quote-post controls backed by a FEP created on GoToSocial, and Hubzilla neither has nor supports them, and this causes malfunctions, it's Hubzilla that's broken.
     
     Simply because both Hubzilla devs oh-so-staunchly refuse to "implement Mastodon" and rip all that stuff out that Mastodon doesn't support.
     
     It has stopped being funny long ago.
     
     #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity
   • Embed this notice
     Pawslut420 (sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party)'s status on Thursday, 11-Jun-2026 04:48:03 JST Pawslut420

     in reply to

     • Jupiter Rowland

     @phnt @jupiter_rowland Making social media less social is one huge reason why it's so shit nowadays.

     It's also funny to see how people who do that end up complaining about how lonely they are before nuking their account. You just cut off all interactions, no wonder people aren't talking to you.