Notices by Jon (jdp23@indieweb.social), page 2

@tchambers Interesting data, thanks! But ...

Measured in terms of monthly active users, though .social has gone from about 17.5% of Mastodon's total MAU in May to 27% today.

Of course that's not the only measure of centralization but still it's an important one. So I don't think the concern I expressed back then turned out to be imagined or hypothetical.

@michael @mike @IPEdmonton @chad

@tchambers Yeah like I say I think it's been a been a huge mistake for Mastodon not to emphasize this more and better support it. But oh well. https://heat-shield.space/mastodon_two_camps.html is a good look at the tensions between the "bigger is better" flat view and the "networked communities" view.

@IPEdmonton @mike @Gargron @chad

@tchambers Perhaps I'm wrong, if so I'd be delighted to be corrected!

@mike @IPEdmonton @chad

@tchambers @laurenshof "decentralized"? lol

@tchambers OK, "straightforward" might have been a bit of an exaggeration. One approach would be to extend nodeinfo with this information, or to check the ToS and privacy policy as part of federation requests, and reject ones that don't fit the bill.

But even without ToS changes, since as we agree the legal situation is murky, given how much regulatory pressure Meta's under, there's significant legal risk for them to scrape fediverse sites -- and the gain is relatively small.

@plasma4045

@tchambers Ah, I misunderstood, I see what you're saying. I agree that hasn't been litigated yet. But also, there's a straightforward answer: only federate with instances whose TOS also prohibits scraping (and who only federate with no-scraping instances).

@plasma4045

@tchambers as the linked article says, companies *don't* base their claims on ownership; in fact, they "expressly disclaim any property rights in that data in their terms of use."

But, I agree that scraping hasn't been tested for anything federated. And in a situation like indieweb.social where the instance admin is publicly saying he doesn't think there any legal barriers to scraping data, courts might well find that companies can rely on that.

@plasma4045

@tchambers indeed, and several people explained to you why you were wrong. Including me!

@plasma4045 two things are stopping people today,. First of all, there are legal restrictions on scraping -- both in the US and Europe. Secondly, some information isn't scrapable -- followers-only posts and DMs.

Also, more barriers could be added. I talk about this (and have links to discussions of the legal situation) in "They can't scrape it if they can't fetch it" in https://privacy.thenexus.today/fediverse-threat-modeling-privacy-and-meta/#no-fetching

@tchambers I think this cuts to the core of different reactions in two ways:

1) different instances have different philosophies over whether to block an instance that doesn't remove accounts of known bad actors

2) opinions differ on whether Meta is making a "good enough" effort overall.

Underlying this is the problem that without better tools, safety on the fediverse really relies today on instance blocking -- which has downsides but at least exists.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/unsafe-by-design-and-unsafe-by-default/

@reflex

@christineluc That's also my impression of the last 6+ years -- at least of the entrentched power structure.

@BlackAzizAnansi One possible approach is to have a region of the fediverse that starts with the subset of instances and people who want to prioritize equity and justice as well as diversity. Otherwise I can't see how to overcome the entrenched whiteness (etc) -- it gets harder and harder to change systems as they grow.

@christineluc yeah really! And white people telling people of color to CW their posts about racism, and casual racism in comments, and the list goes on.

Are the reply guys on that instance or elsewhere? If they're elsewhere, then hachyderm could be a good instance to be part of the "subset" I talked about. But if the hachyderm community is filled with guys like that, then it's big enough that'll be hard to turn around without a major effort (and willingness to lose people)

@BlackAzizAnansi

@CatHat As would I. On Facebook I helped support a POC-led group of admins who decided to transform a "white liberal" group to an actively anti-racist group, starting with more active moderation and threads focusing on racial justice education. At least 10% of the people in the group left. And you know what? That was a good thing!

@christineluc @BlackAzizAnansi

@dredmorbius it's both! In 2019 FB settled charges that they had violated the 2012 consent order, paid a $5B fine (without admitting guilt), and signed another consent order. Now the FTC's saying they violated the 2019 consent order as well.

@dredmorbius Yeah really. I've talked with several admins who have described their position with Meta as "trust but verify". First of all why would you trust them? Secondly how on earth do you think you'll verify their bad behavior? smh.

@jayeless I posted to lemmy by tagging the group -- so https://infosec.exchange/@thenexusofprivacy/110522140277722688 became https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/83606 (the tag's at the bottom)

It turned into a good compare-and-contrast of what replies are visible where and how they look.

I also tagged a kbin magazine but they are doing Cloudflare filtering in response to a DDOS attack so connectivity has been somewhat flaky and it didn't get through. And I tagged a friendica group but had a typo in the group name, oops.

@rom

@kissane Yep. Black Twitter refined using QTs as a means of calling out racism (and sexism, hypocrisy, etc). And racist misogynist troll kings. have plenty of other tools they can use (includng 11-thread reply chains).

Of course the details of how QTS matter a lot -- and there certainly needs to be more anti-harassment functionality and better moderation in general. So we'll see how it goes.

And @damon, 💯 !

@misc There are already plenty of intermediate options! Agreed that calling in is often a better initial approach, but when racist behavior repeats and persists (as it has on Mastodon for the last 6+ years), powerful tools are needed as well.

@trochee @kissane @damon

@welshpixie thanks for the writeup, I agree. And the "just walking away" reminds me a lot of this tweet from Leslie Miley a couple of days ago ...

@hildabast looks great ... thanks for doing all that digging!

Yeah really, great article @hildabast !

And agreed that even though people who actively want to harass somebody will just do a screenshot-and-link if they can't QT, there's still potentially value in controlling who can QT and establishing norms around screenshot-and-link.

Good to hear that they're finally implementing turning of replies, that's long overdue! I think the original bug was filed in 2018 or something like that.

@ct_bergstrom @philipncohen @drewharwell