Notices by Evan Prodromou (evan@cosocial.ca)

@martind yikes

@pjvm I try to take this kind of thing seriously. I think the main critiques are that she talks about kids in Gaza suffering, which they think is propaganda and untrue. Also, that she doesn't talk enough about the suffering of Israeli kids, such as on October 7, which they think is unfair.

@mcc yes.

@mcc @ireneista Great. Thanks.

But I also think people are concerned about bots that aren't friendly or compliant -- for example, "dark" LLM training bots that ignore robots.txt and other signals. I don't think that arguing or signalling helps in those cases.

I also think advisory signals, like robots.txt and meta tags, can be helpful with compliant and friendly bots -- especially search engine or archiving bots.

So, a couple of people asked if this poll was meant to keep people from arguing against scraping, indexing, and training on people's public data. Nothing of the kind.

I think that people in our community, who hold our values, are likely to be very amenable to this kind of argument. I think that making that point verbally can be really helpful.

@mcc I don't understand your point. The whole thread is about avoiding scraping. I didn't say anything about adding scraping-based features.

Finally, there's that extra step of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) that protects the content even from your (and their) server operator. I think the current work on bringing MLS to ActivityPub will help with that a lot. https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-e2ee

Second, there's an in-between kind of audience -- a set of people that I don't know personally, but that I trust some smart moderators have vetted. Facebook Groups work like this, for instance; well-managed mailing lists and chat groups work this way, too. My hope is that the work that we're doing for groups in the SocialCG will help with this: https://github.com/swicg/groups

I'm a "but..." because private accounts are kind of frustrating on Mastodon. When you reply to a followers-only post on Mastodon, for example, the response is legible only to *your* followers, not the followers of the person you replied to. So, the conversation diminishes rapidly. This is a bug.

However, for the problem as stated -- indexing, training -- I think private accounts are fine.

I am intimately aware that because ActivityPub data is stored in the clear on the server, your server operator, any of your followers' server operators, their cloud hosting provider, and possibly some other entities (like your client software provider) could also have access to the content.

Thanks for all the replies! I'm a "Yes, but...". I think this is an effective mechanism for keeping your posts private to you and people you trust. I am intimately aware that because ActivityPub data is stored in the clear on the server, your server operator, any of your followers' server operators, their cloud hosting provider, and possibly some other entities (like your client software provider) could also have access to the content.

@BathysphereHat Stop Antisemitism has a page about her here:

https://stopantisemitism.org/as-week/ms-rachel/

@chrisjrn an interesting challenge! I can think of at least three meanings:

- attached to the laptop using adhesive
- lying on top of the laptop but not stuck to it
- a digital design for a sticker stored on the laptop's hard drive

The first is most common, I think, and the last two would be kind of gotcha, technically correct answers.

Were you thinking of one of these, or something else?

@memeorandum why did they even bother to announce this

@Chigaze why would that be better? What would be better about it?

@wjmaggos I wonder if you tried it?