Post AwKAIfbtcI0fixQKno by williampietri@sfba.social
(DIR) More posts by williampietri@sfba.social
(DIR) Post #AwH0aOmNLn2hijGDkO by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-07-18T12:48:37Z
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So there's a mini-tempest going on. The upshot as I understand it being that some users apparently want to have a public Mastodon account, but want to be asked before that account gets mentioned or linked to on other social media platforms.I'm having trouble even making sense of the request. The way I think of the Fediverse is as a set of interlinked platforms with no clear boundaries. And the way I think of identity here is that the profile basics are published to the world, with that being an essential property of what an account is.I'm also familiar with private forums, where users are vetted and everything is locked down, and it's a sin to leak anything.But are there parts of Mastodon (or the Fedivese) with the latter culture but on top of an essentially public infrastructure? Or is there something else going on culturally that I'm missing?
(DIR) Post #AwH0aQIfhCTERBNWj2 by Uraael@kitty.social
2025-07-18T13:11:32.322Z
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@williampietri@sfba.social Yes, you are missing some things. It's less of a Privacy issue and more of a Consent issue.The fedi is a large cluster of interlinked servers but it is also a Culture. We have Moderation standards here usually higher and stricter than elsewhere, by design. So you nesd to differentiate between Fediverse and Not-Fediverse for reasons of protecting people here used to our level of protection and safety standards. The Fedi did that when Meta's Threads wanted to link up; over 700 server admins refused to connect with it because Meta don't Moderate anywhere near as effectively as we do here. They were a large risk in safety terms as well as Meta being very problematic on various philosophical and ethical grounds.The fact profiles and posts are ' public' here means we've given consent for them to be discoverable on the Fediverse. It does not mean open house for the rest of the internets' networks and services to farm at will, or we'd have joined those services and provided that data ourselves.In the case of the specific user reporting the issue here, their post made it to Bluesky without their consent and also during the crossing it was muddled to give it a very negative spin. That user suffered horrible blowback here when a campaign was mounted to have him blocked en masse, all because of a coding mistake.
(DIR) Post #AwH0aRYJ2YZSJxhWjY by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-07-18T13:23:01Z
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@Uraael I appreciate the explanation, and I see what you're saying about their theory of operation and local culture.But just as a matter of actual implementation, the Fediverse is not closed to non-Fediverse software. Public things like profiles are public to the world. Intentionally, and as far as I know, right from the beginning.If people want it to mean something different for them, I think that's a fine reason to have a new feature or a new kind of software on the Fediverse. But I think people expecting their local culture to dominate Fediverse-wide on this in spite of both the implementation and other cultures is, well, practically untenable to say the least.
(DIR) Post #AwH0aSU5Zin9DAjfnc by Uraael@kitty.social
2025-07-18T13:34:01.264Z
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@williampietri@sfba.social Yes, but making a profile accesible to anyone with a browser is a very different thing from saying it can be hosted specifcally by another network or organisation. Ownership is also key.Why do you think places like facebook say they own everything posted there? By your logic, because it's public anyone can steal it and host it themselves. Whatever the Fedi stsrted out as it emphatically did not give license for data theft, wholesale or piecemeal.
(DIR) Post #AwH0aTEslkDpYId2jg by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-18T22:55:05Z
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@Uraael @williampietri As a practice I have not been sharing fedi profiles, but now as personal policy, I will not. Yes, many people here are very vulnerable to insults and sssualts of all kinds and no way will I facilitate that. But I assume, possibly incorrectly, that literally every profile and post is now and has always been open to anyone with a browser. I sometimes see posts that imply that the poster thinks otherwise.....Bsky or otherwise, all that changes is the scale. But that scale is potentially huge, and small things at scale often become something else altogether. I personally put very little on my profile because I am fully aware of the sort of shit bad people do. I try to think of what happens if the worst possible person reads it; what follows?
(DIR) Post #AwH4trSDMVFByMMm7U by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-07-18T13:42:47Z
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@Uraael I don't think of my Mastodon profile as just being available to anybody with a browser. That's certainly not what's going on technically. And it's certainly not my intent in setting up the account. I explicitly meant it to be machine readable to many other Mastodon and Fediverse servers, as well as search engines more generally.If other people have different desires, I don't think that's unreasonable. But I think that's something we need to bake into the protocols and tools. Some of that's definitely already there, but apparently some people need more. I'm in favor of adding whatever they need.I also don't think you have correctly applied my thinking to "places like Facebook". If you'd like my take, I'd rather you asked me for it than jumping to incorrect conclusions.
(DIR) Post #AwH4tsWrMiYPJ3Y000 by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-18T22:57:59Z
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@williampietri"I don't think of my Mastodon profile as just being available to anybody with a browser." It literally is available to anyone world wide with a browser. @Uraael
(DIR) Post #AwI3aLSGCkbqQkTgjw by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-07-19T11:49:34Z
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@tomjennings Yes, and that's part of my point. But the word "just" in that indicates I'm going beyond that. It's literally available to anything that can create an HTTP connection, plus anything handling ActivityPub.I get why people may want a different level of privacy, but my point is that they don't have it now and shouldn't expect it without major technical changes.@Uraael
(DIR) Post #AwIPPhxgNmPS2YVa4G by tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org
2025-07-19T15:54:11Z
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@williampietriOh sorry I misread the paragraph then.I'm with you. It does seem like people think of the fedi as a safe space, and it is. But the ways in which that is limited is as you say part of it's structure. Its inherent. The other path, locked down everything, I think is a path to madness. We have a lot of it and it just escalates and we have abuse everywhere in it. The world is a mess and no code will fix that. @Uraael
(DIR) Post #AwKAIfbtcI0fixQKno by williampietri@sfba.social
2025-07-20T12:14:11Z
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@tomjennings For sure. And I think maintaining a culture of safety here is something to definitely work toward. But I think the cultural desires and the technological implementation have to be aligned one way or another; the power of culture is limited. Especially when there are multiple cultures in play, as with this current "public things are public" vs "public things should be kept private without explicit permission".