[HN Gopher] Adventures in Mastoland
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Adventures in Mastoland
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-01-16 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (searchtodon.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (searchtodon.social)
| hklgny wrote:
| This was a very strange article to read - and the author felt a
| bit over the top apologetic to me. What excites me about Mastodon
| is its open nature and more decentralized community feel. Feels
| like the kind of place that you can still "discover" and
| "stumble" onto things. Experimentation is very much a core tenant
| of that - the idea that you'd leverage open protocols but try to
| police them like a walled garden feels backwards. What a let
| down.
| sen wrote:
| I saw most of this play out on Mastadon, and OP was absolutely
| blasted for even daring to try something like this. The
| response was completely inappropriate, and the level of hate
| was excessive when OP was very clear from the start that they
| were trying to find a "good" way to do this and had zero ill
| intent.
| dv_dt wrote:
| If the post has a hashtag, it seems like a request to be indexed.
| If not, then maybe don't make it searchable.
| pnathan wrote:
| I would be 100% shocked to learn that there are no quiet and
| private search engines for Fediverse covering the vast majority
| of posts.
|
| I would also expect, given increasing mainstreaming of Mastodon
| and the well known discovery issues, a commercial Fediverse
| search engine to go live in the next year, and to do well,
| despite the community pushback.
| bronikowski wrote:
| This is all well and good but I think it would be naive to think
| that actors that are not going to listen and/or follow social
| contracts of Fediverse are going to be stopped from indexing
| everything and selling the data to whoever.
|
| I bet there are already many, many private archives, created in
| silence, without front-facing UI.
| Ciantic wrote:
| Individual servers will sort this one out.
|
| There are already instances like qoto.org which have full-text
| search, quote toots, and other features. If people of the
| instance demand it, the search feature will be implemented.
|
| Qoto.org have other policies such as they try not to block
| anyone, which among other issues has caused it to be blocked by
| some servers, but not by biggest servers.
|
| It's a cultural clash, question is are toots part of ephemeral
| discussion or microblogging? I lean on side of microblogging,
| thus everything should be indexable and searchable. Some blame
| can be set on the creators of Mastodon, they made a no-index
| checkbox, it should have been end of the story, but it wasn't.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Qoto.org have other policies such as they try not to block
| anyone
|
| How was that compatible with it's rules in the about section:
|
| > Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.
|
| What happens if you harass someone?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| A big advantage of a federated platform is that people can build
| on top of it without being concerned that the API will get shut
| down. A federated platform will never be able to compete with a
| centralized platform in terms of privacy. It should focus on its
| strengths rather then trying to make up for its weaknesses.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I'm waiting for someone just to build a search engine based on
| screen scraping and ignore what "the community" says. either with
| good intent or a hostile version.
| googlryas wrote:
| I'm actually flabbergasted that highly technical users (who
| probably make up 90+% of Mastodon users indicating "no
| search/index/bot" etc) have this opinion about their posts. Is
| it just virtue signaling?
| xerxes901 wrote:
| Hope these people never send any emails, I hear they can be
| searched for a long time too.
| colinsane wrote:
| an interesting analogy: 1-to-1 email used to be considered
| private. actually, a lot of people still use it with an
| expectation of privacy (see: password resets sent over
| email, politicians regularly having their incriminating
| emails leaked, or good ol' personal correspondence). but
| _technically_ it's never been all that private: most SMTP
| servers don't mandate SSL, and even with SSL most email
| remains readable _and indexed_ by Google.
|
| i have no problem when the people i intended to reach save
| and index my email. yet i think i'm reasonable in being
| upset whenever i discover a new party i didn't know/expect
| is doing it (e.g. NSA).
|
| SMTP sniffing, SNI sniffing, DNS sniffing: these are all
| instances where ingesting "openly available" data is
| beneficial to the party doing it but costly to me (it
| limits my ability to speak freely with a consenting party
| without consequence).
|
| fediverse is clearly split on this. some people have
| expectations based more in personal correspondence, and
| don't want to end up in the same situation as email where
| the adversarial relations and negative externalities are
| just de-facto/accepted. others have expectations based in
| mass-media, where the further your comms travel the
| _better_. but for most users, they use the protocol for a
| mix of both, and that makes for a messy and difficult to
| reason about situation.
|
| some of this is solvable with protocol upgrades. but that's
| going to take a _lot_ of time, and it's not clear that
| every social norm even can be enforced technically.
| init2null wrote:
| I too am astonished over some people's vitriol on the
| subject. I saw someone post over the weekend that said that
| they'll refuse to use #nobot since it's opt-out, and they'll
| instead just file GPDR requests against the companies that
| try to follow them. They demand opt-in.
|
| It was certainly a fiery post, but this is how the web has
| worked since forever. Whether it's robots.txt or #nobots,
| opting out is required. After all, you're putting the content
| out there. In the end, this should be addressed by modern
| clients: "Do you want your posts to be searchable and your
| following list to be used for recommendations? Yes, No" and
| add #nobots if they decline.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| There are more charitable interpretations than virtue
| signaling.
|
| Mastodon has the unfortunate adolescent problem of being not
| Twitter but not yet fully matured into its full potential.
| Teenagers and Mastodon alike rebel agaist their parents in
| order to discover who they are. Before they sort this out
| they try a bunch of contrary behavior and eventually they
| discover what makes them them.
|
| Is Mastodon Mastodon because it doesn't have full text
| search, because it doesn't have an algorithm feed, because it
| is decentralized, because it doesn't have quote replies,
| because it has a different user base with different
| relations?
|
| All of these, and not all of these. Mastodon will, eventually
| figure out which ones make it itself and which ones don't.
| Maybe in that process it reinvents itself countless times or
| maybe it coalesces around a strange attractor in social-
| feature-space. We dont know the results without running the
| experiment and figuring out what full text search means to
| Mastodon is running the experiment.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's been around for years and has never improved. Source:
| I was there before the Twitter users arrived. Mastodon is a
| failed experiment, at least if you're looking for a digital
| open society and intelligent conversations. The Twitter
| users that left because they're outraged about Musk not
| censoring enough are only going to make things worse if
| anything. Many might fit right in though, Mastodon is all
| about echo chambers which is a surprising feat for a
| decentralized network.
| hklgny wrote:
| Having read through a few of the comments this guy faced,
| this feels like a decent take. I suspect most folks float
| around for a bit and land back on twitter - which is also
| a shame.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not a fan of Twitter although I use it in light
| of a lack of good alternatives and because some
| interesting people are still on there. Social media
| matters, this is where opinions are made these days,
| where people get their news but also where they get
| indoctrinated and misinformed.
|
| Different folks have very different expectations and
| wishes if you ask them about the ideal social media site.
| Imo it's paramount to bring back trust. This could be
| done not through dubious "fact-checkers" or by banning
| anyone certain people dislike, but simply by having the
| option for accounts to have all their submissions posted
| to a blockchain so that they can't be deleted nor
| altered. This could be used by media, politicians and
| anyone else who wants to signal reliability. Users could
| then go back in time and decide for themselves if the
| account is honest and worth engaging with, there would be
| cryptographic proof if they keep lying or misrepresenting
| things and this in turn could easily be linked to.
|
| Ideally, not only that but users should be in control of
| their data. This is kind of true with Mastodon but the
| majority of users don't run their own server and won't
| ever, because that's just unrealistic. It's better to
| outsource this with financial incentives to ensure
| decentralization and user control.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| How did you arrive at that measure of success for
| Mastodon?
|
| I have my own measure of success and Mastodon meets it
| well enough, but I wouldn't say treating it as an
| objective measure adds any value, and why should it? I
| really only care about n=1.
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(page generated 2023-01-16 23:01 UTC)