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silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
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@p This is a good analysis, and I can confirm that there is indeed some coordination between the organizations and people you mentioned. I wouldn't call it a conspiracy, though. I know some of them well enough to conclude that it is a not a single organization, but a loose group. Some of them seem to be fake, but others seem to be sincere in their convictions.

I'd like to share a couple of additional links you may find interesting:

- https://about.iftas.org/yoel/

Remember this guy? Given the timing, I suspect that some of these projects were supposed to be sinecures for former Twitter employees.

- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/pulls/140

This is a draft of a FEP about mandatory CSAM scanning. As one of the FEP repo maintainers, I immediately raised concerns about privacy, centralization, etc. That made me persona non grata at W3C.

silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
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@phnt @p Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal, although at the time he already moved to Nostr (IIRC).

Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@silverpill @phnt

> Curiously, Gleason was supportive of the proposal

Is that curious?

> Also, some strange things started to happen in the aftermath of closing that PR. I started seeing vague posts expressing moderation concerns on Codeberg and SocialHub (in this thread, for example: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506). People suddenly started talking about adding a CoC, etc etc. But every time I asked what this is about, there was silence.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
Open link
@silverpill @phnt Okay, well, to be fair, the timestamp on the "Scope of the socialhub policy" post is August 1, 2023, and the "PhotoDNA Attestation extension" is from August 4, but I think that was possibly preemptive, because he posted this on August 18:

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/9

> Thanks. So, if I have a problem with how someone is behaving in PRs on codeberg, what do I do next?

And then in https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/12 and https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/scope-of-the-socialhub-policy/3506/13 , he made it explicit that this was about the PhotoDNA discussion.

And he directly retreats into "But think of the optics of not thinking of the children!"

> I ended up withdrawing the PR. I had adapted the proposal in the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Child Safety report into a FEP to start the discussion process. I was attacked personally in the comments, and the FEP wasn’t allowed to be merged. I don’t think it helped our movement to have such vigorous opposition to developing CSAM filtering standards.
Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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@p Reminds me of what Chapman says in the first essay I ever read on Meaningness;

"... you could recognize sociopaths and eject them. Geeks may be pretty good at the recognizing, but are lousy at the ejecting. Mops don’t recognize sociopaths, and anyway don’t care. Mops have little investment in the subculture, and can just walk away when sociopaths ruin it. By the time sociopaths show up, mops are numerically most of the subculture."

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @silverpill

Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@strypey @light @p @fish @phnt @silverpill that isn't what popper wrote even though it is deeply misquoted.

the paradox of tolerance is an open society always contains the possibility that people vote away their open society. it is the sine qua non of an open society. once you have thought police "to protect democracy" you no longer have an open society. and have extinguished your liberal democracy.

the society protects from violence against extreme opinions and vigilance protects against voting the extreme opinions in to place. you can't get rid of it without no longer having the thing you are trying to protect.

nobody seems to have ever read the book.
Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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(1/?)

@icedquinn
> nobody seems to have ever read the book

I admit I haven't (I must), but I did investigate what Popper actually said;

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/paradox-tolerance

@fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light

Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@strypey @fish @phnt @p @silverpill @light
if you read the book, the context of this claim is after 25% of the book goes on about how much popper hates plato and spent chapters reiterating "plato's republic is authoritarian as fuck, actually"

the stuff about limited tolerance is spoken in direct context of people exiting a classical authoritarian society and discussing the dangers of grognards sliding society directly back in to hierarchical strong man cultures.

people don't read it and decide it means calling randos nazis but it was spoken with the very real and ongoing concern throughout time of people rotting democracy back in to dictatorships.

poppers smugness is that if violence is off the table, then reason holds for the best argument, and the best argument is empirically the open society, so they have the advantage of self-demonstrating being the best outcome and not needing special favor.

the whole book is very much against authoritarian solutions to problems. unlimited tolerance is spoken next to societies that literally did the "someone is a threat to our power with their words, kill them" behavior people actually misquote the paradox to justify.
🐝🐝🐝

🐝🐝🐝

@sampler@freebeerextremist.com remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @strypey @silverpill @light
Tweets having 140 character limit made sense before smartphones, when we used Twitter via sms (text 40404) . Not sure why Mastodon castrates itself for any reason other than fetish.

Does any Mastodon instance have Twitter-like text messaging or did they ever? I remember statusnet had xmpp built in but I don't think we ever had proper texting set up. (Maybe this is something revolver should consider)

As long as Mastodon is wearing a chastity belt, the char length be 140 instead of 280 (tweets 2.0 - now twice as much) / 500 (toots are almost twice as big as tweets 2.0 but 500 is a nice round number) because it's a number that actually makes sense

maybe they can get government funding from EU to implement sms integration to make it easier for the government to protect their users.
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
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@sampler @icedquinn @fish @p @strypey @silverpill @light The reason is Gargron was autistic about his vision of a Twitter replacement and posts longer than 500 chars look ugly in the UI. It's a problem that will never get fixed because Mastodon desperately wants to be a Twitter alternative including the way it looks and displays threads.

The actual solution would be to widen the post view and decrease post text size, but that is too much to ask.

Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
Open link

@p
> WE HAVE TO GET YOU MORE LETTERS

If multi-post threads really bother you I can switch to my Friendica account. I keep forgetting I have it, and I *hate* the cludgy interface with a burning passion. But if you *really* need me to ...

> He should try having a better frontend. (Tweetdeck has always sucked.)

The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

@icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light

> If multi-post threads really bother you

Not really, it just seems like at some point, tagging overhead eats the limit. Even Twitter stopped doing that, like, tags and links stopped counting towards the character limit. Mastodon *could* do the former because tags are an extra field (and more or less unconstrained).

I do think that it does make threads harder to read and participate in (by increasing the likelihood of duplication: if you have two paragraphs and the second one covers something relevant to the first, but people that go chronologically see the first one and then write a different version of your second paragraph before finding your second paragraph; this can compound, it is very funny when it does), but I'm just pokin' yer ribs, I ain't tore up.

> The default Masto interface is modelled on Pinafore and has been for years. Although the one modeled on TD is still there as an opt-in.

Ah. I mean...you see the UI that I wrote and use, I'm not sure what Pinafore *is*. (And if it gives you an idea, I used to use the bitlbee Twitter backend as my only Twitter interface. Until they killed off *all* alternative clients, you could have a reasonable time with Twitter by treating it like an IRC channel.)
pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@strypey @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @silverpill @light For one thing, short names on short instances producing short tags. They've enshrined as behavior some half-assed incorrect encoding of the *intended* behavior and this is how you end up with crusty, shitty behavior that is *mandated* because otherwise it doesn't *work*.

This is why Mastodon should be completely ignored by protocol implementors: they want to be the Mastodon Network, fine, let them. Stop letting them stomp on protocol design because someone on a jithub issue whined until someone did the dumbest fucking implementation that solved half of the wrong problem. It is time to cut them loose.
Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
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@silverpill @icedquinn @fish @sampler @p @strypey @light

https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/pulls/7875

This does not implement anything meaningful in the spec and only makes quotes work on Mastodon (because they even fucked up that which worked for years before their attempt).

Trust me when I say that if the proper workflow as envisioned by Mastodon gets implemented in Pleroma, it gets patched out by most larger Pleroma instances almost immediately. Myself included, so if Nicole doesn't make it a toggle, I will. Nobody but Mastodon wants this, and I don't want the Twitter copy of hidden replies either.

pistolero

pistolero

@p@fsebugoutzone.org remote
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@silverpill @phnt @icedquinn @fish @sampler @strypey @light

> Like, what's the plan? Let Mastodon/W3C do their thing until incompatibilities accumulate and the network splits?

They are not meaningfully a part of the fediverse at this point. They have made a Twitter. It is no longer a platform that you use to communicate with friends: it is a broadcast-only circle-jerk and when it fails to be a broadcast-only circle-jerk people that want to "control the experience" and that can't distinguish between startup dipshittery and tech built by people to communicate with each other. Look at the early posts by the hachyderm dipshit, that guy's like "Oh, this isn't going to work, we have to eject these people and we have to make it advertiser-friendly because if we don't then fedi will never replace Twitter!" I don't want to replace Twitter with a shitty clone of Twitter: I want to replace Twitter with something good.

I intend to have a platform to communicate with friends and strangers. I don't really care if Mastodon decides to create a desert and call it peace. They have fundamentally different goals. Nobody complained when Gab fucked off (and they were, in many cases, fucked off before that: https://pastebin.com/E0k5fcd6 ), but somehow Mastodon is important? Go look at what they're putting onto the network: https://mastodon.social/explore .
gab_fears_the_fse2.png
gablins-fear-fse.jpg
trannydemonhackers.png
silverpill

silverpill

@silverpill@mitra.social remote
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@p @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @light

The point I am trying to make is not about Mastodon specifically. It's about network effects. I believe that in case of a network split almost all developers and users will defect to the Mastodon side, even those who are making fun of Mastodon today.

It's not going to be like Gab.

Of course, this situation is mostly theoretical, I don't expect it to happen within the next 2-3 years. And obviously, I don't think that we should be especially concerned about being cut off from the Mastodon Network. I am talking about building a viable alternative.

Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
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(2/?)

But I agree with Johannes here.

The fediverse emerged from an understanding that no *one* ethical platform can replace the network effects of the megafauna (as CoHost quickly learned). Forcing Ryan to make BF opt-in - after years of causing no problems whatsoever as an opt-out bridge to the IndieWeb - was a ludicrous self-punch by the Mastodon HOA. If we can fully integrated ATProto stuff into the fediverse, so much the better.

Strypey

Strypey

@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz remote
Open link

(3/3)

ATProto is in the process of being standardised at IETF. Even if BS is killed tomorrow, and broken up and sold for scrap by its Venture Capitalist owners, ATProto is not going away. Any more than Nostr is.

The AP fediverse came about as a merger of OStatus, Diaspora and DFRN/Zot networks. It seems logical to me that in 10 years time we could be looking back at the AP, ATProto and Nostr networks the same way. From within a fediverse that somehow transcends and includes them all.

Phantasm

Phantasm

@phnt@fluffytail.org remote
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@strypey ATProto is fundamentally different in how it works, it is only decentralized to the smallest extent it can be. Moderation is purposefully more or less centralized with labelers. Which in no doubt is what IFTAS and Mastodon want to effectively build with FIRES and FASPs, it being more decentralized is just a side-effect of AP not being centralized by design. Blocking the central bsky labeler earns you a ban on bsky. These two networks are incompatible in how they operate and want to operate.

Now to the second part, this idea of replacing the status quo with Fediverse is a good idea on paper. Over the years I've watched the Fediverse get worse and worse in both its userbase and the content the userbase puts on the network because of this mentality. First it was years of Twitter refugees going to Mastodon and promoting heavy-handed moderation, breaking federation on purpose, creating fediblock and now IFTAS/FIRES/FASPs. All of these are the result of Fediverse's desire to replace the status quo with itself and it is a death sentence given enough time. Now imagine what bsky refugees will make of this place when they are even more opinionated in their views than the majority of Mastodon users. If Mastodon is what is left of the Twitter left leaving since ~2021, then Bsky is those that didn't leave Twitter because Mastodon was too much of wild west and Mastodon refugees. Opinionated extremists of the already opinionated.

Call it gatekeeping, because that's what it is, but these people should have their own walled of garden they can play in and not bother anyone else. The irony of being part of development of a network that lets anyone say anything they want, where users have no control over other users, while promoting gatekeeping users is not lost on me, but bsky users are a net negative to this network, just like the majority of Mastodon users are.

I don't really care about Nostr since they are just Bitcoin maxis high on $current_llm_model (+ CP), but they are mostly harmless. That said, my timelines were dramatically improved since Gleason went there.
Replying to @phnt@fluffytail.org

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