Shakedown Social

Jupiter Rowland@<a href="https://infosec.space/@kkarhan" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kevin Karhan :verified:</a> To quote Arthur C. Clarke: <blockquote>Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.</blockquote> And for your average Musk escapees, Mastodon alone is more than sufficiently advanced. These people believe that there's some magic going on that makes their fully public posts private and secure regardless. They want perfect security, but with zero inconvenience, and they think Mastodon provides them with exactly this. In fact, they expect Mastodon to be an absolutely perfectly safe haven, simply because it isn't a corporate silo. Little do they know how close to being a corporate silo Mastodon is, what with having a US-based company and a lighthouse instance that accounts for 22% of the whole Fediverse in terms of MAUs. On top of that, more than half of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and most of the rest can't imagine that anything in the Fediverse could possibly have features that Mastodon doesn't have. Not unless you slap them right into their faces like character limits over 500. They cling hard to and rely on an imagination of the Fediverse that has never even been close to reality and never will. As for The Bad Space, its blocklist looks like it's curated not by evidence, but by emotional triggers. Generally, some blocklists go so wild that you have to ask yourself whether the reason why nobody has tried to block out everything that isn't vanilla Mastodon is because that'd be too big an effort (two out of three Fediverse instances aren't Mastodon), or whether such people simply don't know how far the Fediverse extends beyond Mastodon, so they don't know what to block. I mean, there should be reasons enough to block everything that isn't Mastodon. Blocklist import from other instances doesn't make things any better. Just like on all networks where everyone can run a server, the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, has got admins who really shouldn't run a server. It looks very tempting to pick blocklists by length rather than content, the longer, the more "secure", import a bunch of them, but not curate them because that'd be extra effort. In this light, it's a good thing that <a href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/78f9d082-ea04-4501-a771-d1a3dfbc726f/with-the-advent-of-fedicheck-there-will-be-big-changes-to-the-oliphant-blocklists-in-the-future.i-ve-always-said-the-list-project-i-m-doing-is-an-interim-step-on-the-road-to-something-better.-fedicheck-is-the-something-better-at-least-so-far-as-wh..." rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Oliphant put the tier-1 to tier-3 blocklists onto the chopping block</a> when switching from manual list curation to automated list aggregation a while ago. Especially tier 3 would have been easy to exploit with little to no curation, and there certainly were enough sufficiently paranoid Mastodon admins who'd subscribe to tier 3 without ever taking a single peek at the list. Sometimes I feel like going to Mastodon's GitHub repository and submitting blocking or allowing entire Fediverse server applications by user agent, both for admins and for users, as a feature request, just to see what'll happen. Maybe dumbed down on the user side to a switch that blocks everything that isn't Mastodon. But maybe I should also mention that (streams) already has this feature on the admin side so that the Mastodon devs have to think up a way to sell this as invented by Mastodon. #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Long" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Long</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=LongPost" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLong" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWLong</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLongPost" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWLongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWFediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWFediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Fediverse" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Fediverse</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Mastodon" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mastodon</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=NotOnlyMastodon" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NotOnlyMastodon</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediverseIsNotMastodon" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FediverseIsNotMastodon</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=MastodonIsNotTheFediverse" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MastodonIsNotTheFediverse</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Blocklist" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Blocklist</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Blocklists" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Blocklists</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=BlocklistMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">BlocklistMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWBlocklistMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWBlocklistMeta</a>

Jupiter Rowland<a href="https://social.beaware.live/@BeAware/111743568733982802" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">This whole thread</a> gave me to think. Could it be that countless Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users are blocked on countless mostly Mastodon instances by the admins because reporting users the Mastodon doesn't work on these projects? So there's a user who doesn't fully act according to the Mastodon community standards. That user's posts appear on some Mastodon instance. The wrongdoing: For example, what's perceived as hashtag abuse; see the linked thread. Or no Mastodon-style content warning where Mastodon culture would demand one*. Or something like that. What does the admin do? Use the report system to report that user to the admins and moderators of their own home instance. Problem: That particular user isn't on Mastodon. Not on anything that was modelled after Mastodon either. That user is on Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams). Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, neither has Mastodon's report system implemented. The report never reaches the admin of that instance. And the instance doesn't have any more staff. Well, then they could write directly to the admin of that instance. If only the Fediverse contact of the instance admin was available on the instance frontpage. Or anywhere on the instance Web interface. Even if they could, they might get the idea that they could catch the admin's attention by mentioning them in a public post. Spoiler: Doesn't work with Friendica accounts, Hubzilla channels and (streams) channels. Oh, and at least Hubzilla and (streams) allow you to restrict from whom you receive direct messages. Regardless of whether or not that's a good idea, it's possible to make it so that DMs from random Mastodon users no longer end up in your stream. Worse yet: These Mastodon users don't even know that their DMs don't reach the recipient. Okay, last resort, complaints about that user can be posted publicly under the hashtag #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=MastoAdmin" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MastoAdmin</a>. Should reach lots of admins, right? Yes, but almost exclusively Mastodon admins. It's MastoAdmin, after all. Why should an admin of, say, a Friendica node or a Hubzilla hub follow that hashtag? Neither of them is Mastodon, and neither of them has anything to do with Mastodon. They didn't even federate with Mastodon, Mastodon federated with them. Oh, and besides, to my best knowledge, they can't even follow hashtags in the first place. Or is Hubzilla the only one out of the three that doesn't have that feature yet? Anyways, the warning with the #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=MastoAdmin" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MastoAdmin</a> hashtag doesn't reach them either. So whatever you try to let some Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) admin know that a user on their instance "misbehaves", the admin doesn't react and "moderate" that user. Conclusion for your typical Mastodon admin: That instance is unmoderated. From the point of view of people who only know Mastodon beyond the name, the admin must ignore all reports. We can be glad if this leads only to blocking the "misbehaving" user on lots of Mastodon instances and not to what's standard for unmoderated or undermoderated instances on Mastodon: blocking the whole instance. *Footnote: Neither of the three projects mentioned here has a "Content Warning" field. Hubzilla and (streams) have a "Summary" field which is the same thing, but especially newbies and those who are hardly in touch with the ActivityPub side of the Fediverse don't know it's the same. Also, that field is only available for posts (= first posts) and not for comments (= replies which are something entirely different on these projects). Friendica doesn't even have that; a pair of BBcode tags is needed for a Mastodon-style content warning, and AFAIK, this isn't documented anywhere. #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=Long" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Long</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=LongPost" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLong" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWLong</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWLongPost" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWLongPost</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=FediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">FediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWFediMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWFediverseMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWFediverseMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=BlockingMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">BlockingMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=BlocklistMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">BlocklistMeta</a> #<a class="" href="https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/search?tag=CWBlocklistMeta" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CWBlocklistMeta</a>

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