[HN Gopher] Adventures in Mastoland ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-16 23:01 UTC)