Inside an Elephant’s Trunk

https://tube.blueben.net/w/ooviAA17rhDJkFpVHGxndk

We've built a bot to help federate our Mastodon instance and bring in content from other servers. @trunkbot periodically checks #Trunk for new accounts to follow, and the posts by these accounts then show on our live feeds and in the hashtag indexes.

https://www.qweb.co.uk/blog/trunkbot

Ugh. The General Data Protection Regulation says that consent must have been explicit for data collected and each purpose data is used for. @jdp23 wrote an excellent article back when, Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers. I guess you already know what's coming, right? Something I disagree with and that many of you might disagree with, too. 😓

Trunk is a small project of mine that was supposed to help people find a number of accounts to get started on fedi. No spammers, no bots, no orgs. Just people, or so we hoped. Well, today somebody sent me a message saying that they had been contacted by @trunkbot because they're listed by Trunk. And the person writing me that message reasonably believed that this bot was related to my project in some way. But no: it's "a bot created by QWeb Ltd to help with Mastodon server federation."

It also says: "If I've followed you, it's because you're in the trunk!" And that's where we get back to the question of consent and the lack thereof.

I guess the naming and shaming will continue until basic consent and ethics are in computer science curriculums. That is to say, for a very, very long time, as far as I can tell.

#Trunk

@Mayana Please add me to Photography. #Trunk

ps. I'm already there as @chriswright but that server is no more!