Feeling very grumpy this morning looking at my timeline and seeing newly-active folks talk about how they can't imagine "how we could have done XYZ without Birbsite" or how they are "helping to build community and connection on Mastodon".
Fucken humans and our navels. I swear to cat.
I need a pastry.
Also grumpy about folks talking about who can access whose data on Mastodon without contextualizing things -- more misleading than helpful.
Operators of a system where data is not end-to-end encrypted are able to access said data. Applies to fediverse admins, FB employees, Melon Husks, etc.
If you want to argue that it is safer to trust one large corporation instead of multiple independent admins, that's fine. But lets help each other understand things, and then let us make up our own minds.
@edsu Yes, you said it, something about the interaction style is uncomfortable for me.
Talking at people instead of talking with people, maybe? Declaiming and proclaiming, instead of conversing? 🤔
@anaulin Yeah, I'm trying not to be a jerk or rant all "well actually" style at folks, but the "safety" on a big site is really just crossing fingers to be lost in the crowd.
Maybe the big site has a carefully-constructed backend admin system with logs & audits & many eyes keeping each other from being creepy, but it's not necessarily more trustworthy than somebody you kinda know and who doesn't want to be a creep
@anaulin I spent a great deal of time this morning (that I should have spent studying, sigh) writing up something medium-length and cranky, roughly to this effect. I have not yet posted it; I think it will benefit from sitting a minute to help me moderate the cranky edges.
But the basic notion was that safety on the internet will *always* involve judgement and knowledge, and that governance is *always* work, and pretending otherwise is not healthy.
@anaulin I feel like a lot of the "Mastodon isn't safe because you need to trust the mods!11!!" stuff rhetorically positions "maybe don't send anything digitally unless you understand who will have access to it" as semantically equivalent to "everyone should host their own mailserver and learn PGP," even though those are very different statements;
and apparently I'm still cranky. :/
Ana Ulin 😻👩🏼💻🧶🪡
Ed Summers
Les Orchard
Betsy. (a muffin).