mccDec 21, 2022

Re: https://mastodon.social/@lrhodes@merveilles.town/109552108127349128

Another important warning from the pawoo acquisition: The purchaser, Mask Network, is a cryptotoken company that pushes the "web3" myth and openly runs NFT scams*. A lot of people comment that when Twitter started failing it was ActivityPub that wound up being the decentralized way forward, not blockchain tech, but blockchain scammers have a financial interest in making it look otherwise. (1/2)

* Explaining this comment to ward off lawsuits: all NFT sales are scams.

Show threadmccDec 21, 2022
In other words, blockchain/NFT scammers find marks by associating themselves with literally whatever sounds good— financial liberation, musicians, distributed networks, "green energy". Now that Mastodon is starting to culturally "look good", the blockchain/NFT scammers have an incentive to find ways to associate themselves with it and possibly even try to take credit for it after the fact. And though they have no useful technology, they *do* have VC money to spend on PR and acquisitions. (2/2)
Show threadzeruch

@mcc ...and I suspect some folks with "found" instances based on SEO-like characteristics, replete with bogus users, to sell to those kinds of folks. It's the David Ryan Harris lyric "the blind leading the easily led"

People (not many but a not-insignificant side group) are quite weary of that circus, full stop.

Scammers have no filter for that though, and rely on PUA-grade oblivious persistence to operate.

Dec 21, 2022 at 10:16pmWeb
Show threadmccDec 21, 2022
@zeruch I wish that the mastodon migration features worked better so that people who fall into honeypot instances could get out again.
Show threadzeruchDec 21, 2022

@mcc I think the problem there is ironic. It's a use case solved in any number of ways, none of them amenable to the Fediverse holistically (e.g. a centralized identity broker with , like an ABA for instances, or a DLT/blockchain style immutable smart contract, sans the pecuniary aspect, acting more as a reputation clearing house than token arbitrage slum)

Neither of those are necessarily facile, nor pleasant, so were stuck where I advocate for users to stop being passively lazy/oblivious users

Show threadmccDec 21, 2022
@zeruch It's true— I have some thoughts about how to solve it, but it's true. This said, if we had a rigorous or semi-automated "history export / history import" featureset, maybe we could get easy movement without solving the problem of a source of "truth" for identities.
Show threadzeruchDec 21, 2022
@mcc yeah, the "truth" part is subject to so much subjectivity (e.g. an instance that focuses on Hentai vs. an instance that is for Dispensationalist Christians, just to manufacture a likelihood a few standard deviations out). What both will likely present that users "care" about is superficial content aspects, what is really material reputationally is who/how the instance is run and for what purposes.
Show threadFrancis ReganDec 22, 2022
@mcc @zeruch “honeypot instance” is the perfect descriptive term. Hearing about pawoo & its size for the first time, I worry how many other similar “Mastodon” instances are out there off the radar because normal instances have all defederated from them