OK let’s talk about That Op-ed. The one that insisted not only that privacy is dangerous, but that not affirmatively building surveillance into communication tools is a radical ideological position.
Dunking on the op-ed’s arguments is easy. They’re SHALLOW. And dunk many have, often with the gentleness of a professor grading a draft essay from a student they didn’t want to completely discourage. I’ll direct you to the great threads from others... 1/
@Mer__edith Looks like a thread to me!
The only thing you missed is that it's easier on your followers' timelines if you make every toot after the first one Unlisted. But you're not the only person who fails to do that! 😅
@grvsmth @Mer__edith Actually, unlisted has no effect on your followers' TLs at all! That just means it doesn't go to the local/federated TLs.
Also IMO posting a thread to public is /perfectly fine and normal/.
@frostwolf @Mer__edith I get it: you're happy to monologue on a platform made for dialogue, and you don't care that your followers have to scroll through it all, whether or not they're prepared for it. But some of us do.
I can't find a good example, but if Home shows Unlisted toots, that doesn't seem like optimal behavior. And even if that never changes it's considerate to spare people reading Local and Federated timelines from being swamped with a thread.
@grvsmth I am pretty sure it does show unlisted posts (of people you follow). I've found what I need to do to not see every reply post is to just turn them off in the filter settings for the feed. So you get to decide yourself if you want to see them all or not.
See screenshot for where this is in the Mastodon web app (tap the control icon on the right to access them).
@schock @hackbod I don't mind scrolling past a few uninteresting toots! But if someone monologues or posts too often in a short period of time, that is avoidable. I avoid doing it, and I unfollow anyone who doesn't.
I don't get people who are willing to scroll past long monologues or lots of uninteresting posts. Why would you put up with that?
It was easier to deal with when Twitter auto-collapsed threads, but Mastodon doesn't!
@grvsmth @hackbod ok so this is a feature request to autocollapse threads, like on birdsite, so that people have to click to see the whole thing? That sounds like a reasonable feature request. But putting that on people who are posting feels... Odd to me.
As for "uninteresting" I don't understand... How could we know in advance what others will find interesting?
@schock @hackbod Of course interesting is subjective. You were telling me that people normally scroll past posts that they find uninteresting. I'm saying they should just unsubscribe instead.
No, it's not a feature request. Collapsing threads is a kludge. It's about a larger point that I've been making for years, as a linguist and a software developer: Twitter is built for dialogue. The owners only encouraged threads because they didn't want people clicking away:
https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2022/11/dialogue-and-monologue-in-social-media/
I wrote most of this post in June 2022, before a lot of us decided to try out Mastodon. I didn't publish it because I despaired of it making a difference. It felt like so many people were set in particular practices, including not reading blog posts! My experience on Mastodon has been so much bet
@grvsmth Thanks, that info about the impact of short vs. long input on how people write is really interesting.
I'm not really sure how to connect it with the discussion here though... You can remove replies from the timeline yourself. If you don't want to do that, something become a long thread that isn't annoying isn't generally due to the original poster, so how does unfollowing them solve the problem?
@grvsmth Oh sorry I missed the context! Makes sense, thanks for the really interesting link. :)
I do really feel like there are a lot of UX scalability issues showing up as the activity here grows so quickly, hopefully they will be improved significantly, though it will probably take a bit of time.
@hackbod Yes, but part of it is people bringing over bad habits from Twitter. (The good habits are fine to bring over!)
A point I haven't made yet in this discussion is that I really do like reading monologic text. Just not on a microblogging platform.
"Threads" are okay for discussion, but they're a crappy interface for reading something longer than (say) 500 characters.
I also hate switching from reading dialogue to reading monologue and back. Don't other people?
https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2016/10/shelter-from-the-tweetstorm/
It's happened to me too: I'm angry, or upset, or excited about something. I go on Twitter. I've got stuff to say. It's more than will fit in the 140-character limit, but I don't have the time or energy to write a blog post. So I just write a tweet. And then another, and another. I’ve seen ot
@metavalent @hackbod Not sure what your analogy with WinAmp "skins" means; I always found them superficial and never saw the point.
The thing is that we were doing fine linking to blog posts, and I'm very much encouraged to see people going back to that on Mastodon.
Maybe it would be a slight improvement if we turned Mastodon into a single service/app that could give you microblogging and full-length blogging in one, but I think Wordpress already offers that!
@Mer__edith thread works. I presume you mean by: "Particularly because these laws would, in effect, prevent people developing tech from NOT building mass surveillance and censorship capabilities." this: "Particularly because these laws would, in effect, encourage people developing tech to build more mass surveillance and censorship capabilities".
In which case I very strongly agree. We do need to be coordinated and bold. We are the only ones genuinely tackling this in search.
@Mer__edith Totally agree. One of the biggest orgnanizing challenges for privacy advocates is that we're very silo'ed. There are effective local coalitions against facial recognition and ShotSpotter, national privacy and civil liberties orgs, state-based groups like we have in Washington, companies like Signal and Mozilla ... we often work together on individual campaigns, but there's no coherent #privacy organizing strategy.
2023 would be a good year to change that!
@jdp23 @Mer__edith and here's a coalition of orgs against the earn it act, one of the kinds of laws Meredith hints at, we coordinated here at Twc San Diego: https://medium.com/tech-workers-coalition/against-the-earn-it-act-96b3f4d91284
It is hard work to keep this together and it's not clear to me that any of the words of paid staff were stepping into the work of keeping a coalition going. We did it as volunteers. Given the persistence of the policy threat, it would be nice if somebody was funding could help coordinate.
So important to stress!
Not just in philosophy, also elsewhere, people like to think that the best argument will prevail, but it is not about this, it is about convincing people who are not necessarily informed about a topic.
@Mer__edith Worked very well indeed, and thank you for writing this up!
I feel a very close connection with the #Telegram (and less so #Session) argumentation, which I nowadays perceive as a targetted campaign. I think we need talks like https://video.rubdos.be/w/6KrhTEXzbPHoED1ztEomUU and articles like https://www.rubdos.be/2022/04/15/about-secure-messengers.html to provide back-pressure. Does Signal provide any material that you can slap to people that came into contact with the anti-Signal brainwash actions?
@Mer__edith Practical question: how and where to organize.
I know that I have discussions in https://freenetproject.org as my plan B (when free speech dies we need a place to organize), but that has a high barrier of entry.
@Mer__edith Is there a link to where I can read your robust arguments?
In particular I want to see an argument that deals with how end-to-end encryption for illegal uses should be dealt with.
Thanks.
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