Re: Mastinator and such tools

I’ve lately seen a lot of negative remarks regarding a service / tool called mastinator.

I definitely agree it can break some features in a bad way. Most especially follower only posts.

Having said that, I think the failing is trying to have a follower only post feature in the Fediverse. My reasoning on this is pretty simple: the nature of federation is that you eventually end up trusting someone you shouldn’t - at least regarding maintaining confidentiality promises.

If it weren’t mastinator (and probably even though they exist) there would/will be other instances who collect such information and feed it to other services clandestinely (or will wait until they’re too significant to ignore size and adoption wise).

I think software systems and user interfaces should be designed to reflect the promises they can enforce and keep, instead of reflecting the hope and optimism of unenforceable agreements among a growing set of servers and admins.