Mastodawn

Dan Gillmor Apr 30, 2023

@mmasnick done by far the best job of chronicling the Twitter/Musk follies and the resulting social media diaspora. His 6-months-later piece, on where we stand in what I hope will be a massive move to decentralized networking, is a must-read: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/28/six-months-in-thoughts-on-the-current-post-twitter-diaspora-options/

Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options

Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over agai…

Techdirt

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Erin Conroy Apr 30, 2023

Generally appreciate Mike, but this is clearly a lot of BS from Jay & Bluesky, & Mike's totally uncritical take leaves me skeptical of the value of the whole discussion of #Bluesky.

"No no, the lack of blocking has nothing to do with not prioritizing it, don't be stupid! We're just being thoughtful & it's so super complicated! But also one white dude got trolled, so we prioritized it & voila, here it is 24h later! p.s. let's not ask any questions about Jay's candor or competence"

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Craig Apr 30, 2023

@chargrille My working assumption is that blocking still doesn’t exist at the protocol level, but they panicked and bodged it in as a kind of “instance-level block” that works only because bsky is (at the moment) a protocol running on a single instance. Federated blocks are a hard problem, as Mastodon demonstrates; it’s something they probably thought they could defer, but running a platform brings different challenges than designing a protocol.

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Johan Pelck Olsen Apr 30, 2023

@craigm @chargrille I’ve heard about the reasons why this is a hard problem, but I’m actually not sure how Mastodon solves it? Any simple explanations for an ignorant in federated social media protocols?

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Craig Apr 30, 2023

@jpelckolsen @chargrille Basically, it’s just because you go from the platform problem of you can’t trust the client” to the protocol problem of “you can’t trust any of the servers.” Your home server can enforce certain things on foreign accounts (e.g., you can filter out posts from a blocked account or try to prevent blocked accounts from interacting with you), but any motivated bad actor server can find ways around that.

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Craig

@jpelckolsen Mastodon can enforce “real” blocks on local accounts, but remote blocks are more like mutes plus some restrictions on interactions. But since remote servers can lie about what they’re doing, you end up just either hoping they’re acting in good faith, or aggressively blocking entire servers.