Every post in the #fediverse that isn't public should be encrypted. This should be the default, so that to post publicly, a person has to know what they're doing and turn it off. That way, anyone who wants to build search and discovery tools for public posts can do so without permission, or fear of retribution.
Discuss.
@Matt5sean3
IMHO public = public. The only reason it's a problem right now is that the boundaries between public and private posts are unclear, and a lot of people don't realize they're publishing to the web. If anyone had said in the 1990s that ...
> Creating open season on analysis of public websites culturally would still be a step in a potentially very dangerous direction for the web
... they would have been laughed off the internet, and so they should.
We're not in the '90s anymore and there was never a culture of opposing such analysis of websites.
People know they're publishing to the web. They knew they were posting in public when they were on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and every other platform before.
Posts getting used to build a profile of a person was the cost of using the platform. It need not be the cost here. There are people who came here to get away from that, but still want to be able to reach new people.
@Matt5sean3
> There are people who came here to get away from that, but still want to be able to reach new people
Fair enough. I want to be invisible and still have people tell me I look sexy. Sadly, I can't have both.
You can have privacy or you can have reach. You can't have both *in the same post*. But you can have a UI that makes it easy to choose which one you want - per account or per post - and a back-end that reliably enforces those choices.
@Matt5sean3
> We're not in the '90s anymore
Fediverse development and adoption is at roughly the same stage the web was in the 90s.
> there was never a culture of opposing such analysis of websites
That's my point.
The world is not in the 90s anymore. The tools and techniques to build a virtual panopticon did not exist in the '90s. The degree of adoption and development of the Fediverse are irrelevant to this.
@strypey@ma stodon.nzoss.nz
It's not just a context of a single post in isolation, though. It's a matter of what inference can be collected by analysis of all public posts in aggregate.
Historically, even security conscious people who have a lot to lose fuck that up when the posts are taken in aggregate.
No, keeping the rejection of analysis culturally doesn't form a real defense, but it makes it harder and at a social level keeps the eyes on the people who do it and get caught.
@Matt5sean3
I'm not sure how any of this relates to what I said in the post it replied to. The key point is this;
A post cannot be both public and private.
If it's limited to a known set of addresses (eg Follower-only posts in Mastodon), it's private, but it can't...
> reach new people
To reach new people, it has to be public and *discoverable*. Which is why people want more universal (fediversal?) search tools. Particularly those spinning up single-user servers.
(1/2)
@Matt5sean3
There are two totally different use cases here;
* a digital megaphone for shouting general purpose messages to anyone who might be interested
* a set of restaurant tables where people can have bounded conversations, that are only heard within the crowd of trusted people allowed in the restaurant
The fediverse can be both. But the apps need to;
a) allow me to switch between these contexts at will
b) make it easy to tell which I'm in
c) enforce my expectations around each
(2/2)
There can be expectations that extend beyond what code provides.
Your original post stuffs everything into a framework of encrypted or fully public, so there ought to be no backlash for creating discovery tools.
The framework of "a post is public so it's permissible to do anything with it" is not one that has really ever been accepted. For example, doxxing is pretty widely held as unacceptable with few exceptions.
@Matt5sean3
> doxxing is pretty widely held as unacceptable
Agreed.
> there ought to be no backlash for creating discovery tools
There shouldn't be, unless there is overwhelming technical evidence that they are causing (or will cause) measurable harm.
A key point here is preventing people designing user-respecting discoverability tools, for people who want that for their posts, does nothing to stop Bad Actors from designing evil ones in private. Encryption might.
I'm not excluding encryption in this. It's a part, but continued opposition to complex algorithms is worthwhile.
"You posted publicly on the Fediverse, so you consented to being analyzed by my bot" is hard for me to square with respect.
It's akin to "you were out at the convention in a costume, so it's fine to photograph you without asking." The cosplay community doesn't let that fly and neither should the Fediverse community let this be the standard.
Even with that consent there is still quite a lot of space for the harmfulness of algorithms.
Computer algorithms already have a bad track record of reinforcing existing inequalities. The most well known example is computer vision algorithms having difficulty identifying non-white faces, but other examples abound.
It is quite fair to say that an algorithm developer should, even if they get consent right, still fear backlash for their algorithm causing this type of outcome.
@juliasnz
> a secret is something you >>tell no one<<
True. But secret is not the same thing as private.
I think it's a medium of public conversation and attention. I like that your proposal would erase some of the confusion over search, but I think it would increase the confusion for new users.
@wjmaggos
> increase the confusion for new users
That would depend on UI design. There's ways a thoughtfully designed UX could guide people into posting as privately or publicly as they wish to. The lack of this clarity causes more problems than just long arguments about search, that just the tip of the iceberg.
Strypey
Matt5sean3
Julie Smith
william.maggos