Christina WarrenSo the new Instagram text thing is reported to have ActivityPub support and instead of being happy at all the new labor that could potentially be coming to the standard, Mastodon people are now actively encouraging instances to not federate with any of that stuff. K.
Look, instance admins can block whatever they want for any reason they want. It hurts your users but do you. And I'm not trying to argue that Facebook isn't a fucked up company. But actively working to discourage extremely skilled participants (and love them for hate them, FB engineers are VERY good) from contributing or associating with your open source protocol or community is just peak stupidity for people who claim in the same breath to want to remake and reset the social web.
Thom Holwerda@film_girl Facebook: *enables Trump, Rohingya genocide, etc.*
Mastodon admins: "Some of us would like to not associate with this company."
US tech media: "Won't someone think of the poor Facebook engineers!"
I fucking hate this timeline.
@thomholwerda so don't federate them if you want -- fine! But then don't bitch and moan that no one uses your protocol or services.
@film_girl I think the point that a lot of - especially Americans, for some reason - don't seem to get is that a lot of people would rather have a smaller social network but with fewer horrible people than a bigger social network but with way more horrible people.
We let the corporations try social media, and they all fucked up. Every single one of them. Why are so many of you so desperate to keep repeating the same mistakes?
@thomholwerda I think that is completely and totally fine. But then don't call it an open standard, one, if you're going to gatekeep and pitch fits over anyone who uses it (and this goes for all OSS btw, it's open or it isn’t, things. Things like the ethical source movement are not open and I wish they'd at least lean into that), and two, if you want it small, don't complain when it is small.
@film_girl Seems like the people who complain the loudest about Mastodon being "small" are ex-Twitter folk who used to have massive followings there. 🤷♀️
And part of the AP standard is the ability to defederate. There's nothing non-open about not tolerating intolerance.
@thomholwerda You're right. It is absolutely in the spec and as I've said repeatedly, administrators can do what they want, even if it is to the detriment or against the wishes of their users. Sure would be nice if the spec made actually moving instances and maintaining user posts and having *real* data portability a goal and didn't actively antagonize anyone who actually wanted to contribute those kinds of features.
censored for “transphobia”@film_girl
With you 100% on this. Data portability is a problem. I’m not sure how much of the blame for that is attributable to the ActivityPub protocol vs. implementations like Mastodon.
I’ve been on nodes that spontaneously lock users out, after which there is no way for users to reach their data. They just pull the plug & walk away. Or they join the gian oppressive #walledGarden of Cloudflare (e.g. social. #privacytools.io) w/out notice.
@koherecoWatchdog @thomholwerda it’s both I think. Part of it is more a Mastodon problem b/c others have figured out their own hacks around the idea (@atomicpoet for instance has import posts in Calckey) but the underlying AP spec doesn’t really approach how this would work, leaving a lot of the decisions to the various implementations. In my opinion, it is clear that it hasn’t been a priority and that genuinely troubles me.
@film_girl
After getting burnt a couple times, the lesson I learned was to download my Mastodon archive periodically so I can recover from spontaneous unannounced shenanigans. It’s still messy & laborious, but almost insignificant in the big scheme of things. It’s also avoidable by anyone willing to run their own instance (which is impossible under techno feudalism).