Marco Rogers

It sounds like a lot of mastodon people want to post in public but also have everybody leave them alone as if it's not public. As far as I can see, their current strategy for achieving this is yelling very loudly in public posts hoping everyone else will see it and then shift everything around in order to accommodate them.

It's a bold strategy. I look forward to finding out if it works.

Feb 13, 2024 at 4:41pmWeb
Show threadMarco RogersFeb 13, 2024
I'm good at making passive-aggressive shade posts. But I don't mind being more clear. I think this is the early dates of figuring out how to co-exist in a federated space. We are working out how to give people the kind of semi-private space that most suites them. I'm all for that, but I think it will take a while. Meanwhile, people are starting where they usually start. "Let me just yell at other people and try to get them to do what I think they should do." That literally never works.
Show threadNiclas HedhmanFeb 14, 2024

@polotek

I Love It, when people show up in a thread trying to prove their point and then 2-3 exchanges later rage quit and blocks me. Amusing!

Show threadJulian LamFeb 13, 2024
@polotek your standard "not like that" meme template.
Show threadEric JenningsFeb 13, 2024

@polotek the way people flip out about federating data on a service explicitly designed to federate data is rather interesting. You’d think that if you wanted to have a private community you’d post to a private encrypted service instead.

Kind of similar to people being mad about people using data off their public accessible to the world websites. If you publish it to the world, expect the world to access/download it.

Show threadCassandrichFeb 13, 2024
@HitokiriEric @polotek There is legitimately room to be mad at *scraping* of one's activity, regardless of whether it takes place in "public", by parties that don't follow the protocol announcing themselves as followers, honoring blocks, deleting posts the author deletes, etc. But yes I see a lot of ppl upset at federation being used as intended too...
Show threadEric JenningsFeb 13, 2024

@dalias @polotek I get that scraping makes everyone mad.

But it’s fundamentally how the open internet/protocols works. You can try to use copyright and the courts to fight it after the fact for webpages or terms of service agreements. Just that fundamentally, if there’s something you cannot allow to be scraped, then you can never allow yourself to put it on the open internet.

It doesn’t mean the open internet has no value either. It’s just a very important design trade off. And for other things where you need different trade offs you need to use tools that work differently.

Show threadCassandrichFeb 13, 2024

@HitokiriEric @polotek There's a huge difference between technically possible, legal, and socially acceptable.

Bulk aggregation (scraping) of records of people's activity in public places without their explicit & genuine consent should always be socially unacceptable.

In some jurisdictions it's illegal. It probably should be illegal.

Of course it's technically possible. Just like it's technically possible to follow on the street with cameras and microphones...

Show threadKuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋Feb 13, 2024
@dalias @HitokiriEric @polotek The funniest thing is that this bridge has nothing to do with scraping, it uses ActivityPub to follow people that someone wants to follow and forwards the posts that they push using ActivityPub over the bridge. There is no scraping, automatic bulk fetching and aggregation up front or anything like that. But people like to be angry about their own vision of how something works…
Show threadCybarbieFeb 13, 2024
@mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric @polotek I mean I am not sure this semantic bullshit matters. But I get that you are saying a domain block on brid.gy does no good whatsover since they are creating parasitic accounts. Good to know except and FWIW people aren't angry about their vision of how something works. Not angry at all in fact, just don't want to know how it works or have anything to do with assholes and have to deal with the shitty behavior. It's not even remotely funny.
Show threadMarco RogersFeb 13, 2024
@nf3xn @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric I think the difference matters a lot. Because part of the issue is that people did opt into the behavior of mastodon. Federation has always been a published and intentional feature. I can't tell if the people who are mad are the ones that just wanted a semi-private Twitter clone and didn't bother to understand the rest. Or if it's also a different set of people who are like "yes this is an intentional feature. But we didn't expect you to actually use it".
Show threadCybarbieFeb 13, 2024
@polotek @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric Except Bluesky is not federating and if they did that would be fine since I could just domain block or defederate with them if I had my own instance and they could do same too. This is not afaik even Bluesky it is an individual scraping my posts to a site I want nothing to do with without my consent.
Show threadMarco RogersFeb 13, 2024
@nf3xn @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric you don't have to re-explain the issue. I assure you that I understand it both socially and technically. It doesn't actually change what I said. I'm not sure why everybody who is mad about these things assume it's impossible for other people to understand it without immediately being on their side.
Show threadCybarbieFeb 13, 2024
@polotek @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric I am re-explaining to disabuse you of the false notion you just stated that it had anything to do with federation which it doesn't.
Show threadMarco RogersFeb 14, 2024
@nf3xn @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric sounds like you've now had people explain to you that it does in fact have to do with federation. Would you like to apologize? Or are we just gonna do the internet thing where you pretend nothing happened and it's still somehow my fault?
Show threadMarco RogersFeb 14, 2024
@nf3xn @mackuba @dalias @HitokiriEric you did help to answer my previous question at least in this instance. It was the second thing. "Yes that is a feature, but I didn't think you'd use it."
Show threadKuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋Feb 13, 2024
@nf3xn @polotek @dalias @HitokiriEric It's not "scraping", that's what I'm trying to explain, and yes, you can domain-block and defederate the bridge, that's literally what snarfed's initial announcement was about
Show threadKuba Suder • @mackuba.eu on 🦋Feb 13, 2024
@nf3xn @dalias @HitokiriEric @polotek It's not "semantic bullshit", people in that thread wrote things like: "the moment he goes live, he pulls in data from over 100,000 California mastodon users" or "the data you have already captured pre-launch" and then get angry about it, while it's just not how it works. It doesn't "scrape" any data from the whole Mastodon, it will just follow someone *when someone requests that* and the pass on their posts.
Show threadxianJun 16, 2024
@HitokiriEric sure, but that was before billionaires were training their monetizable talking-dog bots on our every stray utterance
Show threadBoyd Stephen Smith Jr.Feb 13, 2024
@polotek I suppose one could just mute everyone that interacts with your toots. Then they could be publicly visible, but you would be minimally exposed to feedback. (Might want to use a bot to do the muting so you don't accidentally see how the public responds to your posts.)
Show threaddatawenchFeb 13, 2024
@polotek @grmpyprogrammer It sounds like a lot of people would like to be able say something in "public" without public necessarily meaning "literally global" - and thus inevitably experiencing the degree of social constraint that leads to frankly shitty and useless "discourse" - or without giving up any interest in their utterances to the unaccountable appetites of data ingestion machines. Especially when they say it on a server that doesn't monetize it to begin with.
Show threadFeralRobotsFeb 13, 2024
@datawench
I get that desire. But unless they take steps to limit the reach of their posts, that reach is literally global. & that's true regardless of whether the post gets gatewayed to bsky.
@polotek @grmpyprogrammer
Show threadAncaFeb 13, 2024
@polotek I'm so glad you're here.
Show threadFeralRobotsFeb 13, 2024

@polotek
For some folks this seems to source to having a deeply mistaken understanding of how ActivityPub supports post privacy. (Short version: It doesn't, but Mastodon's UI lies to them about it.)

But yeah a lot is just garden variety obtuseness: They think the rules that apply in their #HOA also apply when they're downtown at a coffee shop.

Show threadMarco RogersFeb 13, 2024
@FeralRobots the thing that is really wild is watching how this just tracks back to how people love to police space. White people especially are reveling in this new area where they get to tell everybody else how to be and where they are allowed to exist.
Show threadDragon-sided DFeb 13, 2024

@FeralRobots @polotek I broadly agree. Part of the beauty of Fedi is that instance owners & users can self- organize in this laboratory of democracy.

But I think it will only be when the bridges are fully open, that we discover how much is nourishing water… and how much is waste product.

Show threadFrugalGamerFeb 14, 2024
@polotek It's also called "having a website." But since that involves a lot more work on the yeller's end I predict it won't be as popular.
Show threadMax Leibman has moved!Feb 14, 2024
@polotek Definitely one of my favorite Mastodontroversies.

I'm not convinced by the people who say, “Well, sure, this is public, but you wouldn't follow me around a public park, recording what I say to my friends and telling people where to find me," because I think of this as a form of publishing. But it's been instructive to me to be reminded that not everyone has the same mental model for what we're doing here.
Show threadBenFeb 14, 2024
@polotek I often find myself going back and forth between two models of how this will play out. (a) Sure. This is the start of something new. We’ll figure out better ways to communicate, thus transforming the collective experience over time. (b) lol. It’s new people coming and going every day, each having to learn the lesson anew. Look around. This is the eternal now. Nothing will change ever. Just like in all the other places.
Show threadBenFeb 14, 2024
@polotek of course the truth is somewhere in the middle, mostly driven by a bit of structural factors, incentives, and demographic changes in the user base. It’s also weird how this feels quite conservative. “People don’t change. Find a way to make the world work as is.” - not true about individuals, but maybe about how the group of users of social media is structured? There’ll always be x% gullible, y% bad people, z% well-meaning and willing to learn.
Show threadBenFeb 14, 2024
@polotek good thing: if you don’t amplify the second group to put it in front of the first, it might actually work somewhat :)