🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)22h ago

Today, an unknown bot swarm started using my name, boosting my posts, and inserting itself into communities I helped create. I treated it like any other potential attack and started defending myself and our communities as best I could. This has taken up more of my day than most malicious bot attacks, because it had the air of legitimacy—despite taking the actions of a threat.

When the owner, @evan ¹, came in with the same justifications as the porn-scrapers and LLM-owners I regularly fight against—repeatedly doubling-down in the face of backlash²—I felt more and more sure of my response.

I now feel justified in calling for a #FediBlock of tags.pub (and probably his other projects), at least until a better opt-in consent model is built into the project.

¹ I'm including his name as he's a public figure associated with Activity Pub, and our whole conversation today is already a public record, but please don't dogpile; just defed or block as you see fit and call it a night (or day—I'm not your mom).

² Receipts: https://lgbtqia.space/@alice/116824281370893420

#FediAdmins

🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄) (@[email protected])

"Add this tag to your profile to opt out of our shitty service" is *not* a valid way to run your bot/app/etc. #NoBots #NoBot #NoTagsBot #HalfMyBioIsGoingToEndUpBeingOptOutsForYourShitServices #FuckBots

LGBTQIA.Space
Show threadDJGummikuh21h ago
@alice I must admit, I understand the technical side of it. Especially considering that there are people here going "hurr durr, doing your own instance is the only true way to use Mastodon" and the like, discoverability of Hashtags is directly tied to the size of your instance.
Is their approach heavy-handed? Undeniably.
Does it solve an issue? I'd say so.
Is there a better approach? Honestly, time must tell, the fediverse still is pretty much in its infancy and a lot of contract still forms.
Show thread🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)20h ago
@DJGummikuh seems like there should be an efficient way to semi-anonymously broadcast that a server has specific hashtags, and if a user on a single-user instance follows that hashtag, then their instance would know which servers it has to poll to get posts with that tag.
Show threadDJGummikuh20h ago
@alice I don't think there is and that hinders discoverability of as of yet unknown persons massively. This is a direct function of the concept of federation, balanced against the load requirements of servers. We're firmly in the design philosophy territory of ActivityPub here, and social-graph forming via hashtags is a complicated issue, again predominantly disadvantaging small/one-user instances
Show thread🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)20h ago

@DJGummikuh we already have opt-in solutions for that. I'm registered with like a dozen of my most-used hashtags on multiple discoverability services.

But I chose those.

I chose to be listed as someone who talks about data privacy, LGBTQ topics, etc.

No one assumed I'd be okay with being listed there.

Show threadDJGummikuh20h ago
@alice fair. And again, I do not have any capacity to judge authoritatively which is the right approach. I just felt inclined to point out that this is a workable, possible solution to a tangible problem with the underlying architecture of ActivityPub and not some pervert trying to make a buck, which is a consideration I felt lacking in a lot of the replies to your original thread.
Show threadToni Aittoniemi

@DJGummikuh @alice I somewhat hesitantly raise my voice also, that I’m not entirely against discovery aids, but at the same time if those are found to cause people harm, the community of fediverse can choose to come together block them on the server level.

But I do also call for some level of organic experimentation to be encouraged, as designs by committee are vulnerable to other kinds of abuse: capture by large actors working against the small.

Jun 28 at 6:30amWeb
Show threadDJGummikuh20h ago
@gimulnautti @alice couldn't agree more! I am absolutely not against blocking people for doing something percieved to be immoral, even if it is just the perception of individuals. This is a vslid strategy to express dissent. I just find it important to raise that there are more nuanced sides to this story than the replies of quite some participants in this discussion suggest
Show thread🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)19h ago

@gimulnautti @DJGummikuh again, *consent matters*.

There is *no* other argument here.

It's not consent if you violate trust first and then notify me that I was violated after the fact.

Show threadToni Aittoniemi15h ago

@alice @DJGummikuh It is not a question of understanding the issue. Merely notifying that while consent matters, absolute consent necessitates absolute prearrangement of details, potentially leaving no room for good surprises.

Where is the space for argument, or ’courtship’? And how open is that space? These are difficult questions, and people’s tolerance in those spaces and how they’re defined seem to differ somewhat.