cdeversApr 7, 2017

Twitter thread on drawbacks of Mastodon's federated approach:

https://twitter.com/adrienneleigh/status/850243710973493248

TL;DR— Federation is great, but it kills privacy. If you want private posts, or want to delete posts, all you can do is request a deletion, but other Mastondon/GNUSocial instances don't have to honor that.

Moreover, it kills identity: anyway can be “@you” on some new Mastodon instance.

These problems are intrinsic to Federation, and will not necessarily be easy to fix.

cdeversApr 7, 2017
Show threadawkward

@cdevers @you
I think she's right about the messaging surrounding it, but I think some activities need to be discouraged - like taking you email handle on every email server would be considered nuts.

I think the thing that's going to come through is that what instance you're on is going to rapidly become an important part of context, and that will need to be surfaced to the users. Even something as simple as theming instances differently would be good messaging.

Apr 7, 2017 at 5:41pmWeb