Streams Users Tea Garden

Wed, 01 May 2024 17:37:06 -0700 from Bunny of Doom

Giac El Vecio wrote the following post Wed, 01 May 2024 17:37:02 -0700

After almost 1 year since the creation of a channel (another - not this) where I barely interact with ActivityPub (zero zot connections there) contacts and practically exploring the Brazilian fediverse dependent on this protocol, there are days where my patience in reading reaches the limits and sometimes exceeds them. I am referring above all to this mastoverse world, unbearable in a certain sense, a philosophy of use of these tools so polar opposite to the one I have become accustomed to for many years, mastodon at the center of the universe with all its technical and non-technical shit.

@Giac El Vecio

Bill Statler

Wed, 01 May 2024 20:13:30 -0700 from Bunny of Doom

I was complaining a few days ago about political issues in the Fediverse, and Witcraft had a good observation: "...there is a difference between the majority (the most people) and the perceptibility (the loudest people). ... Maybe they create / mobilize (agitate) many people, but they rarely represent them." In other words, a small fraction of Fediverse users are contributing a large fraction of the annoying content.

I agree with this, but I also think a large fraction of Fediverse users are pretty ignorant about what they are using.

Another thing: I think most people dislike change. They may say they want something new and better, but they really just want to get rid of one or two problems, and keep everything else the same.

So, most of the people who got angry at Twitter and Elon Musk did not want something new. They wanted something that was exactly like Twitter, but controlled by liberals. And what they got was Mastodon, with its inadequate tools, controlled by a small annoying group of authoritarians who claim to be left-wing.

Jupiter Rowland

Thu, 02 May 2024 01:03:26 -0700 from hubzilla

@Bill Statler Not exactly few Mastodon users actually keep using Mastodon just like they used to use Twitter. No different at all. Not only don't they ever use hashtags, but they barely ever toot 300 characters because they've still got that 280-character limit in their heads. And they aren't even the most annoying ones.

It's many of those who have adopted to Mastodon's own culture. But that culture has no place for anything that isn't Mastodon. And they don't care. They completely ignore and disregard the Fediverse outside Mastodon. In fact, I guess every other Mastodon user genuinely believes that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And large parts who know otherwise still think Rochko has invented the Fediverse, maybe even as late as 2022, and everything else are add-ons to Mastodon.

Thus, they're irritated to say the least if something happens in either of their timelines that's "un-Mastodon-like", be it by technical limitations (sorry, I can't put CWs on replies because summaries on blog comments make no sense), be it by lack of those and related cultural differences (sorry, we don't have a no-more-than-500-characters culture).

All this seems to be Rochko's plan. He apparently wants to make Mastodon incompatible with large parts of the ActivityPub standard and the whole rest of the Fediverse. And since Mastodon is very good at convincing people that it is the Fediverse gold standard through its size and by implying it was here first, Rochko can make the whole rest of the Fediverse look bad and broken to Mastodon users. And that's only a safeguard in case the steps he takes to keep Mastodon users from finding out that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon fail.

Some things, however, are beyond his control. This includes members of threatened minorities who have escaped from Twitter to Mastodon, not only because it isn't controlled by a right-wing nutcase, but also because Mastodon lacks one particular means of harassment: quote-tweets. Also known as quote-toots or quote-posts or quote-boosts. And we have known them as shares since the earliest days of Mistpark.

And that's exactly the point: Mastodon doesn't have quote-posts. But only Mastodon and a few of its forks don't have them. Outside of Mastodon, they're a very common feature. As in, the rest of the Fediverse does have quote-posts. However, this is largely unknown on Mastodon.

I've recently run a poll on whether the Fediverse has quote-posts or not. It only got 28 votes because I think I'm shunned by large parts of Mastodon and probably shadow-banned on many instances now. I can't even exclude that the hub I'm on is blocked by some Mastodon instances that don't reveal their blocklists because moderation and incident reporting on Hubzilla doesn't work the way Mastodon expects it to work.

Still, of these 28 votes, 8 were for no, the Fediverse doesn't have quote-posts. That's about 30%. And I'm residing in a bubble that's much more Hubzilla, (streams), Friendica and other non-Mastodon projects than the average, not to mention that many of my Mastodon followers probably don't really follow me anymore. This means that the same vote on Mastodon proper would look even worse.

This goes to show that Mastodon has a critical mass of users who don't know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. The bad part is that this includes members of threatened minorities who sought a safe haven with no quote-tweets and no harassment. It's these people in particular, but not only, who'll welcome a quote-toot opt-in switch. And they'll believe that this switch will work Fediverse-wide, i.e. if they don't opt-in, literally nobody anywhere in the Fediverse will be able to quote-post them.

Now, Mastodon is working on implementing quote-posts. Whether or not they're re-inventing the wheel in the most incompatible way again doesn't matter because they're also planning to include that switch, either because Mastodon's own devs don't know jack shit about the Fediverse outside Mastodon themselves, nor do they care, or because the consequences are fully intentional.

Of course, this switch will only work on Mastodon. Not only won't it affect anything that isn't Mastodon because this switch will be proprietary and non-standard and have no technical documentation whatsoever because it's intended only for Mastodon, but non-Mastodon users won't even be able to see who doesn't want to be quote-posted - and quote-post them, opt-in or not.

The original proposal actually included a mandatory, immediate full Fediblock for all instances that don't respect that opt-in switch. The user who had proposed it didn't know that there are countless instances of dozens of non-Mastodon projects that can quote-post already now, so they intended that switch for rogue Mastodon instances. In practice, however, this switch would mean an immediate Fediblock for all instances of just about everything that isn't Mastodon, effective the moment this whole feature is introduced. Mastodon could finally present itself to its users as "the Fediverse" with nothing that isn't Mastodon connected to it, weren't it for the undeniable fact that this several-whole-projects Fediblock would be a game of whack-a-mole, using Mastodon's current blocking technology.

Mike is currently working on channel filters for whole Fediverse projects. You'll be able to enter an instance type, and all interaction with all actors on all instances that report this instance type will be rejected. A bit earlier, I had the idea to propose something like this on Mastodon's GitHub repository, but on steroids: Not only should it include a blocklist per account, but also an allowlist per account as well as a blocklist and an allowlist per server instance. Essentially, you should be able to write "Mastodon" into the allowlist, and everything that doesn't report as Mastodon is blocked. Sure, (streams) admins could circumvent this by entering "Mastodon" as the instance type, but still.

I actually only wanted to see the reactions on GitHub, people calling it dangerous as well as people cheering on it if they understand what it does. But I'm half-afraid that Mastodon would actually implement it because they don't know that I'm on Hubzilla, and my proposal is anything but sincere.

I'd say that Mastodon would be even more eager to implement it, now that (streams) is working on this feature, at least slimmed down and on a channel level, but still giving individual users the tools to fully block Mastodon. They won't because not a single Mastodon dev and next to nobody in the Mastodon community knows that (streams) even exists, much less what it can do.