So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as “private”) in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That’s not ideal.
Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:
Something you may not know about Mastodon’s privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn’t display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don’t implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).
Servers don’t necessarily disregard Mastodon’s privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon’s privacy settings aren’t a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don’t run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren’t configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn’t expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user’s reblogs.
That is super relevant for “private” posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you’ve been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it’s being hidden in your UI, but it’s actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It’s simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it’s not shown in your UI, it is available.
Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on her blog about how her partner has been posting sensitive information as “private,” and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it’s a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in her (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.
I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like she’s planning on telling her partner that it’s still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked “private,” now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that’s a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like she’s very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer her partner’s information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.
That’s not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this lady does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title “Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances”:
Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.
Pixelfed got caught with its pants down
rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software
dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires
i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy
periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops
dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over
developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal
dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it
dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs
I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They’re also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he’s getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.
This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who’s doing something. Usually someone who’s giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there’s some giant outcry that they are “problematic” or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I’ve looked at it, it’s mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is “he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE.” Usually it is based more or less on nothing.
Dansup isn’t just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He’s the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don’t tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn’t he broke it for everyone) (and don’t tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it’ll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn’t count)
And so on.
Some particular moderator isn’t just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:
a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.
And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.
It’s weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say “actually it’s not that simple”, to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I’m completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I’ve been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I’m horrible?
Guys: Chill out.
I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is “problematic” or “toxic” or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that’s causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it’s based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I’m saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn’t look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone’s being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.
IMO, Dan has some responsibility but more of it lies with Mastodon and other microblogging software that labels this post type as “private”, “followers only” or similar without any further explanation. It needs to be clear that it’s dependent on good faith and competence of remote servers that may collect that information.
Moreover we need to do a better job of letting users know that anything posted on the internet, and especially anything posted to the fediverse where it’s backed up on potentially thousands of servers, should be assumed to be publicly-visible and eternal. If nothing else, it will be backed up on the internet archive. If you want to communicate privately, this is the wrong place.
I wish there was a private social media platform but it seems like the closest we’re going to get is Signal.
Also “the bullying problem” has nothing to do with the Fediverse and everything to do with people in general and the erosion of nuance.
Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.
It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don’t invite any reporters.
it’s not unrealistic to keep trust at the server level. following your rationale, you can’t trust my reply, or any, because any server could modify the content in transit. or hide posts. or make up posts from actors to make them look bad.
if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.
servers will deliver, not modify, not make up stuff, not dos stuff, not spam you, but apparently obviously will leak your content?
fedi models trust at the server level, not user. i dont need to trust you, i need to trust just your server admin, and if i dont i defederate
There’s a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you’re describing and servers that aren’t fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.
Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don’t show on vanilla Mastodon.
I’ll note that Lemmy’s version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed’s. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.
Nothing is private on the fediverse, and Mastodon’s bodge only gives the illusion of privacy. There should be zero expectation that any fediverse software will follow their non-standard extensions.
I think the confusion from fediverse’s claims of privacy stem from poor
enunciationelucidation of the nature of the privacy from its proponents. It is definitely more private in the amount of passive data mining for ad tracking purposes compared to for profit social media. The architecture is designed to discourage instance managers from implementing ad-tech from building sophisticated user profiles of your behaviour in order to serve you more targeted ads from the people that manage the infrastructure. There’s no monitoring of clicks, click through rates, time spent on the platform, the type of content you like, etc. And the price for that mechanism is, making public, data that cannot be monetised on a large scale, which for profit social media guaranteed “privacy” to(in quotes because it was private from prying eyes through E2EE but not your keys not your data.)I can see where the confusion might arise for nontechnical people who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of ActivityPub implementations. I don’t think there should be any confusion for technical people in understanding the architecture clearly guarantees a total lack of private data, seeing as how decentralisation works.
This is my thought on it, too. I don’t disagree with any of the point OP is making, but I think a larger issue is people misusing ActivityPub platforms and trying to make them into something they’re not. It’s not meant to be a messenger, it’s not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.
Completely agree.
It is fine if you want to add privacy to a federated platform. If you wanted to, you would need to think through how to do it (probably it would involve either adding something specific and very carefully laid-out to the ActivityPub spec, or just doing like Lemmy does and switching to a whole other protocol like Matrix and warning the users that anything over ActivityPub is not private). Neither of those is what Mastodon did, but now they’re going around telling users they can have private posts, which is why I think they’re ultimately at fault in the situation that kicked off this whole shebang.
Just a random thought, if there is a need for privacy wouldn’t it be possible to create public / private encryption key for users so messages can be encrypted and exchanged.
This way what would be public is that there’s an exchange but nobody would be able to know what was said. It would make it at least message content private.
To make it a step further could exchange between servers also use it to encrypt which users exchange private message. I am thinking it could make it fully private then. Only sender and receiver servers could know which users were private messaging.
The furry engineer who writes cryptography posts is working on this. Turns out it is not so simple in practice.
https://soatok.blog/category/technology/open-source/fediverse-e2ee-project/
To keep it secure from the servers themself would require users to handle the encryption. See PGP for an idea of how much uptake that’s likely to get. If you mean for the servers to handle the encryption, that’s already the case, and the issue right now is that servers are privy to what users do, and by nature are a 3rd party in the convo.
You actually could do this kind of thing with AP. It’s designed to give a key pair to every user to use for signing all their activities, so so the some careful redesign, you might be able to do something like have the browser authenticating the user’s identity in a way that the server isn’t able to do, or even messages being sent encrypted in a way that the server can’t read.
In practice, the server keeps the user’s private keys, and moving away from that model would be difficult. But you could in theory redesign it away from that.
Mastodon moving to the ActivityPod (I think that’s the proposal name) Nomadic Identity/DID model like bluesky where the user holds their private key will be essential at some point if mastodon is going to compete with bluesky seriously for twitter refugees
Can you share the proposal? ActivityPods is something else. https://activitypods.org/
This is wedistribute’s blogpost on the proposal
I thought it had some sort of branding beyond nomadic identity but I guess I was just misremembering
If any dev should be getting roasted, it’s Gargron, for his many bad decisions over the years.
100% this.
If you did a venn diagram of ‘Worst possible implementation’ and ‘What Mastodon Did’ you’d just have a circle.
It’s not meant to be a messenger, it’s not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.
Just want to counter this: Privacy is in fact a part of ActivityPub. Stuff is only meant to be public if it is sent to the Public collection, otherwise it should only be delivered to the intended recipients, much like email. This is part of the core protocol, not any extension.
I definitely think it’s important to make people aware of the difference in the fedeiverse. Especially since that is not how it worked in non-federated social media
Well, where are you all when the Fedi cheerleading squad keeps posting about how bad it is that this or that competitor stores this or that information and how secure and private and great it is in Fedi servers because they don’t store anything?
Because I’ve spent years chiming in to explain these things in those and it normally just gets people angry and complaining that you’re shilling for corporate social media or whatever. The image being projected, both accidentally and on purpose is that no centralized data collection means your data on Fedi is private when it is extremely not.
I definitely agree, it’s advertised as private, when really it’s more “open” so that it’s not profitable I think
I think the confusion from fediverse’s claims of privacy stem from poor enunciation from its proponents. It is more private in the amount of passive data mining for ad tracking purposes compared to for profit social media. The architecture is designed to discourage these practices from the people that manage the infrastructure. And the price for that mechanism is, making public, data that cannot be monetised on a large scale, which for profit social media guaranteed “privacy” to(in quotes because it was private from prying eyes through E2EE but not your keys not your data.)
I can see where the confusion might arise for nontechnical people who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of ActivityPub implementations. I don’t think there should be any confusion for technical people in understanding the architecture clearly guarantees a total lack of private data, seeing as how decentralisation works.
This poster… its like every other social media platform is not anonymous?!
Why should this one be? Did you really think i.e. reddit wouldn’t corpo-analyze the fork out of your data with data science practices? Anonymous upvotes? LOL
This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.
But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you’ve upvoted what posts, that’s essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word “private” or even “unlisted”, as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.
Just because the average user doesn’t consider whether they should trust the platform, doesn’t mean the fediverse is less trustworthy. It’s not. Nothing online should be considered trustworthy if it’s not encrypted.
You still have to consider whether Facebook is trustworthy with your posts and click data, whether the thousands of advertisers they sell your info too are trustworthy. Whether the persons you message are trustworthy and that they won’t get hacked.
About the same risks as with trusting a fediverse instance operator except they don’t have the same motivations to sell your data.
I’m not sure if you are aware of fediblock which allows instance operators to coordinate banning and defederating bad actors from the network. And of course you can always mute or block any user or instance you wish independently of your instance’s block list.
Your data being leaked to “malicious servers” in this case also requires approving a follow to a user on that instance or having your profile set to public (and at that point you should expect your content to be public)
I do think you are right that it is a paradigm shift of thinking for new users who aren’t familiar with federation. But I think anyone who wants to join will just either have to give up control to big platforms and stay put or shift their thinking.
Building trust is hard. It’s easier to trust a few companies than to trust a million unknown servers. It’s why I prefer Wikipedia over amazingnotskgeneratedatalltopicalinformarion.biz when I’m looking up simple facts.
Furthermore, Facebook isn’t selling data directly. At least, not if they’re following the law. They got caught doing and fined doing that once and it’s not their main mode of operation. Like Google, their data is their gold mine, selling it directly would be corporate suicide. They simply provide advertisers with spots to put an ad, but when it comes to data processing, they’re doing all the work before advertisers get a chance to look at a user’s profile.
On the other hand, scraping ActivityPub for advertisers would be trivial. It’d be silly to go through the trouble to set up something like Threads if all you want is information, a basic AP server that follows ever Lemmy community and soaks up gigabytes an hour can be written as a weekend project.
Various Chinese data centers are scraping the hell out of my server, and they carry referer headers from other Fediverse servers. I’ve blocked half of East Asia and new IP addresses keep popping up. Whatever data you think Facebook may be selling, someone else is already selling based on your Fediverse behaviour. Whatever Petal Search and all the others are doing, I don’t believe for a second they’re being honest about it.
Most Fediverse software defaults to federation and accepting inbound follow requests. At least, Mastodon, Lemmy, GoToSocial, Kbin, and one of those fish named mastodonlikes did. Profiles are often public by default too. The vulnerability applies to a large section of the Fediverse default settings.
I’d like to think people would switch to the Fediverse despite the paradigm shift. The privacy risks are still there if there’s only one company managing them, so I’d prefer it if people used appropriate tools for sharing private stuff. I think platforms like Circles (a Matrix-based social media system) which leverage encryption to ensure nobody can read things they shouldn’t have been able to, are much more appropriate. Perhaps a similar system can be laid on top of ActivityPub as well (after all, every entity already has a public/private key pair).
It’s perhaps a communication problem, where the privacy settings should clearly state this. Or these settings shouldn’t be offered. But maybe this current structure is fine for most people?
Regardless, it’s how existing social media used to work. In that sense, federated social media can’t offer an alternative and that could be a problem for some.
Yeah, but offering something that claims to be private, but isn’t, is actually much worse than refusing to offer something that’s private. Even if people want the private feature.
Truly private posts just are going to require something that isn’t ActivityPub, because ActivityPub just isn’t designed to give assurances about what’s going to happen to an activity that you are sending off to some other server. Or, the other option would be to go through the whole process of adding it into the spec in a thought through fashion instead of just hacking it in and moving on. Although, I do kind of get why Mastodon doesn’t want to go through that snail’s pace process for every single protocol change they would need to be able to make things work.
Who would’ve thunk that misusing the same type for both public and private posts (with a sprinkle of weird mention rules to determine the visibility) could backfire?
Well, definitely not Mastodon devs. Lemmy’s current approach of using an entirely different type is much better.
If you’re interested in some details, I recently wrote a comment about it: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmings.world/comment/14476151
lemmy’s approach still relies on audience targeting for privacy, just like mastodon. using a distinct object type (which is off spec btw) is “more secure” just because nobody else knows what lemmy is doing
I said better, not more secure. It’s not as easy to accidentally leak the message. It’s equally easy to intentionally leak it.
Yeah, the whole thing of “if #public is in
toand the user is incc, it means one thing, but if it’s the other way around, it means something different” just reeks of “IDK I just wanted to hack it up and move on and IDGAF how platforms other than Mastodon are going to wind up handling it.” Which is fine… as long as your users universally understand that that’s your level of care towards honoring non-public visibility settings they’re setting on their posts.Yep. Sadly, Lemmy will move on to implement this exact horrible mess in future versions.
The current ChatMessage approach is much better than crazy shenanigans with to/cc/mentions.
Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have?
First time on the internet? This happens everywhere, more so when you’re anonymous or pseudonymous, but whenever you’re behind a screen and everyone on the other side is just a username being controlled by an idiot or a troll.
Agreed. Reddit and Twitter were bad for bullying, doxxing, or just general nastiness, I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen on Mastodon, or the Fediverse in general, but it’s nothing like as bad.
Until someone does something not FOSS’y or anti-linux.
Or you try to tell them the government they are cheering for is not a leftist one, people here loves to defend them based only on the propaganda that reaches them and get MAD if you don’t join the yes-wave.
If Mastodon/Fedi was at the scale those platforms are we would see more harassment, absolutely. It remains to be proven but I think federation enables a lot more eyes on content which implies harassing material can be removed more quickly.
Federation/decentralization solves a lot of problems over centralized social media, but ultimatley you can’t engineer human nature.
If you build it, they will come
People get so weird about Dansup.
This is in part because he’s in public trainwreck mode fairly often.
That’s why I say it is bullying.
He does post trainwreck statuses sometimes, or miss self-imposed deadlines, or something. That’s very very different from “incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires” but it gives people a grain of truth to fall back on when the total bullshit they’re accusing him of gets called out.
Some for JordanLund, same for FlyingSquid. People are imperfect. It’s okay. If your habit is to use people’s imperfections as a reason to make wild accusations at them that have no basis in reality and double down on the legitimate criticisms and pick at them, and generally just be shitty to them, then there is a perfect word for that activity.
This guy is being reasonable, get the pitchforks!
This guy also being a perpetrator of bullying because he didn’t like moderation decisions makes this post a bit ironic though 🤷
Yeah, I alluded to that when I said I’m probably guilty of it sometimes.
A reasonable person could say that I tend to bully the mods when I disagree with something they’ve done. I do think that when you sign up to control people’s experience and delete messages you don’t agree with, you’re signing up to have your decisions criticized. Reasonably or not. It’s absurd to say that no one is allowed to get upset or air their grievances when the moderators apply moderation in a way that they don’t like, because the end state of that setup is Reddit. But in fairness you are not wrong, sometimes I take it too far, and I think I should cool it at least a little with getting embittered about people moderating me in ways I don’t like.
Also, just for the record I’ve never had any issue on any level with you specifically. My whole anger at one of your moderators posting electoral propaganda and then banning people who disagreed with it, was that I thought he was hijacking his way into the slrpnk good graces for his own agenda, not that that was the intent behind the whole instance or anything. I’ve started being snarky towards the instance as a whole since the slrpnk admin team for some reason came out swinging hard to defend him on that, and then also gave out some further deletions and bans afterwards that I thought were equally silly, but it was more because I felt like you were supposed to be one of the good instances that supported people being able to have the conversations they wanted to have, and move the whole network in a good direction. I definitely wasn’t happy about it or looking for that embittered interaction.
(For context for anyone who’s confused, here are some instances of what might be called bullying that I’ve done previously. The second one in particular sort of makes me cringe to post here, because it’s exactly the kind of sour grapes innuendo that I’m complaining about when people aim it at Dansup.)
But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it’s based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.
Not saying that it isn’t a problem, but as someone who’s been Around™ online, this is pretty par-for-the-course stuff.
Ah, to remember the glory days of Livejournal and Tumblr… and don’t get me started back in the days when every fandom had a dozen sites which all hated each other for vague and extremely personal reasons.
and don’t get me started back in the days when every fandom had a dozen sites which all hated each other for vague and extremely personal reasons.
Oh man, this brings me back.
Remember the time in the late 90s and early 2000s when even a niche topics had like 3-4 large community sites with active forums. More popular topics could easily have like 10-20 communities.
And there was a lot of drama both within and between communities.
It’s kind sad that we lost this, although lemmy is a solid modern alternative, just needs much more users. Enough users for even niche topics to have multiple active communities with their own spin/focus on a given topics.
On the plus side, I am glad I got to experience the early pre-corporate internet. It was good times.
I’ve seen people say that Farcebork was like being in a small town, actively making that kind of everyone-knowing-everyone’s-business a reality again for communities fractured by urban anonymity.
But that was there in spades in the early internet, it’s just that normies hadn’t been beaten over the head by social conditioning by the corporate overlords yet to join in.
It’s human nature to think and behave tribally. So we should expect it to continue in the Fediverse, we just can’t shove the problem over to someone else to manage and take their tithe in eyeballs, and thus fracture our communities all over again: we have to do it ourselves. Drama fucking sucks, wherever is found, but we have to accept it’s our job to manage if we don’t want to trade our freedom for a padded cell.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I definitely don’t think it is a fediverse-only problem. Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.
I was thinking about this earlier today: There was a wonderful little renaissance that happened around the time of the Napster / Slashdot / flash game era, when “it’s the internet so of course it is awful” was in abeyance for a little bit of time and things were cool (as well as being pretty creative, and generally sensible.) I think a lot of what I’m upset about here is not so much that people are being catty (as you said, that’s just kind of the nature of the beast), but that it’s so disconnected from reality. People will say wild made-up nonsense and then other people will take it seriously. Of course, yes, that’s not exactly new or a fedi specific problem…
I get what you lot are getting at but my objection is this, at least when it comes to the Mastodon part of the Fediverse it gets advertised as the nicest social experiences. Mastodon not the Fediverse has a moat on civility, some of the most nasty experiences I’ve seen people have is on fedi. That creates a very different expectation and thus people don’t want to hear “that’s the internet for you”. If it wasn’t marketed as such then I’d completely agree with the points being made.
Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.
Me, who only started into online communities in the early 2000s:
See, but as I was saying above about the privacy stuff, the perception is supposed to be that this is somehow “the alogrithm’s fault” or caused on purpose by corporate media to boost engagement.
Even your take is letting Fedi design off the hook, IMO. The answer here isn’t “oh, well, what can you do?” it’s designing proper moderation tools.
I know people get mad when you praise Bluesky around these parts, but they have an actually good block system, compared to Masto, Lemmy and Fedi in general. It really helps cut this crap short.
And the main reason Bluesky can have that is because it’s not actually decentralized.
Cool.
So?
I mean, you are assuming “decentralized” is good, but it’s only as good as what it gets you. On paper, and until proven otherwise, I may choose less decentralized and more “capable of proper, effective moderation” instead. Especially if “less decentralized” is actually “somewhat decentralized”. I haven’t seen a case that fundamental decentralization trumps all so far.
When I first started the reading I figured the person being bullied was the woman who was upset with dan because her concern about disclosure wasn’t really reasonable. I don’t think the bullying problem is innate to the fediverse, and thankfully we have a lot of tools to safely navigate the fediverse and tune out the abuse.
But there is a not insignificant portion of folks on here that are here because they were banned or warned on mainstream platforms because they couldn’t regulate themselves and still aren’t regulating themselves.
The vast majority of people I’ve came across are genuinely kind. Dansup doesn’t exactly follow best practices in his development which I think causes a lot of strife in the segment of the fedi population who can’t regulate when someone does something they don’t agree with.
I don’t agree with how he has handled loops so I just don’t use it. I don’t think ill of Dan at all.
I don’t exactly think ill of him, but I’ll stay away from any platform he creates. He shared one snippet of code where he disabled validating certificate validity and certificate names. When called out on it, he decided to delete the post.
Security and standards don’t seem like the first things on his mind.
But there is a not insignificant portion of folks on here that are here because they were banned or warned on mainstream platforms because they couldn’t regulate themselves and still aren’t regulating themselves.
What?
Plenty of people on mainstream platforms are obnoxious. Twitter and Reddit in particular are hives of villainy that make anything available on Fedi platforms look childish. Why do you think people are here because they were ejected from mainstream platforms?
Dansup doesn’t exactly follow best practices in his development which I think causes a lot of strife
What?
Can you elaborate?
No disagreement that there are many more insufferable people on Reddit and twitter. But whenever meta discussion comes up about leaving those sites such as !watchredditdie@sh.itjust.works there is always a small handful of people that mention they were banned for “disagreements”. Not to mention the meta drama between .ml users and .world users.
With regards to Dansup, the most common complaints I see are developing Loops closed source and not opening it to federation and still not open sourcing it after 6 months. And with Pixelfed being developed with laravel instead of a stack that is more scalable.
I did elaborate a bit in a sibling comment.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re both wrong. Here me out.
As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they’re quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it’s unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).
However. I’m also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I’ve read through the code, I’ve tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it’s a spaghetti’d mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti’d base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it’s one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it’s an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.
good reply but private items are not “quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens”, AP spec has audience targeting and content gets sent capillarly, like email. a Note for bob gets sent ONLY to bob’s server
as:Public content gets broadcasted by some software (relays) and inbox forwarded by others (mastodon, mitra).
What parts of the codebase did you look at and not like how they were implemented?
Why is it a problem if he makes server software and then publicizes it? Like can you show a couple of examples of authors of some other software who are giving credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people, and how they are giving credit? What are they doing differently than Dansup?
A great example is his handling of Laravel, scaling, and Docker. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have a huge understanding of Docker - or at least hasn’t managed docker images at scale. A huge thing there that I ran into constantly is that the Pixelfed containers both are 1) Stateful and worse than that 2) depend on each other’s volumes. These are both anti patterns specifically called out in the docker best practices. It ultimately means that the Pixelfed containers must share the same host as it’s workers. He put a lot of time and effort into building scripts that would simplify the setup for a docker compose file, but never thought horizontally - scaling these containers out on a cluster or separating workers off away from the web-api nodes at all.
I spent 3 weeks trying to de-tangle that all and got nowhere. I’ve been watching the guys over at Pixelfed Glitch ( a fork of pixelfed ), and from what I see they’re trying to do the same thing. I wish them godspeed. Until then, I can’t recommend Pixelfed as it just can’t horizontally scale. Sure you can throw a more expensive machine at the problem, but that’s not a fix.
As for the last, I don’t have any examples - and I think that’s because no one else has gone on a press junket like he has. The owners of Mastodon started a foundation a while back, I think that’s the most official news I’ve heard out of them. I think that’s what bothered me - for the vast majority of people that was their first chance to hear about the open web. Instead of saying “We have a thing called the fediverse. I’ll spare you the details but you can choose Pixelfed, Mastodon, even Wordpress or many others, and they all work together”. Instead all I heard anywhere was Pixelfed. Feel free to call BS there, maybe he did somewhere and I just missed it.
“Doesn’t scale because the containers are set up wrong” is different from “unmaintainable code” though. What of the code was bad? I’ve looked at a bunch of fedi projects and Pixelfed didn’t strike me as either particularly good or particularly bad.
As for the last, I don’t have any examples
?
I mean, that is sort of what I expected. Mastodon doesn’t publicize Wordpress. Lemmy doesn’t publicize mbin. They all, mostly, mention a little bit of the context that they can interoperate with other federated services, but it doesn’t strike me as weird or malicious that someone would write a project and then promote that project. That sounds normal.
Actually, both Mastodon and Lemmy chose to implement sort of their own versions of ActivityPub, and that actually does strike me as selfish behavior. It means that mostly they are their own independent platforms that run “on top of” ActivityPub instead of enabling full interoperation with the other stuff. Doing it that way was hard to avoid, because the design of ActivityPub to me isn’t great, but this situation is actually a perfect example of that: Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly. I’m not aware of Pixelfed doing anything like that. Mastodon and Lemmy can both get away with presenting themselves as “the fediverse” and forcing everyone else into copying one implementation or the other if they want things to actually work, and they both show very little interest in making it easy. If you want to pick out sins of various fedi projects to start to point out that are disrespecting the other projects in the space, something like that is where I would start.
Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly.
You ever notice how Gargron refers to the fediverse as “the Mastodon network?”
He’s been doing things this way since 2017 at least. At this point, any longtime observer really has no other choice but to consider the behavior deliberate.
Everyone I ever talked to told me “well yes we have to implement our own version of ActivityPub because AP is under-defined”. In most cases it is defined what AP does, but not how. Therefore individual programers go in and figure out on their own how a certain thing they are building for their platform should be structured in AP.
Now, every project could simply go “I will copy the way Pixelfed implements it”. But why should PF have that priviledge?
Agreed. It’s not completely their fault. But also, they’ve run further than they needed to with the “I’m in charge of what protocol I’m going to speak to other instances running my own software” than they needed to. Case in point, this exact issue with “private” posts. A lot of things had to be fleshed out more so than they are in the AP spec. This feature needed to be handled more carefully than that.
I shared a bit about exactly this here: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmings.world/comment/14476151
deleted by creator
Using Laravel as a framework should be the first red flag, I yet have to meet a Laravel dev who understands architecture (and I interviewed quite a bit of them). That framework is several anti-patterns bundled into a nice package.
I mean, I completely agree but last time I said that people flamed me over it. If it was still 2013 then I’d look more into it, but today it’s such a monolithic architecture
I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it’s unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix
It also uses an entirely separate AP type that’s not used for anything else (ChatMessage) unlike Mastodon which uses Note, which is also used for: Mastodon posts and comments, Lemmy comments, most likely others.
ChatMessage type also has strict requirements about recipients, the chances to leak them are slimmer. Additionally, if the target app does not support the type, it’s very unlikely it will handle it at all, but Note will most likely be handled in some way.
In conclusion, Lemmy PMs are very hard to leak accidentally (still very easy to leak intentionally).
Sadly, Lemmy will be moving to Mastodon-style PMs.
Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.
And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn’t feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work.
Anyone who’s ever touched the Mastodon dev process knows that Gargron is much the same, FWIW, minus getting angry in public. These days I just have to shake my head at all the bright-eyed bushy-tailed noobs updating issues on the Mastodon repo, because those of us who’ve been around since the start know exactly how far that’s gonna go in nearly all cases - and in the cases it does go anywhere, it’ll be because Gargron implemented something similar with zero discussion and no credit where credit is due.
But yeah, follow Dansup long enough and you are guaranteed to see some regrettable behavior on main.
Unfortunately it’s just a ubiquitous reality that people are the worst.
This kind of indirect bullying is kind of unavoidable online, because of the lack of direct contact, you don’t empathize much with the other sensitive being. Until we get that perfect education to civility that may happen in 2000 years if we still exist. Maybe one solution is to have strong rules and moderation about personal attacks. But then it’s the moderators that will get bullied for censorship and end up crucified on the power tripping bastard community.
And you have summed up why I block those communities. There are surely cases of people abusing power, but a majority of it is just people wanting to stir up shit.
Maybe one solution is to have strong rules and moderation about personal attacks. But then it’s the moderators that will get bullied for censorship and end up crucified on the power tripping bastard community.
When people try to call out power tripping against valid moderation, they get called out on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I don’t think that blog author is male, btw.
Oop. She is not. Fixed.
I’m OOTL,
who is Dansup? (missed the parentheses) What does this person have to do with private posts not being private?Dansup is a developer who made Pixelfed and Loops.
Depending on who you ask, he either fucked up Pixelfed in a way that exposed Mastodon users’ private posts, or else Mastodon implemented private posts poorly and he got caught in the crossfire. I’m firmly in the second camp, so much so that I think it’s misleading to describe it in that both-sides type of way, but regardless, that is the lay of the land of the drama.
Never trust the client, right? In this case, the client is another server, run by different people. If software A can fuck up software B, software B is the one that should be fixed with better security. Thanks for clarifying btw!
Yes. That is 100% my feeling.
Happy to be of service.
So, I was probably (one of) the first to post that “Pixelfed leaks private posts” thing on here? I first wrote a long reply to this, but it sort if got away from me. The short version would be,
A) sure, the fediverse has a bullying problem in the sense that people do, and that that is usually exacerbated in any online comment field. People are awful, and that includes me, you, Dansup, and anybody reading this. We’re also usually pretty brilliant when nobody’s looking.
B) despite what I write above, I don’t take bullying lightly. I am really uncomfortable with how you use the generally phrased headline to address this specific case. You’re not writing about the fediverse as such, you’re casting Dansup as a victim.
C) Dan’s up, Dan’s down, Dan’s a victim, Dan’s throwing a fit online and then deleting the tweets. As you cite in OP, some people attribute all sorts of unrelated evil to him. Most of all, my impression is Dansup has as a hard time separating from his role as main developer on Pixelfed, Loops, etc, as online commenters has separating his work from (perceived) personal faults.
D) let’s imagine those projects were fully open sourced and developed by the community already. Would we be in the same situation here? Again, resorting to ad hominem bullying in online discussion is unacceptable, but I do question that Dansup is an unequivocable victim. Nor is he an evil mastermind who has engineered this situation to garner pity. He just seems to be extremely hard working, with a generous pinch of need for control of his projects.
you’re casting Dansup as a victim
Correct. The original blog post wasn’t really all that bullying, I just thought it was mistaken about the security issues involved. The subsequent comments (“incompetent” “toxic” “quite problematic” “funding funding funding” and so on) were what I would describe as bullying. And, it fits a pattern where people take some issue (often one like this where he didn’t even theoretically do anything wrong) and use it as a jumping-off point to start the personal attacks.
Dan’s up, Dan’s down, Dan’s a victim, Dan’s throwing a fit online and then deleting the tweets. As you cite in OP, some people attribute all sorts of unrelated evil to him. Most of all, my impression is Dansup has as a hard time separating from his role as main developer on Pixelfed, Loops, etc, as online commenters has separating his work from (perceived) personal faults.
What?
Why should he separate from his role as main developer? This makes no sense. “Sure those people got personally insulting with Dan for no reason at all, but you have to remember, he’s the main developer of these projects and he won’t separate from them. So it’s complicated.” What?
They should implement some form of pgp into private posts so only folks with the right key can decrypt
Back when I was younger and naïve, I would Nicolas Cage OP.
I’m now more mature and open minded, and I can say I wholesomely agree with @Zak@lemmy.world’s statement ITT.
Technologists have very little patience for people that are technologically illiterate. And when you’re fighting to liberate people against corporations that send hitlists against you, patience runs faster. My hope is that people like OP can empathize that while yes, public technologies can be harmful and downright hostile, they can take their time to comprehend concepts technologist took their time to write down and document for.
If you want private conversations with peers, it must be encrypted, it must be forward secret, and it must be authenticatable.
XMPP, SimpleXchat, & Signal are the only three that fit these specifications.
I have the first two (check my bio👈😎👈), the latter I do not trust.
the latter I do not trust.
Am I reading the article wrong? Is it not a good thing that they refused to comply with the hostile anti-encryption law?
They refused to operate ON a country with a hostile anti encryption law as a threat.
Signal could have mocked the France government for being authoritarian fascist censorious anti-mathematics pieces of turd, but leave USERS stuck in France with the danger of the government’s bs law.
A metaphor for ease of comprehension: Signal threatens a farmer for hunting chicken down, by ceasing all freeing-chicken-from-the-farm operations. Not killing the farmer, but leaving the chicken without the tools to liberate themselves.
Yes, I read Animal Farm.
You know they can’t legally operate there if they don’t follow the law, right?
Pulling out is the only form of protest they have as a company. The rest is up to its users.
Anyway, if it happened, you could still use Signal anyway, perhaps with the help of a relay like other countries who prefer spying over privacy.
Privacy and encryption are inalienable human rights, even in authoritarian hells like North Korea. There’s is no reason to comply with bs laws.
If you don’t see mocking a fascist government as a form of protest, I’m not so sure how I can help you see the harm in leaving.
That last paragraph is the problem, they know they are a line of defense for many vulnerable people in France. So leaving them to their own devices is a form of complicit acceptance.
There is a reason: you will be sued out of existence. And the bit about North Korea made me laugh, so thanks.
You get sued no matter what authoritarian country your tools get used in, it doesn’t mean Signal Technology Foundation has to comply with French law, as they are not beholden by their jurisdiction. That is why I used North Korea as an e.g.: Kim Jong Un can’t sue the world.
But if you officially operate somewhere, they can sue you, I thought that was common knowledge?
Anyway, not complying with local laws and operating in the country can get you in some serious trouble. And the trouble will escalate until you comply or pull out of the country.
Kim Jong Un can sue anyone. Like, they can sue Signal if they want. Sure, they have no way to enforce it, but they can sue (and win the case). It’s not like this would be a first, that happened quite a few times. Especially in dictatorship.
