this article doesnt even mention the biggest problem which is trust and safety throwing trans users under the bus to protect a serial harasser and paedophile apologist like jesse singal.
What’s this?
Mastodon will still be there when this one burns down too
True, but unless they have a solution to the bot problem blsky is having and reddit has…
They won’t fair any better…
fare*
Mastodon would only get that problem if it became as big as Bluesky or reddit.
More moderators and admins
Bsky has block lists and subscriptions to different moderation services labelers (that anyone can run) and you can pick and choose.
This is honestly an amazing feature. I hope someone can implement it in fediverse.
Yup, organic growth
Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don’t, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they’re wrong they don’t want that feature.
I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they’re utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.
The mastodon developers are us.
It’s open source so yeah…my PRS are part of the community. And so are yours. And projects like GoToSocial make it seemless if someone wants to implement the same protocol in a slightly different way.
That’s really not how it works, especially in regards to what OP is referring to. Anyone can offer contributions to mastodon, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be accepted. Mastodon has an organization and that organizations has opinions on what should and shouldn’t be implemented. For example, Mastodon doesn’t federate favorites, so you only see the amount of favorites a post has recieved from your own interest. I’d like for this to be changed, and I could submit a PR to do so, but it wouldn’t be accepted.
I’d like for this to be changed, and I could submit a PR to do so, but it wouldn’t be accepted.
How do you know that it wouldn’t be accepted?
Because PRs have been made for it before and people at the Mastodon organization have made it clear they do not want this feature.
Pretty much this, which leads to a bajillion different forks and similar-but-not-quite alternatives that have some neat features but lack others, which your instance of choice probably won’t ever migrate to and which all risk being abandoned by the single person that decides to work on it.
Just to give a taste of forks - https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps/issues/47
The mastodon devs decide what to merge, though. If they don’t see the value of a feature, they won’t merge it.
If you want to extend the protocol, sure, go ahead. But you’ll be alone on it, since no one outside of your protocol island can use that specific feature.
inb4 “it’s not my job to contribute to a community project when there’s a slick corporate alternative” which is basically just saying “it’s not my job to make the world a better place.” (Actually that’s everyone’s job, all the time.)
“Wahhhh, I shouldn’t have to learn to code, or garden, or be a street medic, or learn to do anything to take care of other people ever. I should have it all spoon-fed to me by corporations that don’t give a fuck if I live or die!”
And yet there are somehow those of us who have the audacity to call Boomers lazy and entitled. We’re obviously no fucking better.
If Bluesky goes, Lemmy will be my permanent home
It won’t go. At least not in the near future. They’re just growing. And that comes with consequences. The article says they’re at it. And doing a good job.
Bluesky’s moderation team is shit. Recently, their “head of trust and safety” went full Elongated Muskrat and tried to permanently ban a user who was tracking his public data.
He was overreacting because the bot publicized that he had clicked like on a porn video.
His ban of the user was an attempt to cover up his mistake and thanks to the Streisand effect now we’ve got screenshots.
It’s pretty freaking sad honestly.
If I did something like that at my job I would be looking for a new job. Not really sure why they haven’t responded or dealt with that in any way.
Told people already it’s not as decentralized as people might believe or has being told to them. I will never join Bluesky.
Did anyone actually think it would be? It just had to be not Twitter. Mastodon would’ve been awesome but apparently the barrier for entry was more than the average person willing to accept.
Did anyone actually think it would be?
I assume so. They’ve certainly been trumpeting it enough.
Yes a lot of people went away from Mastodon to Bluesky, thinking indeed it was open source and decentralized. Jack Dorsey is selling BlueSky like that. Also various media outlets are saying: “Is Bluesky decentralized? Yes.”
Gonna be real, microblogging is never gonna really work with decentralization. It barely works when centralized. It’s isolating by nature, and only really amplifies the voices that are already the loudest, and the introduction of separate servers and federation delays only make those problems worse.
Decentralization is is unobtainable. You have to have a source of truth. DNS has shown us the way, everyone else is fucking around.
Gotta have a trusted org to manage identities.
Yesn’t. Yes we have DNS, which is bad enough. But the internet itself was build to be resistant and distributed. DNS is distributed, but not decentralized. However, decentralized protocols (read BitTorrent protocols, etc.) do exist, and does make it more decentralized. Without the need of DNS.
I’m never doing to trust a single org or group to control a large group of users/people or projects. Never.
Nothing that involves authoritative state of data can be decentralized. Ultimately something is a source of truth. Who decides what the torrent data is? Congratulations, your system is now centralized.
Decentralized systems are anarchist mastubatory fantasy, distributed systems are what runs the world.
You can spin up your own instance to ensure you have a custom username suffix. That’s literally all anyone needs to distinguish themselves from fake accounts. Trusting any org to remain a neutral authority is a mistake and a bigger risk than getting users to agree on an accurate source based on a suffix.
This is a neckbeard dream, and it is why activity pub will never take off.
Grandma ain’t running her own instance, but she can swipe her card and get “grandmahotstuff.com” tied to her ATproto DID.
As long as the did is maintained by a neutral org like let’s encrypt, and icann remains functional, it’s a superior model, as those orgs are now tied to the functioning of the internet itself.
Let me guess, you and/or your buddies are the trustworthy ones?
If anyone truly thought this group of techbros that was spearheaded and organized by Jack Dorsey was gonna somehow be different than the previous iterations, I’ve got a bridge to sell them. I mean, they owe millions to Blockchain Capital. Cryptobros. But sure, we just need to keep making more billionaires and then ditching their services after they have enough money to deeply influence politics.
Idiots acting like they’re against people like Musk but they’re just creating another one at a different company.
they’re not creating “another one”. Dorsey is already made and he seems to be immune to whatever is working elon’s intestines.
ps i don’t care a bit about Dorsey either. I just see a difference.
Dorsey already left Bluesky back to Xitter because he didn’t like their moderation practices. I’m talking about Jay Graber, who literally got their start developing Zcash, a cryptocurrency. Graber is far from a billionaire at the moment.
Dorsey went back to Xitter!
Why would he do that 🤦
sorry, ignore my previous comment. This too! I need to read a little on this now. Apparently i missed that move
edit: reading this ☞ https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create.
Around the same time, I found Nostr. We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian. It has no board, no company behind it, no funding. It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.
Day by day, I learned that this was actually the path. It emerged from something that was not Twitter-driven, it was a reaction to Twitter’s failures, and I thought that was right as well. That’s what I should help, and that’s what I should support.
So I just decided to delete my account on Bluesky, and really focus on Nostr, and funding that to the best of my ability. I asked to get off the board as well, because I just don’t think a protocol needs a board or wants a board. And if it has a board, that’s not the thing that I wanted to help build or wanted to help fund.
this sounds alright, no?
But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
This bit I don’t get. Even on Lemmy and Mastodon we need moderation tools and arguably the current provisions aren’t fit for purpose. It’s not something that can just be pushed to the individual users and most hobbyists who want to spin up public servers don’t want to be spending their time wading through reports and CSAM. How to provide a safe environment for users is still an unsolved problem in the fediverse so it’s no wonder people drift to corporate controlled servers which say least nominally have the resources to do something about it.
No problem, not everyone is up to speed on everything. Here’s some reading material.
Went back to Xitter and started funding Nostr.
https://thedeepdive.ca/jack-dorsey-leaves-bluesky-board-unfollows-almost-everyone-on-x/
this is an architecture problem.
a new architecture needs to be implemented that would make it impossible for bots to [not] even use the tools, and if they do block them at the source.
verified identities using government id schemes, loads already exist, i verified my account on LinkedIn for free
yeah, I personally can’t support linking a true identity to an online identity.
it just feels ick and would only be a matter of time before people started to get blackmailed for shit they did online.
I’m all for taking personal responsibility but not forced responsibility like the Chinese have today.
yeah we would have to trust the anonymization and security of the authentication services but i see no other way to defeat the bots
i think there could be many other benefits as well if it works
How do you propose such an architecture works?
probably start with no public API that uses something like a csrf token.
then leverage the patterns that companies combating adblock use and make the page source so spaghetti that anything like beautifulsoup couldn’t use it.
at that point you would have to track fluctuations in user actions, rather the lack of. if a user takes .5 seconds to click an action after a page loads 20 times in an hour flag the account for further surveillance that watches over n days for larger impacting actions like post or activity times. correlate with existing users that are in the same profile range and if they are a match for known bot activity ban the account.
on the flip side, bots may try to randomize interactions to combat this, so another filter may look at long term patterns with repetitive actions. things like adding comments may not be useful, but the way they’re entered may.
how long does it take them to enter the comment into the input form? how many words are they using every comment? are what they are responding to indicative of a response length provided?
for example if the post was, “what’s your favorite cheese?” someone may respond with “Gouda” or “I love Swiss on toasted rye. it reminds me of a lake retreat I had where …” but it would certainly be less than 1000 characters.
as opposed to a post asking about a political opinion that’s nuanced and requires thought and opinion to be shared. not just, “you suck!”
further interactions like upvote/downvote can trigger surveillance. I know some users will dv bomb a user for whatever reason. that could be reason enough to identify them as a malicious entity that’s interfering with the system.
So… Having no public API means people just develop libraries to interact with your private API.
Furthermore, beautiful soup can work on any page… It’s just a matter of how easily.
CSRF doesn’t do what I think you think it does. It only works with a cooperating client (i.e. it’s to protect a user in their own web browser). If it’s a bot you’d just scrape the token and move on.
Fluctuations in user actions can also be simulated (you can have a bot architecture that delays work to be done to be similar to what a normal user might do/say/post) … and rate limiting can be overcome by just using more accounts, stolen IP addresses, etc
You can do a lot, but it’s always going to be a bit of a war. Things you’re suggesting definitely help (a lot of them echo strategies used by RuneScape to prevent/reduce bots), but … I think saying it’s an architecture problem is a bit disingenuous; some of those suggestions also hurt users.
