The fediverse has a bullying problem
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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?
I did elaborate a bit in a sibling comment.
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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 [email protected] 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.
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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.
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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
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. -
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.
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.
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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.
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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. This 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 glitch-fed ( 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.
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.
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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?
I shared a bit about exactly this here: https://lemmyverse.link/lemmings.world/comment/14476151
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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.
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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.
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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 han 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. -
You get sued no matter what authoritarian country your tools get used in, it doesn't mean Signal Technology Foundation han 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.
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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
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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.
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They're nasty pieces of shit when they don't have to look at the person they're hurting or putting in danger, but that only supports my theory. There's an empathy disconnect that's created when there isn't a human face or voice immediately in front of them. Once they aren't in danger of an in-person interaction all the venom comes out. Online, that's basically all of our interactions.
I should point out the phenomenon where a minority in a community will magically become "one of the good ones" so that the bigots can continue hating minorities while empathizing with their neighbor. This is also becoming less common as we grow more isolated from each other and everyone moves online, destroying the potential for that face-to-face interaction.
I do concede that there has been a trend towards xenophobia that has been exacerbated by filter bubbles and even more by algorithms. But the balance is that people who once had no choice but to suffer ostracism and extreme isolation have been able find community online and have improved mental health and outcomes in many ways.
I certainly found this myself in the early days of the internet before the iron fist of corporatism grabbed this fledgling space, determined to extract value from it, and creating the nightmares of isolation and hate that are now Farcebork and its ilk. Fedi has been a welcome return to smaller communities that have to do the necessary work of self management, which reduces the hate and isolation that is promoted by antisocial media, even if it doesn't stop it altogether.
My point is, the internet isn't worse. Humans can be good or bad, but certain environments make them behave in worse ways, and these environments can exist both online and off.
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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.
How can non-enforceable laws be laws?
Your majesty, the peasants are rebelling, they have overtaken the army, what do we do?
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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.
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 -
I’m genuinely curious what you would call this and what distinguishes it from a vulnerability.
Leaving aside responsibility, the system could have been set up in a way that wouldn’t have exposed user data but wasn’t. This is now fixed and user data isn’t exposed via this method any longer. What is the right word for what it was at the moment this flaw was discovered?
Not me who downvoted you, FYI.
To me, a vulnerability is something unforeseen, that allows bad actors to exploit the system in an unintended manner. In this case, the system is working perfectly as designed. Just because another system decided to implement a new feature without consulting anybody else, does not make it a vulnerability. Or perhaps it does, but with the vulnerability on the side of Mastodon, since they're the ones telling their users their post is private when it is actually nothing of the sort.
What would I call it? An unsupported feature. One that Mastodon forced everybody else to implement without asking or any respect.
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How can non-enforceable laws be laws?
Your majesty, the peasants are rebelling, they have overtaken the army, what do we do?
I mean, have you ever read anything about any dictatorship?
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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.
