Adventures in Mastoland | Hacker News Reader

Adventures in Mastoland

searchtodon.social

91 pointstodsacerdoti71 comments

This was a very strange article to read - and the author felt a bit over the top apologetic to me. What excites me about Mastodon is its open nature and more decentralized community feel. Feels like the kind of place that you can still "discover" and "stumble" onto things. Experimentation is very much a core tenant of that - the idea that you'd leverage open protocols but try to police them like a walled garden feels backwards. What a let down.

I saw most of this play out on Mastadon, and OP was absolutely blasted for even daring to try something like this. The response was completely inappropriate, and the level of hate was excessive when OP was very clear from the start that they were trying to find a “good” way to do this and had zero ill intent.

Yep, there was some really nasty stuff aimed at them - and I've known them for many years, absoutly none of it was deserved and was just hateful vitriol based on typical assumptions off an avatar.

I do get it - these people have been on the Fediverse longer and feel like it's a form of digital colonialisim, but as I've pointed out - if they keep shutting down individuals who do things in good faith, soon when the "BigSocial" comes along and does it anyway, they won't have anyone there to help speak up as they'll have blocked, defederated or just scared people off.

Also the underlying problem here is a tech one - it could be fixed by correctly implementing the "noindex" stuff and working on privacy and consent features. This can't be fixed as a people problem, and certainly won't be by shutting down any attempts to address the problem now

Also TIL that a "FOSSBro" is apparently a thing people now like to throw about.

>FOSSBro

There's a similar term in science: bropenscience (bro + open science). The behaviour is strangely similar, people on the nerdier side who have been doing 'their' niche-thing for a while and are often condescending/aggressive towards newcomers. It's interesting that both FOSS and open science were made to make things more 'open' but sometimes lock/close things down even more.

A lot of people defend this behaviour because a lot of the Fediverse (especially pre-Elon) were there because they were harassed on other platforms, and so discoverability is a negative feature. I don't see how that justifies the amount of vitriol thrown at the author, but that's where a lot of the culture has come from. Some people see any kind of project like this as an attack on their safety, which doesn't activate the part of your brain that's good at reasonable discourse.

Discoverability is pretty much inevitable if the tech allows it.

It's a feature simply too useful to too many. It will get built if it can get built.

I get the desire to be "public but only when it works in my favor" , but it's just not practical. You have to choose whether to be public or private.

But Google already offers full search of most public Mastodon posts -- add "site:mastodon.social" to a Google search on anything in the news, and see what you get. It's odd for people to get so worked up about what would happen to Mastodon if it were generally searchable, and yet not to notice that Google already did that quite some time ago.

Not all posts are public, not everyone is on one instance.

That's optional and off by default. You have to go into settings and tick a box for search engines to index your profile. So, by default, this isn't an issue in "normal" search engines that respect website's wishes.

All of the decisions up to this point have been debated, carefully considered, and there's always a reason why things are the way they are (you can usually find that reason deep within Mastodon's issue tracker). When someone comes in and tries to disrupt that fine balance that took years of effort to achieve, people get very hostile, sometimes to an unreasonable degree.

A suggestion of some sort: just don't fuck with other people's posts. At all. If you want to fuck around with fediverse, build your own presentation in any way you want to and interact with other people. But don't try building "meta" projects like search engines, stats, analyses and what not. Even if your intentions are good and you do your damn best to respect everyone's wishes, you will still piss off a lot of people. The only way to avoid that is to make your product opt-in, but then pretty much nobody will want to opt-in, so you'd just be wasting your time.

Anyone doing anything slightly out of the norm on the fediverse gets blasted. I too experienced this just recently. Being open and responding just gets you even more heat.

100% agree the response is inappropriate.

If you don't do an apology like done here the mob will continue to attack you. So I totally understand why they did this.

The best strategy is to ignore what the minority that attack people say and just block them...

Crazy thing is that a lot of the policing of other people's behaviour is even from people who haven't even been around for long. It's crazy seeing people trying to control other people's behaviour by attacking them and telling them "that's not how things are done here" when they've been on Mastodon for less time than the person they're policing!

It's common for newcomers in a community to try to prove that they deserve to be there by aggressively enforcing/performing community norms.

Can confirm, I was that newcomer. Thought the culture was perfect and thus wanted to defend it. I’m more disillusioned now and focused more on the decentralisation aspect.

> I saw most of this play out on Mastadon, and OP was absolutely blasted for even daring to try something like this.

I'm glad that we live in a world in which some people respond to this kind of social dogpile with defiance and renewed inspiration. Progress depends on highly disagreeable people who gain energy from being told by tut-tutting do-godders that certain things musn't be done.

> the idea that you'd leverage open protocols but try to police them like a walled garden feels backwards.

Just because it is technically possible, does not mean it is socially a good idea. Members and server owners should decide what can and cannot be done with their data. If you want a Mastodon server without limitations for experimentation, you can create one, and people can join if they consent.

The author has probably seen mob justice played out in the fedi and didn't want to irk them.

I've seen it play out and it's disgusting.

The author should be commended for staying true, but tbh, if they don't do it today someone else will do it tomorrow. EVERYTHING you post in the fedi should absolutely be considered public information.

> tenant

tenet?

Individual servers will sort this one out.

There are already instances like qoto.org which have full-text search, quote toots, and other features. If people of the instance demand it, the search feature will be implemented.

Qoto.org have other policies such as they try not to block other servers, which among other issues has caused it to be blocked by some servers, but not by biggest servers.

It's a cultural clash, question is are toots part of ephemeral discussion or microblogging? I lean on side of microblogging, thus everything should be indexable and searchable. Some blame can be set on the creators of Mastodon, they made a no-index checkbox, it should have been end of the story, but it wasn't.

> Qoto.org have other policies such as they try not to block anyone

How was that compatible with it's rules in the about section:

> Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.

What happens if you harass someone?

Edit, I corrected my wording in my post.

It's moderated server for sure, I was referring to this section:

> We only require servers we federate with to follow one simple rule: respect a user's right to disengage. Offending servers will only be silenced, not blocked, blocks will be reserved for technical assaults only such as DDoS attacks...

They don't block other servers.

https://qoto.org/about/more

I would be 100% shocked to learn that there are no quiet and private search engines for Fediverse covering the vast majority of posts.

I would also expect, given increasing mainstreaming of Mastodon and the well known discovery issues, a commercial Fediverse search engine to go live in the next year, and to do well, despite the community pushback.

I'm waiting for someone just to build a search engine based on screen scraping and ignore what "the community" says. either with good intent or a hostile version.

I'm actually flabbergasted that highly technical users (who probably make up 90+% of Mastodon users indicating "no search/index/bot" etc) have this opinion about their posts. Is it just virtue signaling?

There are more charitable interpretations than virtue signaling.

Mastodon has the unfortunate adolescent problem of being not Twitter but not yet fully matured into its full potential. Teenagers and Mastodon alike rebel agaist their parents in order to discover who they are. Before they sort this out they try a bunch of contrary behavior and eventually they discover what makes them them.

Is Mastodon Mastodon because it doesn't have full text search, because it doesn't have an algorithm feed, because it is decentralized, because it doesn't have quote replies, because it has a different user base with different relations?

All of these, and not all of these. Mastodon will, eventually figure out which ones make it itself and which ones don't. Maybe in that process it reinvents itself countless times or maybe it coalesces around a strange attractor in social-feature-space. We dont know the results without running the experiment and figuring out what full text search means to Mastodon is running the experiment.

It's been around for years and has never improved. Source: I was there before the Twitter users arrived. Mastodon is a failed experiment, at least if you're looking for a digital open society and intelligent conversations. The Twitter users that left because they're outraged about Musk not censoring enough are only going to make things worse if anything. Many might fit right in though, Mastodon is all about echo chambers which is a surprising feat for a decentralized network.

Having read through a few of the comments this guy faced, this feels like a decent take. I suspect most folks float around for a bit and land back on twitter - which is also a shame.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Twitter although I use it in light of a lack of good alternatives and because some interesting people are still on there. Social media matters, this is where opinions are made these days, where people get their news but also where they get indoctrinated and misinformed.

Different folks have very different expectations and wishes if you ask them about the ideal social media site. Imo it's paramount to bring back trust. This could be done not through dubious "fact-checkers" or by banning anyone certain people dislike, but simply by having the option for accounts to have all their submissions posted to a blockchain so that they can't be deleted nor altered. This could be used by media, politicians and anyone else who wants to signal reliability. Users could then go back in time and decide for themselves if the account is honest and worth engaging with, there would be cryptographic proof if they keep lying or misrepresenting things and this in turn could easily be linked to.

Ideally, not only that but users should be in control of their data. This is kind of true with Mastodon but the majority of users don't run their own server and won't ever, because that's just unrealistic. It's better to outsource this with financial incentives to ensure decentralization and user control.

How did you arrive at that measure of success for Mastodon?

I have my own measure of success and Mastodon meets it well enough, but I wouldn't say treating it as an objective measure adds any value, and why should it? I really only care about n=1.

I too am astonished over some people's vitriol on the subject. I saw someone post over the weekend that said that they'll refuse to use #nobot since it's opt-out, and they'll instead just file GPDR requests against the companies that try to follow them. They demand opt-in.

It was certainly a fiery post, but this is how the web has worked since forever. Whether it's robots.txt or #nobots, opting out is required. After all, you're putting the content out there. In the end, this should be addressed by modern clients: "Do you want your posts to be searchable and your following list to be used for recommendations? Yes, No" and add #nobots if they decline.

Ffs if you don’t want an http uri anon accessible, apply authzn. Has the world gone mad?

>Whether it's robots.txt or #nobots, opting out is required. After all, you're putting the content out there.

Anyone who is putting content on the internet is explicitly "opting in" to the content being on the internet, with all the rights, privileges, advantages, and disadvantages thereof. They can elect to make their wishes about content sharing known by using things like robots.txt and #nobots, but those are merely weak guidelines, and by then it's too late anyway since they've already opted-in by putting their content in an easily accessible location. Kind of disingenuous to stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and then get pissed that someone heard you and remembered what you said.

You can, however, sue that person for repeating your story verbatim under copyright — even if you performed it publicly.

This happens literally all the time with music: broadcast is not a license to redistribute or otherwise commercially use content.

Hope these people never send any emails, I hear they can be searched for a long time too.

an interesting analogy: 1-to-1 email used to be considered private. actually, a lot of people still use it with an expectation of privacy (see: password resets sent over email, politicians regularly having their incriminating emails leaked, or good ol’ personal correspondence). but technically it’s never been all that private: most SMTP servers don’t mandate SSL, and even with SSL most email remains readable and indexed by Google.

i have no problem when the people i intended to reach save and index my email. yet i think i’m reasonable in being upset whenever i discover a new party i didn’t know/expect is doing it (e.g. NSA).

SMTP sniffing, SNI sniffing, DNS sniffing: these are all instances where ingesting “openly available” data is beneficial to the party doing it but costly to me (it limits my ability to speak freely with a consenting party without consequence).

fediverse is clearly split on this. some people have expectations based more in personal correspondence, and don’t want to end up in the same situation as email where the adversarial relations and negative externalities are just de-facto/accepted. others have expectations based in mass-media, where the further your comms travel the better. but for most users, they use the protocol for a mix of both, and that makes for a messy and difficult to reason about situation.

some of this is solvable with protocol upgrades. but that’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s not clear that every social norm even can be enforced technically.

It was never safe to assume 1-on-1 email was private.

The rule I was taught was "email can be stored indefinitely and read by every node in the network the email is routed through; act accordingly."

The idea is that a search feature leads to harassment or spam. You could, for example, search for your favorite politician's name and hurl insults at anyone who criticizes them.

A lot of Mastodon users want Mastodon's #1 priority as a platform to be harassment prevention, even if it requires major compromises in usability.

(Another example of this is the lack of a quote-tweet (quote-toot) feature.)

Ironically, the community's response to the author of this blog post when he debuted his search tool could probably qualify as harassment - he was absolutely walloped on there.

It's not that it's a wrong stance per se. But the notion that you can ward the truly malicious actors from indexing content that you yourself made public by saying that you don't want them to is kinda ridiculous.

There's a world where a full-text-search-disabling mastodon content license has legal teeth and the enforcement comes down to employing the justice system. I admit this isn't terribly likely, but it isn't categorically ruled out. I suppose it comes down to where we draw lines on maliciousness and court effectiveness, but there's still interesting things to territorialize in that space.

I'm going to predict that the Mastodon people believe that the legal system can't be used for good and thus they're not willing to use it.

Mastodon people is sort of a strange way to group folks. Categorically I don't think it's useful other than speaking in tendencies.

I brought this up because I specifically run my own server and I license my content in a way that prohibits its indexing for full-text search. Am I a "Mastodon people"? Who can say for sure.

While there is certainly nuance in Fediverse communities, I think the idea of "Mastodon people" has merit. Many people on Mastodon have strongly held political and cultural opinions and strong feelings on the types of ideas their conversation partners should have. Deviation from these opinions is usually met with derision at best but more generally vitriol and banning. It sounds like the OP ran against exactly this behavior. Over the years there's certainly been a rise in interest oriented communities, but even those come with strongly held cultural and political opinions.

My experience comes from using Mastodon from 2015-2018 (where I got to witness the free speech instance wars) and ultimately distancing myself from it.

>I think the idea of "Mastodon people" has merit

With the recent influx of Twitter refugees the user community on large instances has, as one would expect, trended to the mean, and I would say this statement doesn't have much merit now.

Depends on how many folks stay. If the community attracts like-minded folks with most returning to Twitter, then it sticks.

Do you require the license to be read and accepted before providing access to servers trying to federate?

I provide it on my profile. I don't require the license in my Github repos to be read and accepted before it applies to the code therein and this is a parallel. The license strictly prohibits indexing for full text search and quote replies. All other indexing, storage, and retrieval is allowed.

I don't think one needs to agree to your GitHub license to browse the repo, though. Copying it is another matter, but indexing doesn't do that.

At the end of the day what matters is what a judge believes. Maybe it's not legally possible to create a license that prohibits full-text search, but I'm not going to give up before trying.

If you really want to control who can access it, you need to encrypt it with the public keys of everybody who is allowed to read it. That's probably the only way.

I don't think Mastodon or anything else on the Fediverse currently uses public key encryption at all, though.

You also need to verify anyone who joins the group. Allow strangers to join and the encryption doesn't do anything. Might as well use a private group on Signal at that point.

Encryption still encrypts, doesn't it? Of course they could decrypt it and pass it on decrypted, but no amount of security is going to prevent that.

Google Plus had the option of sharing publicly, with a specific circle, with all your circles, or with your extended circles (your circles and their circles). This gave very good granularity in controlling who could read what. It sounds like some people at Mastodon could really use something similar, and the only way to accomplish that on an open, federated network, is through encryption.

Though it may be a bit much to encrypt it separately for 100 different people. It really blows up the overhead. So maybe don't encrypt the entire message with publish keys, but with a secret key, which gets encrypted with each public key of the allowed recipients, all of them attached with the same message. Still some overhead, but a lot less.

I don't know ActivityPub well enough to know if they already have something like this, but it might be a useful addition.

One issue is that other Mastodon servers would need to decrypt the messages if any of their users is a member of a private group. Furthermore, users can switch servers, which effectively means that any server they can move to could get access.

If you want end-to-end encryption then the key management needs to be on the client and the client software needs to be securely distributed, which makes it more like a mobile or desktop app than a web app.

There's a simple, ancient solution to avoid receiving hurled insults: don't read comments from stangers, and share blocklists with your friends.

Who says there aren't already silent ones out there running already? And this has been my point in replies, it's coming one way or another - do you want to own it (as a community) or do would they rather wait until it's too late, and they've also pushed anyway any support to stop it?

That has been my statement as well.

It is going to happen, and they can go kicking and screaming, or try to get something that works with them.

This is all well and good but I think it would be naive to think that actors that are not going to listen and/or follow social contracts of Fediverse are going to be stopped from indexing everything and selling the data to whoever.

I bet there are already many, many private archives, created in silence, without front-facing UI.

A big advantage of a federated platform is that people can build on top of it without being concerned that the API will get shut down. A federated platform will never be able to compete with a centralized platform in terms of privacy. It should focus on its strengths rather then trying to make up for its weaknesses.

Mastodon has a special culture as it got established as a response to and in the shadows of the social media dinosaurs. Reacting to big tech violations of privacy, manipulation by algorithmics etc, all these things are bundled together as an expression of evil together with an almost complete rejection and suspicion of any commercial motive whatsoever.

But as these decentralized and open source approaches (hopefully) flourish and the web gets rediscovered things will start differentiating and making a bit more sense. In particular communities that want to stay private will switch to other tech - there are more than enough options.

Things may get derailed again, in novel and unexpected ways once the fediverse gets mainstream, just like it happened with the web in the first instance.

Yet this is not a reason not to try - a bit wiser this time around.

No culture will sustain a meaningful ban on anything that it cannot effectively enforce. The problem here is that the protocol fundamentally allows such indexing - and how could it be otherwise if you want content to be visible across a federated network? Therefore, people who have some utility to derive from it will do so, privately if necessary.

Of course, if it can only be done privately, this makes its utility much less for some use cases - e.g. communal sharing of useful information - but doesn't affect other use cases - e.g. targeted advertising or harassment.

Indeed. I'm waiting for someone to index Mastodon instances and place their dumps on Freenet.

From the text:

> If a big enough “bad actor” joins here, and we are on the brink of this with major platforms having announced upcoming ActivityPub interop, whatever they do will happen regardless of the consent given by folks who think they can federate content but restrict where it goes. I’m not suggesting this as a justification to just make away with people’s data, but realistically this is going to happen eventually and I’d rather Mastodon has tooling and conventions available to deal with this rather than “we always hoped this would never happen” ...

" .. we are on the brink of this with major platforms having announced upcoming ActivityPub interop .. "

Anyone know which major platforms have announced ActivityPub interoperability?

Tumblr

More addressing the parents reference to bad actors and major platforms. To be fair around tumblr it is now run by the Wordpress Foundation - https://wordpressfoundation.org/

“The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.”

So while definitely a larger platform this is not big for profit social media arriving.

Medium haven’t announced ActivityPub but they have announced their own mastodon instance, indicating potential coming interest in ActivityPub.

https://blog.medium.com/medium-embraces-mastodon-19dcb873eb1...

Is the author aware that the title is roughly synonym to "Adventures in Boobland"?

Stating the obvious (?) but it may be a reference to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland where nonsense is a key theme, culminating in a Mad Hatter's Tea Party where we witness riddles with no answers, the need for respect during confrontation of ideas, and the risk of conversation descending into absolute meaningless nonsense.

I’m the author and this is the correct reference.

What makes you think they're not aware of it?

If the post has a hashtag, it seems like a request to be indexed. If not, then maybe don't make it searchable.

This is already a thing: https://blogofy.com

The idea that the community opposed this due to oppression status is appealing but likely untrue. The more realistic answer is that Mastodon is the largest cp network now, and records of posts are legally risky.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com