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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

The tricky bit is kind of hand-waved away here:

> throw The One Ring (Twitter) back into the volcano from which it was forged

What does content moderation and that whole thorny problem look like on this new system? I don't want to hang out in a bar with a drunk nazi and his buddies screaming at everyone.

Yeah, it's tricky and there are all kinds of difficult considerations and tradeoffs and it's all quite imperfect, but for any new platform, I want to have some idea of how they imagine it all working.

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Author here. You get to have all the moderation, filtering, etc. that is implemented on the servers you use.

I'm sure there will be servers that very closely try to approximate what Twitter is/has been doing. Servers also can share any and all information needed to effectively moderate.

So it’s closed source Mastodon?

I don't expect it to stay closed source. But there are significant differences to Mastodon. Just to give one example: Mastodon server admins actually can read your private messages. Also Blue Sky's approach to data portability and how to implement filtering/indexing is more developed. It might be personal preference, but I prefer AT Protocol's approach where the servers have less powers, and the users have more power. A lot of little design decisions add up to a qualitative difference.

Weird I haven't seen this idea:

Microblogging shouldn't have private messages. Let people have a profile and a link to an email address or similar and be done with it.

I'm not sure why a service designed to publicize things so that everyone can see them ALSO chooses to take on "private messages." I get that's how the big money incumbents see it, but I feel like less would be more here.

I'm fine getting private messages on platforms but I do not want to put out my email for the general public to contact me. That information is also far more dangerous to put out than just messaging me on a platform. Yes you could just create an email for that purpose but I feel most people won't do that.

I would imagine Twitter server admins can also read your private messages if they really wanted to since Twitter doesn't use E2E encryption. Am I unaware of something/Is there a reason to believe differently?

Yes, another reason to move away. Although Elon has also stated that he's tasked Twitter engineers with working on implementing E2E encrypted DMs.

The remaining Twitter engineers break the API every 2 days and are slowly dismantling a functional UI into an incoherent mess that doesn't load most of the time.

I have absolutely no confidence in any e2ee implementation that would be served from twitter.com and trusting Elon or anyone that still claims to speak for Twitter on any security guarantees it offers would be foolish. They also recently broke the API for their "circle tweets" which is supposed to let you create private tweets that only go out to a subset to your followers, and stay private to everyone else, but of course that ended up not working anymore and they ended up in your profile.

I'm not sure how they actually go about doing that though. Unless of course you enter your key and decrypt client side, which I suspect the majority of users won't like.

There is nothing stopping this from being implemented in ActivityPub too, and in fact there are already pub/pri keys there to do this. However you still need to trust that the instance you are on and the one your are communicating with play by the rules.

With Twitter, I can at least assume the admins don't give a fuck about the average user. On Mastodon, an admin will be serving far fewer users and might actually be motivated to snoop on someone they know.

Mastodon needs to at very least change its terminology if it ever wants to be taken seriously. As funny as it is for people to be "tooting" out whatever happens to be in their head in that very moment no one wants to be known as a "tooter" who "toots" frequently.

This was already changed two years ago: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

>In this PR, the publish button still says "Toot!" but it's worth thinking about as well.

This is one of many PRs that removed the references to "toot" over the years.

Tooting aside (it's a silly enough term as it is) Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized social platform where you sign up to individual..."

Yeah they're already asleep. The average person doesn't give a damn about that, and they sure as hell arent about to jump through a poor UI experience and extremely badly worded terminology to sign up to it.

Let's not kid ourselves. Average person isn't reading anything that is on the sign up page. There exists some magical break point when people start to switch over and after that the sign up page can be blank and people will move there.

It is completely different matter if that point will ever be reached.

> Mastedons never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

Email's never going to go mainstream. It's too convoluted and complicated to explain how it works to someone with a moderate level of skill in IT, let alone your average every day person.

"It's a decentralized communication platform where you sign up to individual..."

Email had a real world counterpart. In that sense it was easier to explain because you could start from traditional mail and use that to explain emails.

Mastodon and its relationship with the fediverse is indeed complicated to grasp.

"It's Twitter, but set up like email where you have multiple servers, but they can all talk to each other"

That wasn't very hard at all.

'what's a server?'

Is this actually a problem? I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people who use the internet have a good enough idea of what a server is that even if they're dead wrong about how one works it isn't terminology that would be confusing to them.

Vast vast majority don't even know what their router is, let alone a server.

The internet (or cloud, if you prefer, mostly the same thing) is just a bunch of computers connected to each other. "Servers" are the big ones in the middle that handle stuff like email and youtube videos

this is not THAT hard yall

The average person uses _email_, bear in mind. They don't know or care how it works, but they use it.

Is there any difference between tooting and tweeting really?

Other than that "tweeting" is what birds do and "tooting" is term for farting and slang for snorting cocaine? Well, isnt that enough?

Whenever I hear someone "tooted" on Mastodon I just imagine them farting while high on cocaine.

Yes. "toot" sounds far less refined than "tweet". Is it completely subjective? Yes, but if enough people think so, "it is so".

That's a good thing, some of the worst cultures on Twitter are based around taking it too seriously...

If you just want to communicate with your friends why not use some IM service like Discord or IRC?

You can use verified domains as handles

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