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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon's dependence on screenshots from other social networks is infuriating, enough that I left Mastodon altogether. Screenshots are text, they can be doctored in 15 seconds. Screenshots in the age of AI are utterly useless.

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This reads as anti-mastodon propaganda tbh. You never heard of Inspect Element, or saw screenshots of twitter on reddit and vice versa?

Yeah the AI part of their post is stupid, but they're right; screenshots can be easily faked (through e.g inspect element), so if your social media feed is mostly screenshots from other social media, you're at a relatively high risk of seeing fake posts. On the other hand you can't fake the content of a post or repost or the quoted content of a quote post, so if your feed contains only non-screenshot content you can be relatively certain that the content you're seeing is genuine.

I've never had that problem on Mastodon, but I can see how it could be annoying if you follow a lot of people who mainly post screenshots of people's posts from other social media sites. Though you could solve that problem by unfollowing those people...

Also note your Mastodon feed is the people you follow, so you can just not follow people who post fake screenshots.

I'm aware, but the practice is widespread is what I'm saying - even in the cybersecurity space.

Sure, but Mastodon doesn't embed anything and links from "the outside" usually don' work on other social medium unless you have an account - which leaves people unable to verify. Twitter users don't tend to be inspired by (or present on) other networks, so it goes:

X has FB and Insta screenshots

Insta has FB and X screenshots

FB has Insta and X screenshots

Bluesky has FB, Insta and X screenshots

Masto has Bluesky, FB, Insta and X screenshots

So what I'm saying is on Mastodon, you are exposed to the most screenshots of other networks, because there are no techniques to embed them and people refuse to link to them for the reason they aren't on those networks in the first place.

As for AI, i know toddlers who can prompt but are unaware of what a right click is.

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