Users can send out invites once they have been there for long enough, and a few thousand people a day are reportedly joining from the waitlist, so "invite-only" amounts to being no barrier to shitty behavior at all.
Yeah, I get much more use out of the local TL than the federated. I think there could be room for a more sophisticated take on the latter than is available at the moment, but that's just a vague notion on my part.
If it's possible for someone to be harassed or stalked on their platform, then they've launched. Being invite-only means that they're in the shallow end of the pool, but they made the choice to get themselves wet.
It's a basic part of the moderation toolkit that… didn’t exist until many years after most social media sites launched.
If they're not learning from past experience, I'm not inclined to trust them very far.
I'd like to see a vibrant ecosystem of decentralized, interoperable, user-friendly social media platforms. But I'm not an optimist by nature.
I've been on Mastodon since spring 2017, and I think it could be possible to do a recommendation system in a principled way. For example, browsing the "Federated" timeline is drinking from a fire hose: it shows all the public posts that your home server is aware of, i.e., pretty much everything posted by everyone that anyone on your instance happens to follow. Some way of displaying that which isn't purely chronological could actually be a benefit. This could be implemented on an instance-by-instance basis and customized to fit the local community standards. And it would be unobtrusive. Don't care about it? It's not being wedged into your home timeline, so you can close it and go on your merry way.
I mean, create half a dozen servers, or instances, or village squares, or whatever you want to call them. Randomly assign invitees to servers as they arrive. Then you can at least check for technical bugs in your implementation.
Blocking isn't "every feature"; it's a basic part of the moderation toolkit. It legitimately baffles me that they thought it was something they ought to chuck in the "pending" tray.
Why not have an invite-only beta with a small-scale federation already in place, so that at least some aspects can be studied in practice? That's an idea off the top of my head. It's not my job to figure out how to do the task well; it's theirs. And from where I sit, they're not.
Admittedly, some of the terms of service are clunky (and I think there are a couple of the terms that, in their present form, will run into trouble with the EU if they’re left in place). But, the company came out publicly last week and admitted these were quick boilerplate terms, and they had already begun working with lawyers on a complete rewrite that will be user friendly.
And, again, that comes across as a "move fast and break things" mentality which gets my hackles up. These are supposed to be the professionals. If something on Mastodon or the wider fediverse happens without adequate planning, well, it's like witnessing the dishes get done in a commune: on a basic level, I am just amazed that it happened at all. If they aren't ready with their Terms and Conditions, should we think they are ready for the much more demanding task of Trust and Safety?
They're figuring this stuff out, and trying to do it right, rather than rush something half-assed.
I'd believe that if functionality as basic as blocking wasn't on the list of features to be delivered on Tuesday.
Graber explained in a long thread that blocking will be introduced very soon, and the reason it wasn’t yet had nothing to do with them not prioritizing it, but rather because the underlying system is designed to be decentralized and federated, there are a ton of questions about how block works across multiple servers, that couldn't be answered until the federation setup was ready, and that hasn’t been released just yet (though it will be soon).
So... not prioritizing it.
If you can't do X before you finish Y, and you push something out the door before Y is ready, then you didn't care about X.
I think this is how they are defining "social network":
Plateforme en ligne permettant aux utilisateurs finaux de se connecter ainsi que de communiquer entre eux, de partager des contenus et de découvrir d’autres utilisateurs et d’autres contenus, sur plusieurs appareils et, en particulier, au moyen de conversations en ligne, de publications, de vidéos et de recommandations.
[Online platform permitting end users to connect and to communicate with each other, to share content and to discover other users and other content, on multiple devices and, in particular, by means of online conversations, publications, videos and recommendations.]
Sounds very ... broad. Like, that's toutes les choses from the fediverse to Amazon user reviews to Wikipedia. Even if the articles don't count as "publications" that help people "discover ... content", the Talk pages attached to each article logically ought to. And the feature that lets you see all the pages edited by a given user.
Meanwhile, "A Republican lawmaker in Texas has introduced legislation to compel internet providers to block abortion pill websites". A quick skim of the bill text reveals that it is transphobic too.
"Woman" means an individual whose biological sex is female, including an individual with XX chromosomes and an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity that the individual attempts to assert or claim.
Once again, the people incessantly crowing about "biological sex" don't actually give a rat's ass about biology. Turner's syndrome? Androgen insensitivity? Hysterectomies? Never heard of 'em! As the saying goes, the cruelty is the point. "Biological sex" is just the fig leaf.
Musk could have made a big show of buying Twitter, changed nothing substantial, and been fawned over as a genius.
Instead, he's a pedophile-enabler.
That, as we once said, is the tweet.
Yeah, the existence of a technological "ad stack" is one of those things that makes one feel like we are in for the most mediocre of all possible apocalypses.
I expected better from Markey. Time to make exasperated constituent noises, I suppose.
Users can send out invites once they have been there for long enough, and a few thousand people a day are reportedly joining from the waitlist, so "invite-only" amounts to being no barrier to shitty behavior at all.
Yeah, I get much more use out of the local TL than the federated. I think there could be room for a more sophisticated take on the latter than is available at the moment, but that's just a vague notion on my part.
If it's possible for someone to be harassed or stalked on their platform, then they've launched. Being invite-only means that they're in the shallow end of the pool, but they made the choice to get themselves wet.
If they're not learning from past experience, I'm not inclined to trust them very far. I'd like to see a vibrant ecosystem of decentralized, interoperable, user-friendly social media platforms. But I'm not an optimist by nature.I've been on Mastodon since spring 2017, and I think it could be possible to do a recommendation system in a principled way. For example, browsing the "Federated" timeline is drinking from a fire hose: it shows all the public posts that your home server is aware of, i.e., pretty much everything posted by everyone that anyone on your instance happens to follow. Some way of displaying that which isn't purely chronological could actually be a benefit. This could be implemented on an instance-by-instance basis and customized to fit the local community standards. And it would be unobtrusive. Don't care about it? It's not being wedged into your home timeline, so you can close it and go on your merry way.
I mean, create half a dozen servers, or instances, or village squares, or whatever you want to call them. Randomly assign invitees to servers as they arrive. Then you can at least check for technical bugs in your implementation.
Blocking isn't "every feature"; it's a basic part of the moderation toolkit. It legitimately baffles me that they thought it was something they ought to chuck in the "pending" tray. Why not have an invite-only beta with a small-scale federation already in place, so that at least some aspects can be studied in practice? That's an idea off the top of my head. It's not my job to figure out how to do the task well; it's theirs. And from where I sit, they're not.
Not gonna lie, "Methamphetagreen" is pretty good branding.
I'm shocked, shocked to hear of Axios being part of the problem.
I think this is how they are defining "social network":
[Online platform permitting end users to connect and to communicate with each other, to share content and to discover other users and other content, on multiple devices and, in particular, by means of online conversations, publications, videos and recommendations.] Sounds very ... broad. Like, that's toutes les choses from the fediverse to Amazon user reviews to Wikipedia. Even if the articles don't count as "publications" that help people "discover ... content", the Talk pages attached to each article logically ought to. And the feature that lets you see all the pages edited by a given user.Authoritarians have no shame in being special snowflakes when it suits their interests.
Meanwhile, "A Republican lawmaker in Texas has introduced legislation to compel internet providers to block abortion pill websites". A quick skim of the bill text reveals that it is transphobic too.
Once again, the people incessantly crowing about "biological sex" don't actually give a rat's ass about biology. Turner's syndrome? Androgen insensitivity? Hysterectomies? Never heard of 'em! As the saying goes, the cruelty is the point. "Biological sex" is just the fig leaf.Musk could have made a big show of buying Twitter, changed nothing substantial, and been fawned over as a genius. Instead, he's a pedophile-enabler. That, as we once said, is the tweet.
The link to SB152 is to last year's bill with that number, not the SB152 for 2023.
Yeah, the existence of a technological "ad stack" is one of those things that makes one feel like we are in for the most mediocre of all possible apocalypses.