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PhilipTheBucket

@ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

Posts
127
Comments
432
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yes. That is 100% my feeling.

    Happy to be of service.

  • 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?

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Dansup is a developer who made Pixelfed and Loops.

    Depending on who you ask, he either fucked up Pixelfed in a way that exposed Mastodon users' private posts, or else Mastodon implemented private posts poorly and he got caught in the crossfire. I'm firmly in the second camp, so much so that I think it's misleading to describe it in that both-sides type of way, but regardless, that is the lay of the land of the drama.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yeah, I alluded to that when I said I'm probably guilty of it sometimes.

    A reasonable person could say that I tend to bully the mods when I disagree with something they've done. I do think that when you sign up to control people's experience and delete messages you don't agree with, you're signing up to have your decisions criticized. Reasonably or not. It's absurd to say that no one is allowed to get upset or air their grievances when the moderators apply moderation in a way that they don't like, because the end state of that setup is Reddit. But in fairness you are not wrong, sometimes I take it too far, and I think I should cool it at least a little with getting embittered about people moderating me in ways I don't like.

    Also, just for the record I've never had any issue on any level with you specifically. My whole anger at one of your moderators posting electoral propaganda and then banning people who disagreed with it, was that I thought he was hijacking his way into the slrpnk good graces for his own agenda, not that that was the intent behind the whole instance or anything. I've started being snarky towards the instance as a whole since the slrpnk admin team for some reason came out swinging hard to defend him on that, and then also gave out some further deletions and bans afterwards that I thought were equally silly, but it was more because I felt like you were supposed to be one of the good instances that supported people being able to have the conversations they wanted to have, and move the whole network in a good direction. I definitely wasn't happy about it or looking for that embittered interaction.

    (For context for anyone who's confused, here are some instances of what might be called bullying that I've done previously. The second one in particular sort of makes me cringe to post here, because it's exactly the kind of sour grapes innuendo that I'm complaining about when people aim it at Dansup.)

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • You actually could do this kind of thing with AP. It’s designed to give a key pair to every user to use for signing all their activities, so so the some careful redesign, you might be able to do something like have the browser authenticating the user’s identity in a way that the server isn’t able to do, or even messages being sent encrypted in a way that the server can’t read.

    In practice, the server keeps the user’s private keys, and moving away from that model would be difficult. But you could in theory redesign it away from that.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • you’re casting Dansup as a victim

    Correct. The original blog post wasn’t really all that bullying, I just thought it was mistaken about the security issues involved. The subsequent comments (“incompetent” “toxic” “quite problematic” “funding funding funding” and so on) were what I would describe as bullying. And, it fits a pattern where people take some issue (often one like this where he didn’t even theoretically do anything wrong) and use it as a jumping-off point to start the personal attacks.

    Dan’s up, Dan’s down, Dan’s a victim, Dan’s throwing a fit online and then deleting the tweets. As you cite in OP, some people attribute all sorts of unrelated evil to him. Most of all, my impression is Dansup has as a hard time separating from his role as main developer on Pixelfed, Loops, etc, as online commenters has separating his work from (perceived) personal faults.

    What?

    Why should he separate from his role as main developer? This makes no sense. “Sure those people got personally insulting with Dan for no reason at all, but you have to remember, he’s the main developer of these projects and he won’t separate from them. So it’s complicated.” What?

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Agreed. It’s not completely their fault. But also, they’ve run further than they needed to with the “I’m in charge of what protocol I’m going to speak to other instances running my own software” than they needed to. Case in point, this exact issue with “private” posts. A lot of things had to be fleshed out more so than they are in the AP spec. This feature needed to be handled more carefully than that.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Correct. And as I tangentially mentioned, even if you do think this needs to be kept secret, then the blog author would still be wrong, because this blog post is doing is doing way more “harm” by publicizing the issue than any amount of commit notes ever could.

    But yes, trying to keep this secret like a 0-day is completely the backwards model for how to handle it.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Completely agree.

    It is fine if you want to add privacy to a federated platform. If you wanted to, you would need to think through how to do it (probably it would involve either adding something specific and very carefully laid-out to the ActivityPub spec, or just doing like Lemmy does and switching to a whole other protocol like Matrix and warning the users that anything over ActivityPub is not private). Neither of those is what Mastodon did, but now they’re going around telling users they can have private posts, which is why I think they’re ultimately at fault in the situation that kicked off this whole shebang.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yeah. I do think communicating over the internet even with people you disagree with is possible to do, and it can be super productive. Can be. It just takes conscious effort to do so, I guess not much different from when you can talk them out face-to-face.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yeah, but offering something that claims to be private, but isn’t, is actually much worse than refusing to offer something that’s private. Even if people want the private feature.

    Truly private posts just are going to require something that isn’t ActivityPub, because ActivityPub just isn’t designed to give assurances about what’s going to happen to an activity that you are sending off to some other server. Or, the other option would be to go through the whole process of adding it into the spec in a thought through fashion instead of just hacking it in and moving on. Although, I do kind of get why Mastodon doesn’t want to go through that snail’s pace process for every single protocol change they would need to be able to make things work.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • “Doesn’t scale because the containers are set up wrong” is different from “unmaintainable code” though. What of the code was bad? I’ve looked at a bunch of fedi projects and Pixelfed didn’t strike me as either particularly good or particularly bad.

    As for the last, I don’t have any examples

    ?

    I mean, that is sort of what I expected. Mastodon doesn’t publicize Wordpress. Lemmy doesn’t publicize mbin. They all, mostly, mention a little bit of the context that they can interoperate with other federated services, but it doesn’t strike me as weird or malicious that someone would write a project and then promote that project. That sounds normal.

    Actually, both Mastodon and Lemmy chose to implement sort of their own versions of ActivityPub, and that actually does strike me as selfish behavior. It means that mostly they are their own independent platforms that run “on top of” ActivityPub instead of enabling full interoperation with the other stuff. Doing it that way was hard to avoid, because the design of ActivityPub to me isn’t great, but this situation is actually a perfect example of that: Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly. I’m not aware of Pixelfed doing anything like that. Mastodon and Lemmy can both get away with presenting themselves as “the fediverse” and forcing everyone else into copying one implementation or the other if they want things to actually work, and they both show very little interest in making it easy. If you want to pick out sins of various fedi projects to start to point out that are disrespecting the other projects in the space, something like that is where I would start.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Oop. She is not. Fixed.

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • What parts of the codebase did you look at and not like how they were implemented?

    Why is it a problem if he makes server software and then publicizes it? Like can you show a couple of examples of authors of some other software who are giving credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people, and how they are giving credit? What are they doing differently than Dansup?

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yeah. There are a lot of subtle cues that keep things in check, that let people express frustration or disagreement with each other and it still be okay and kept in a balanced fashion, when it's happening in person. In typing that all goes out the window. It takes conscious effort to be able to remember the social aspect and not just get carried away with your typing and decide the other person is horrible and you need to attack (or just take something without the right context and think they're going on the attack when they're not.) Like I say, I'm guilty of treating it pretty carelessly sometimes too.

  • Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus

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  • content should be private by default, nowhere is stated otherwise

    This is completely false. Read section 7.1, "Note: Silent and private activities". It specifically says that privacy behavior, for activities with no recipients at all, is undefined. It recommends not showing them to anyone, obviously, but that "behavior is not defined" has a very specific meaning in a specification document. It means, if you sent an activity of that type to someone, trusting that they would then keep it private, then you fucked up, because behavior in that area is undefined and cannot be relied upon.

    That's not "rules lawyering." That is how specification documents work. That's an important note, which I suspect is why it is highlighted and in its own separate box. There are some similar parts of the document, involving the big word "MAY" in all caps where they had the option of writing "SHALL" or even "SHOULD", to indicate that a server had to keep certain things private, that follow the same philosophy.

    None of that means you can't use some common sense. It's obviously not good to be handling intended-to-be-private information in some way that the sender doesn't expect, and that's why Dansup fixed it quickly when it was brought to his attention (particularly since the issue wasn't even directly related to access control on private posts, just in a subtle interaction involving approved-followers-only users and a setting that was failing to federate). My point was just on the broader issue, that if Mastodon is sending out "private" statuses to random servers, then this is at the root a Mastodon issue. The quick fix (regardless of whatever it was about that made the blog poster even more upset when Dansup took it seriously and fixed it quickly) puts the lie to your assertion that Dansup is "toxic" "ignoring what the federation requires" and so on.

    I suspect that we're going to keep going around in circles on this forever. I have a new strategy when someone is just endlessly arguing with me about some weird minor issue. I just make a new post dealing with the issue in more depth, so that it's not just you and me endlessly going in circles deep in the comments at each other. You're welcome to come to that post, and continue the conversation there, if you'd like to:

    https://sh.itjust.works/post/35210537

  • The fediverse has a bullying problem

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  • Yeah, you're not wrong. I definitely don't think it is a fediverse-only problem. Something changed culturally between Usenet and the things that came after.

    I was thinking about this earlier today: There was a wonderful little renaissance that happened around the time of the Napster / Slashdot / flash game era, when "it's the internet so of course it is awful" was in abeyance for a little bit of time and things were cool (as well as being pretty creative, and generally sensible.) I think a lot of what I'm upset about here is not so much that people are being catty (as you said, that's just kind of the nature of the beast), but that it's so disconnected from reality. People will say wild made-up nonsense and then other people will take it seriously. Of course, yes, that's not exactly new or a fedi specific problem...

  • Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus

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  • even without this flaw ActivityPub is not the way to go for anything private.

    This is the real issue. The whole story about how his partner's posts were getting shown to random people should have ended with both of them realizing that these posts were in no reliable way "private," and to stop putting them up with the assumption that they would be. Not with them yelling at Pixelfed for the way it works, and then yelling at Pixelfed again for starting to honor these fake privacy settings.

  • Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus

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  • I did a whole analysis of what the spec actually says, how it relates to "private" posts, and Mastodon's implementation details. TL;DR they just made things up and it's a huge disservice to Mastodon users to give people the impression that these posts are private.

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    A little essay I wrote about "mods are power tripping"

  • politics @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    November Could Determine Future of Ranked Choice Voting in US Elections

    www.dailysignal.com /2024/10/18/november-could-determine-future-of-ranked-choice-voting-in-us-elections/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    Add any RSS feed to any Lemmy community

  • politics @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    Democrats block pro-fracking bill in the Senate

    www.eenews.net /articles/democrats-block-pro-fracking-bill-in-the-senate/
  • politics @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    Judge allows a man serving a 20-year prison sentence to remain on Alaska ballot

    abcnews.go.com /US/wireStory/judge-allows-man-serving-20-year-prison-sentence-113571512
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    What do you want to have in a Lemmy instance?

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

    Follow RSS feeds from Lemmy