Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org
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Love conquers fear
#nerdery #books #puzzles #ttrpg #anime #Christian #feminist #antiracist #photography #sudoku #golang #python #OpenWeb #AIart #GenshinImpact #tfr
Joined Nov 2022
Wikipedia has launched a new page design, and like all new designs, it is being poorly received by a number of people who can’t understand why they even bothered, why they made everything worse, or why anybody would want this rather than the old design.
The old “vector” design was made the default in 2010, so “every 13 years” doesn’t seem like too often for a design refresh. That said, I’m sympathetic to the idea that a new design should be objectively better in some way, rather than just change for change’s sake. So let’s compare:
Old skin, minimum width: https://ibb.co/Pcvn7VP
New skin, same width: https://ibb.co/PgxF8hf
Old skin, maximum size: https://ibb.co/WsptkCY
New skin, same size: https://ibb.co/x8NmgZq
In both cases, more article content is visible and line lengths are more readable. I’m sure there are some edge cases in which things have objectively gotten worse, but it’s also easy to keep using the old skin, or any of a few alternatives: add ?useskin=vector to the end of any Wikipedia URL for the old skin, or log in to set a default for yourself. There’s also a bookmarklet available on the Wikipedia page for skins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skin
Old or new, Wikipedia remains a good resource that I use frequently. Kudos to the design team on the new look.
It would be nice if there were a lightweight ActivityPub server that is easily deployable as a docker image without being built first.
It’s also possible I’m just not good enough with docker.
I could deploy mastodon using docker, but that seems like overkill for what would be a single-user server. I did find a doc on installing WriteFreely, which involves only two docker images rather than mastodon’s three. Oh! And then I found a related guide that involves a single container!
https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-writefreely-sqlite-on-your-synology-nas
I might try this out.
I fiddled with Epicyon briefly a couple of weeks ago and didn’t find satisfaction. Perhaps I gave up too quickly, though. That repo does include a Dockerfile.
Between WriteFreely and Epicyon, I’m going to try to get something up and running this weekend.
The CSV spreadsheet is usually the one that’s a day ahead, so I guessed it was the one using GMT. Except… every now and then, it’s the one that’s a day behind. The inconsistency rules out GMT shenanigans, I think, but also, I don’t ever supply a time when marking a book as read. I select a year, month, and day. Which suggests it’s arbitrarily storing a time, and the fact that it’s off so often suggests it’s storing a time within five or six hours of midnight. And apparently inconsistently.
Another amusing bug anecdote is that books I finished reading on Oct 1, 2022, are just listed on the site as having been read “Oct 2022.” No date shown. The CSV spreadsheet has a date, of course.
It seems like there’s an entire class of date/time bugs on GoodReads, before we even get to the missing ISBNs and badly-corrupt data from 2017.
I’m not sure which is worse, exactly: GoodReads exporting my library with no “Date Read” filled in, despite having a “Date Read” on the site, or GoodReads exporting my library with the wrong “Date Read” filled in, one that is a day off from the one on the site.
How does that even happen? Given that it’s off by a day when it’s off, I’m guess it’s a time zone issue, with either the site or the export function using GMT and the other using my local time, six hours removed.
That doesn’t explain the many rows in which the date is just missing. Nor the missing ISBNs.
It’s been clear for a long time that Amazon doesn’t actually care about making GoodReads a GoodSite, but this is really, really bad.
What I’ve settled on doing is opening the export CSV in a spreadsheet in one pane, sorted by reverse “Date Added,” and looking at “My Books” on GoodReads in another pane, sorted the same way.
The Arc browser from https://arc.net/ is working pretty well for this.
As I continue to explore GoodReads with an eye to exiting that site, I am amazed at just how terrible it is. I exported my library, intending to delete everything that wasn’t read in the last five years, but the resulting CSV file is missing so much!
There is no “Date Read” for many books that are only present in the file because I read them, and a surprising number of books are missing ISBNs, too. I’m talking about books in print, not ebooks or audiobooks that might not even have ISBNs.
It is clear that Amazon does not prioritize accuracy in export files, and as I explain previously, they don’t prioritize accuracy in their own database either, although the effect is seen in different ways.
The long and short of it is that I’m apparently going to need to manually edit the CSV file in order to get anything like accurate data, and giving up the convenient GoodRead mobile app for a BookWyrm server seems more than ever like a fair trade. I’ll happily pitch a few bucks a month toward @bookrastinating for their help getting things set up, and to avoid propping up Amazon’s less-than-lackluster efforts with GoodReads.
This seems like a good way to spend a day off work, right?
When I decided to jump into the fediverse with both feet, I signed up for a BookWyrm account at @bookrastinating. When I tried to import my history/library, there were two big issues.
The first was timing. I joined and started an import at about the same time many, many, many other people did, and the server promptly fell over. The owner of Bookrastinating was helpful and friendly and eventually the queue started moving again, so that’s not an issue anymore.
The second was not actually a problem with BookWyrm at all, but with GoodReads! It turns out that a bunch of books I’d previously tagged as read on GoodRead were no longer the books they had been. No offense to Marc Blake, author of “How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside,” but I’ve never read that book. When I “shelved” it on January 9, 2017, I assigned it “baroque, cycle, fiction, hardback, series, read,” so it seems very clear that what I actually shelved was a book by Neal Stephenson, and checking now shows that GoodReads only knows I’ve read the second book in the tagged “baroque cycle” series, but it has lost the first and third.
I’m not sure when the GoodReads database was corrupted, and in a review of my Reading Challenge book lists for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, everything seems probably-correct. But my 2017 Reading Challenge also does not include the book I mentioned above, the book that caught my eye as clearly-incorrect.
When I look at books shelved in 2017, I see many that are definitely not right, although they don’t have “read” dates. I’m sure After the Martian Apocalypse: Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration is a perfectly fine book, but it definitely wasn’t what I tagged with “fiction paperback series dragon king trilogy” on January 9, 2017. Love on the Dotted Line could be a fantastic romance novel, but it’s not what I tagged “paperback anthology science fiction” on January 9, 2017. A dual-language collection of Italian women’s poetry is definitely not what I tagged as a volume of the “Writers of the Future” science fiction anthology series. And so on. The ones I notice most easily are the titles I would never read, but the date January 9, 2017, stands out. Sorting by date added, I can see that some of the books added on that date seem correct. I know the books, and the tags match the books. Most do not.
I’m sure there’s some irony in an import failure on the fediverse alerting me to serious corruption on Amazon-owned GoodReads, and the result stopping me from actually migrating.
I clearly cannot trust GoodReads, as they’ve broken the first and second rules of a database: they’ve lost data, and represented data falsely to belong to me when it doesn’t. I’m not sure which of those is the first rule and which is the second, but both seem bad.
I also cannot import my entire library from GoodReads into BookWyrm, because I don’t want to start with bad data. I think it’s time to let most of the past go, and create a cleaned-up import file with just my reading history from 2017 onward.
Good thing I have the day off tomorrow!
Responding to an ill-informed rant about SMS (the mobile phone message service), I highlighted parallels to the ranter’s proposal, and it got me wondering: Why do some proprietary services so easily replace open protocols, while others don’t?
The rant was ultimately demanding that we give up using SMS, instead using WhatsApp, a proprietary messaging services owned by Facebook. This is a clearly horrible idea, and suggested some parallels.
We should give up using RSS for podcasts, instead let’s use Spotify. (NO!)
We should give up using HTTPS, instead let’s use a new protocol owned by Facebook or Google to visit web pages. (NO!)
We should give up using email, instead let’s use a proprietary messaging app. (NO!)
We should give up using IRC, instead let’s use Slack. (Most of us already have!)
Spotify’s effort to own podcasting is falling flat, fortunately. Attempts to build a Facebook-only subnet seem to have petered out as well. Replacements for email have come and gone (remember Google Wave? or Google Buzz?). But it seems like it took nothing at all for IRC to be tossed aside in favor of something new, anything new! If it weren’t Slack, it would be HipChat, or Discord, or something else.
There’s a lesson to be learned here, and were I a paid pundit, I’d declare what it is with confidence, and return to the theme repeatedly over the next few months to emphasize just how right I was.
But I’m not a paid pundit, and I don’t know what the answer is. I’m not sure there is a single answer.
At its peak, IRC wasn’t as widely used as the others, or not as widely used by non-technical “normies” at least. RSS feeds for podcasts seemed like they could be as technically fiddly as IRC in the very early days, but people like @davew made sure that the experience was smooth and simple, and so it stands up more than 20 years later.
There have been extensions to HTTPS, like QUIC, but so far they’ve always been handled as extensions and implemented as open standards. Google’s biggest push toward centralizing the web was AMP, and enough people cared enough about that to push back until Google promised to stop emphasizing it in 2021.
Sometimes the most open technology wins, despite efforts by companies to extend or replace it. Sometimes it’s tossed aside so quickly people forget we once used something like Slack without paying anybody anything.
I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m on four Slack servers, 18 Discord servers, and only three IRC servers, so I guess I’m part of the problem.
Digital narration for audiobooks - Apple Books for Authors
https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks
This really boggles my mind. I think it is typical of Apple to find one of the best possible practical uses of what most companies would consider the edge of technology and many hard-core nerds would say was the leading edge a couple of years ago.
Tonight, on this last night of 2022, I’m refreshing Dark Sky and reading again about the current temperature and how it Feels. I’m looking at the radar page showing clear skies around me. And I’m mourning a great product produced by a company that was bought by a megacorporation, in this case Apple, who ruined the product. At midnight tonight, Dark Sky will go dark forever.
I guess I’m happy for the folks who got a big check, but shame on Apple for this.
As a nascent digital hoarder (I can stop at any time!), the ups and downs can come quickly.
For example, I hastily mis-pasted a command and removed not the @eaDir directory and all of its sub-directories as I intended, but the parent of that @eaDir directory and all of its sub-directories, or as many as it could remove before I realized the command should have finished already and interrupted it. That was a discouraging feeling.
Then I remembered where the content in that directory had come from, checked Discord for a link, then used wget to download replacement files at 18.2MB/s. That was an encouraging feeling.
I might be no farther ahead than I was before my mistake, but I feel like I’ve accomplished something.
It’s tempting to install Mastodon on my NAS just to have a single-user server to play around with. Apparently it’s as easy as 1, 2, uh, 27!
https://mariushosting.com/how-to-install-mastodon-on-your-synology-nas/
I’m not entirely sure what I would do with such a thing, and that box is already busy running a few other things, but it’s a nice option to have at my fingertips. Plus I already have a wildcard SSL cert, so I can skip quite a few steps!
Courtesy of Marco d’Alfonso, a very Marvel Christmas book that never was.
Source: https://www.deviantart.com/m7781/art/how-the-grinch-almost-stole-sweet-christmas-749755064
My understanding is that mastodon itself supports so-called “quote tweets,” but they aren’t implemented on most servers. They’re implemented on the server I use, though, so this should appear to be quoted.
The debate about QTs is interesting because as far as I tell, all sides are correct. • QTs let you introduce a topic to your followers w/ tailored ...
Apple may be allowing alternate app stores soon, at least in Europe, at the point of a metaphorical gun, but I assume they’ll do in their Apple way, meaning it won’t be easy, and it will likely still require every app to be signed by Apple at some point, like MacOS apps mostly are now.
I’m all in favor of more openness and flexibility on my devices, especially when there are guardrails and protections I have to explicitly choose to turn off. I hope that iOS allows alternative browser engines, app stores, and everything else, but that none of it is turned on by default.
That said, I’m already tired of a few arguments I see online.
It seems clear that some companies are going to push for their apps to only be available outside of the App Store. But no, people say, Android has allowed side-loading since the beginning, and that hasn’t happened there! Two things: First, yes it has, Epic’s Fortnite is the most notable example. Second, Google hasn’t impacted Facebook’s advertising to the tune of $12.8 Billion in 2022 alone. Facebook is highly motivated to get around the iOS prompt allowing people to block Facebook’s highly-invasive tracking, and if side-loading will do that, it is probably worth it to them to insist on side-loading.
Of course, I don’t think even side-loaded apps will be able to avoid the “do not track” prompt, so it is quite likely Epic will be alone in insisting that they should be installed in a back alley, but the argument that it won’t happen because it hasn’t happened is hogwash.
The other argument that has been bothering me is that “Safari doesn’t support web apps,” so allowing alternative browser engines will mean an explosion of web apps replacing mobile apps in the App Store anyway. I have a few issues with this one. First, Safari does support web apps, and web apps that work in Safari do exist. Some features and APIs aren’t supported, though, which is really what they mean. Second, a number of companies have gone the web app route in the past and found that there was no way to get a web app to match the experience of a native app, so the’ve switched back. You might say that’s because of Safari limitations, but thirdly, if web apps are set to supplant native apps, why aren’t they doing so on Android, where browser engines presumably are not the limiting factor?
But Starbucks, you say! Yes, Starbucks has both a native app and a web app, and the web app seems to work fine in Safari. It requires iOS users to choose to “Add to Home Screen” rather than auto-installing, but I prefer that approach, personally.
But Flipboard, you say! Again, this seems to work fine on iOS after manual installation, although I note that it prompts at least once per session to install/open the native app instead.
The point remains: if web apps are where they should be–which I doubt–then why haven’t they taken over the Android world yet? If we’re still in the early days of web apps, then there’s no rush for iOS to trip over the bumps in the road until things are more stable.
Technologists are incurable optimists, myself included. It’s easy for us to see things as they could be, rather than as they are. That’s how new things are created! But there’s a fine line between envisioning a future we can make together, and denying reality. I look forward to a future in which open NFC, browser engines, and alternative app stores are options in iOS, but I don’t think it’s going to be the panacea some are expecting.
iMessage Contact Key Verification brings over a feature from Signal, and will still require some measure of trust in Apple, but seems like like a step forward. Given Apple, I’m sure most of the time people will use the prompt to learn when their family and friends upgrade their iPhone.
Security Keys sound great, and I want one now. Wait, they’re only $29 from Yubico? Wow!
End-to-End Encryption for iCloud Backup is huge, and while I want to say “about time,” the second-best time to plant a tree is today, so I’m glad it’s here now.
I am surrounded by artists, while lacking either the talent or the motivation (or possibly both) myself. I marvel at the level of effort involved in isometric pixel art, for example, which this essay gives a great explanation: https://www.slynyrd.com/blog/2022/11/28/pixelblog-41-isometric-pixel-art
I was adding bookmarklets to Safari to ease the pain of following people on other servers when I thought: what about native apps? And so it is that I installed (free) Mastonaut, my new favorite thing about mastodon.
There’s a 500-character client-side countdown indicator, even though my server supports 64K, but other than that, Mastonaut makes things very, very nice so far. Excellent work, @brunoph!
I should probably know better than to wade into such a contentious topic as a mastodon newbie. Yet here I am, responding to a story titled: “Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, Caves to Nazi’s Agenda”
https://qoto.org/@freemo/109393989962731002
I am new to QOTO, so I’ll let Mr. Freeman handle the historical details, and I hope that people listen and unblock QOTO, which I have found to be a wonderful server run by impassioned moderators, including Mr. Freeman. My concerns are more basic and technical. I’m trying to understand the purpose of defederation. As I understand it, this dispute ultimately comes down to how to respond to bad actors, and there are different mechanisms for different levels of bad activity.
To be clear: any of the below could be completely wrong! Please, do not rely on this as an authoritative explanation of mastodon, in case I get out over the front of my skis and make too many assumptions.
How Mastodon Works
Mastodon works because completely independent servers are all running compatible software that speaks “ActivityPub,” and that is used to exchange activities like posts and comments and follows between servers. If any user of serverA follows any user of serverB, then serverA gets a copy of posts from serverB to display in serverA’s “Home” view for that user. This connection between serverA and serverB is “federation,” and some servers are federated with many other servers, while some are federated with only a few, perhaps because they have very few users who are interested in mostly other users on their same server.
Poking around instances.social, it seems I can click on any server and find out how many “connections” it has, which I believe to be a measure of how thoroughly that server is federated. Sorting the list by users, I see mastodon.social at the top with 879,988 users and 34,623 connections, while mstdn.party at #11 has 39,365 users but only 9,610 connections. QOTO is in position 20 with 25,130 users and 24,529 connections. In fact, if I sort the list of instances by connections, QOTO is sixth, so it seems to be “well-federated” as I understand it.
So far, all technical, but already I see issues. Even in the top-20 listing, when I limited the list to servers with at least 25,000 users, I recognized one server that I have seen on nearly every server’s “About” page as a blocked server. That brings us almost immediately to questions of moderation.
Moderation
Bad actors are one of the biggest challenges facing any internet service. The functionality of email has been almost completely ruined by spammers, victims of “419 scams” send many millions of dollars to overseas scammers every year, comment sections on websites have gone almost completely extinct as site owners do cost/benefit analysis and realize they’re spending much more time moderating comments as they’re deriving value from the comments that remain, and the world’s richest oligarch just set fire to $100 billion of his money because he refused to accept what Twitter was saying about bots, and still his every tweet has fake crypto giveaways among the first few replies. Worse than any of that is targeted harassment, as some people don’t respond to any of the normal mechanisms of social pressure intended to keep them for pursuing their victims to hurt them.
These are human issues, not technical issues, which is why I think any solutions cannot be only technical. These issues have always existed, but the internet pushes everyone and everything together, acting as a force multiplier, making bad intentions easier to put into action, and harder to resist or avoid.
I should note here that I am a cisgender man best described as “white,” so I know about targeted harassment in a detached sense, but have never been the target of such activity. This will obviously lend my discussion of this horrific behavior a detached tone some might see as inappropriate to the subject. I 100% support those targeted, and I am 100% aligned against those would harm or threaten to harm others in any way, especially on the basis of who they are, rather than in response to statements or actions. (Please read this as: “If you’re a nazi, I’ll stand by and let someone punch you and not feel bad about it at all.”)
Like most internet-connected software in the 21st century, mastodon includes mechanisms for responding to both bad actions and bad actors.
Starting at the local level, if a user on your server says something that you believe violates the rules of your server, you can bring it to the attention of a moderator and they should respond appropriately. Depending on the server, a bad action might result in a notice and the post or comment in question being deleted, while an egregiously-bad action, or a pattern of bad actions that indicate a bad actor, might result in that user’s account being suspended or terminated. If you find content you consider to be objectionable, but the moderators of your server don’t agree it is worthy of moderator action, you still have a few choices: you can mute the user so you don’t see their posts or comments, you can block them so that they can’t comment on your posts, or you can leave the server entirely and find another one more to your linking. The design of mastodon means that your list of followed and followers will move with you, but your posts and comments will not, so it’s not a completely transparent move, but it’s not the end of the world, either.
If the user is not local to you, meaning you’re on serverA, while they are on serverB, that’s where things get more difficult. You have the same mechanisms available to you: you can mute the user or block the user, and even report the user. When you report a user from another server, the message goes to your own server moderators as well as (optionally) the moderators of the other server. And then what? It depend on both your moderators and the moderators of that other server.
Let’s say that other server’s moderators are horrible trolls, or that the other server in question is a self-server, so that the person spamming or harassing you is their own moderator. You have one additional mechanism, which is that you can “Block domain badactor.antisocial” entirely. For example, there are servers out there devoted to trolling, or that don’t abide by laws effective in the US and Europe, or that are just gross.
So far all moderation choices are up to you. If you find people of a certain political leaning intolerable, you can block domains known to host them. If one particular person gets under your skin, you can block them. If you’re browsing the “Federated” timeline to see all posts from everywhere and see something you can’t believe is even allowed to exist on the internet, you can block either the user or the entire domain as you feel is appropriate.
But there’s another level of moderation possible, and that involves server admins.
Local vs Global
I’ll use QOTO as an example, since that’s where I am. QOTO has strict policies against hate speech and harassment. There are several moderators who spend a lot of time reviewing content on QOTO, and enforcing the rules. The “Local” timeline is full of friendly positive content and a lot of nerdery. Anything that seems even a little bit like hate speech or harassment can be reported and will be dealt with, and they’ll kick people off the server who aren’t willing to be kind. QOTO has long been a haven for people in the LGBT community, in large part because of somewhat-heavy moderation at a time when some LGBT people were being targeted specifically on mastodon. As a server, QOTO is a great place to be.
But all of that describes the “Local” experience. If you stay on the “Home” (people you’ve chosen to follow) and “Local” (people on your server) timelines, QOTO is pleasant and agreeable and interesting and fun, and most of all, well-moderate.
If you switch to the “Federated” (global) timeline, things can get very ugly very quickly. That’s because QOTO has a policy against de-federating.
Server admins have four options for moderating users, and three options for moderating entire servers. The user actions come into play when, for example, I report something another QOTO user posted, and the QOTO moderators have to decide what to do with that. They might mark the user as sensitive, so that any images that user posts is automatically put behind a content warning. They might freeze the account to prevent any further posts or comments by that user. They might “silence” or “limit” the user so that only people who’ve chosen to follow them see anything they post. Or they might suspend the user, which effectively deletes their account completely.
The server options are similar, but more consequential. A moderator on serverA can choose to “reject media” from serverB, so that no images of any kind from that server show up locally. They can “silence” or “limit” that server so that nothing from any user on serverB shows up except for people on serverA already following them. Or they can suspend or block that server entirely, an action commonly called defederation.
This last option seems very extreme to me. It is literally the most extreme option available, and can have unforeseen consequences many server moderators don’t seem to be considering. It is such an extreme option that QOTO has a policy of only blocking servers that engage in technical attacks or make CSAM available. They’ve silenced only four servers, mostly in response to dedicated harassment of LGBT people on QOTO condoned by those server moderators. For the most part QOTO focuses on local moderation and makes a domain blocklist available to all users who wish to start with a list of 123 blocked domains.
https://qoto.org/@freemo/109303687938265107
While QOTO takes a very hands-off approach to inter-server moderation, leaving decisions in the hands of individual QOTO users, some servers lean very hard in the other direction, blocking domains not just for things that have happened, but for things that they believe might happen in the future, or because a server chooses not to participate in the daily two-minute hate against another server.
What Defederation Does
To be clear about why defederation is a big deal, I can give an example, naming names. I am on qoto.org, while a very good friend of mine who is pretty big in the tabletop gaming world was on tabletop.social. It turns out that tabletop.social blocks qoto.org for reasons seemingly related to the ongoing issue described in the first link in this post. As my friend put it when I mentioned this to him, they’ll block anyone for anything. Because his server blocked my server, he couldn’t add me as a friend. He couldn’t search for me by tag or URL. He couldn’t see any of my posts unless he logged out of mastodon. I could see him, and I tried to follow him, hoping that would open up new options for him, but he never even saw my follow request, and his account was set to require approval for following. Like I said, he’s pretty big in the tabletop gaming world.
He and I are the best of friends, and neither of us are bad actors in any way. In fact, we’re both supporters of LGBT people personally, and where applicable, professionally, so it seems really strange that we could not communicate at all because of (apparently) issues related to LGBT people. None of the 3.15K users (870 active) on tabletop.social could interact in any way, shape, or form with any of the 25.2K users (8.53K active) on qoto.org. There was no accusation of bad behavior by me, or by any other QOTO user, just a presumptive domain-wide ban. When I dug into why this ban was in place–which was difficult, since nobody at tabletop.social could even see my comments asking questions–I came across comments from some years back suggesting that QOTO’s unwillingness to block a third domain meant that QOTO should be blocked. This got QOTO put onto a blocklist shared by a number of sites.
I struggle to follow this reasoning. If someone on tabletop.social were being awful, I would block that person. If multiple people on tabletop.social were being awful, to the point that I began to suspect the domain existed for the purpose of being awful, I would block that domain. And even though I’m only acting for myself, not every user of my server, I can’t imagine blocking tabletop.social because they refuse to block some other domain I really dislike. Let’s say there was a domain called badactors.antisocial that existed primarily for the purpose of harassment. I would block them for myself, no problem. I might even, depending on just what sort of harassment that server was engaged in, block them at the domain level if I were a domain moderator. But I don’t understand what would make someone then go around to other servers and demand that they also block badactors.antisocial. That tabletop.social users might see posts from badactors.antisocial on their timelines doesn’t affect me or my server at all!
An ungracious person might view it as “I hate anybody unwilling to hate the people I hate,” but surely there has to be more to it than that, right? I can think of very few possibilities. Four, really.
Why Defederate?
First, it could be exactly that. Authoritarians can be found all along the political spectrum, and to some extend this feels a bit like left-wing authoritarianism. For example, mastodon.art recently chose to block QOTO and lists as the reason “Federates with instances that violate our ToS/CoC (such as Gab, Kiwifarms.cc, freespeechextremist.com, etc.)” That sounds a lot like “we block these servers, and any servers that won’t also block these servers, etc.” It sounds like the “two-minute hate” issue. And to be clear, those servers are terrible, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for blocking them either individually or even on a server level. I blocked two of those myself individually, and the third doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
However, it could be a second reason: maybe servers blocking QOTO don’t understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. In describing the action, the owner of mastodon.art seemed to believe they weren’t affecting anybody who already followed someone, but QOTO is listed as “Suspended,” not “Limited,” so no, they’ve completely blocked any interaction with anybody from QOTO for all of their users, possibly because they don’t understand the difference. Again, the fact that QOTO doesn’t block badactors.antisocial doesn’t mean that badactors.antisocial content shows up on tabletop.social or mastodon.art! If those servers block badactors.antisocial, then badactors.antisocial content won’t show up, so the reason for the preemptive blocking seems to be based on ignorance. There are two more possibilities, though.
A third option is that there may be one way that content from badactors.antisocial might show up on a site that has blocked that domain. I haven’t experimented to be sure, and it seems from reading comment threads that others haven’t either, but there’s a widespread belief that if someone “boosts” a post from badactors.antisocial, then that boosted post could show up even on a server that has blocked the domain, because the “boost” means that the content is now coming from the other server. I am not sure whether this is the case, but let’s say it is. Then I would ask, has this happened? Are there people on QOTO boosting horrible posts from badactors.antisocial? If so, report them to the QOTO moderators, who should take action! If they don’t take action against the users boosting bad content, then you have a valid reason to take action against QOTO. Nobody in the comment threads seems to be 100% sure whether boosting posts from blocked domains results in them appearing, so it seems clear that even the first step in this chain has not happened, making a block against QOTO seem very premature at best.
Finally, the only other reason I can think of is that people have misunderstood QOTO’s heavy emphasis on “academic freedom” and confused it with the “free speech” label hateful people often use to describe their hate-filled nastiness. Even though QOTO clearly states that they don’t permit hate speech or harassment, and very clearly moderate QOTO, people elsewhere seem to believe that QOTO is “completely unmoderated,” and a haven for (right-wing) “freeze peach” enthusiasts to say hateful things primarily against minority groups. This is categorically false. I’m not sure Mr. Freeman appreciates why people might believe this angle, or he might make it even more clear in QOTO’s About page how heavily moderated QOTO is. Then again, he has stated so many times in comments when it has come up, although they are comments I’m not sure most relevant people can actually see, since they come from someone at the now-blocked QOTO!
Consequences
I’m a mastodon evangelist in my circle of friends, and I convinced my board gaming friend to move to dice.camp, away from tabletop.social. I convinced my artist friend to sign up with sunny.garden rather than mastodon.art. A long-time mastodon-savvy friend reached out to warn me about a push toward defederating from QOTO, suggesting that I might “wind up on a fediverse island soon if this defederation continues,” and I guess that’s a chance I’m taking. (I sent him the first URL in this post.) It seems strange that the sixth-most-connected server could end up as an “island” with zero evidence of any actually-offensive posts.
The thread that prompted that friend to reach out was illustrative. The initial post said that they were blocking QOTO based on a message from a QOTO admin that no, QOTO wouldn’t block a server for inciting genocide. But the response wasn’t quoted, it was just “Admin replied that Qoto would not block such servers.” It possible that the response was actually that QOTO does not block any servers, which is a principled stand, but it is described in a way that suggests Qoto is in favor of genocide, or at least tolerant of advocating for it. It was nice to see that other people spoke up in comments suggesting that this sounded a bit like a witch hunt, and that it should perhaps require “documented evidence of continuous abuse of rules” rather than blocking based on a singe possibly-misunderstood conversation.
But that’s federation! Every server owner gets to decide for themself what they want to allow, and if that means cutting off huge swathes of servers until eventually it’s just a few servers in an echo chamber patting each other on the back over their policies, that’s their choice. We can have a tiny cluster of defederated right-wing authoritarians over here, and a tiny cluster of defederated left-wing authoritarians over there, and never the twain shall meet.
I’ve seen a couple of mentions of “The Paradox of Tolerance” in discussions about QOTO, but I don’t think what we’re seeing is over-dependence on tolerance on QOTO’s part resulting in nastiness spreading around mastodon. Instead, we’re seeing intolerance in the extreme, with a few individuals cutting off all possible reasonable discussion for large groups of users, many of whom have no idea what’s happening, all without any actual evidence of bad behavior or reprehensible views on the part of QOTO users. A small group of authoritarian left-wingers have decided that QOTO is right-wing and acted precipitously to cut it off before anyone manages to say anything right-wing. As someone actually using QOTO, this comes as a surprise to me. None of the admins have said anything I’ve noticed as being specifically right-wing, and have been very vocal in support of the LGBT community, for example, which is not a stance I tend to associate with right-wing trolls. I don’t post much about politics, but I’m pretty far from a right-winger myself. I’m also pretty far from authoritarian, though, so I guess I’m not cut out to be a mastodon admin.
I’m trying to avoid focusing overmuch on the drama over at Twitter, but it’s exceedingly difficult. It’s too much! What follows are some thoughts I’ve had during discussions with friends over the last few days.
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When I say “Twitter is dying,” I’m talking about a difficult-to-define inflection point. I mean, myspace.com still exists. digg.com still exists. slashdot.org still exists. It’s not a question of whether or not the website will still exist, or still carry ads, but of whether it will occupy the same place in the mindset of the vast majority of people. I think it’s clear that it will not.
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The idea that “something” will replace Twitter seems misguided. People talk as if facebook replaced myspace which replaced friendster, as if those transitions weren’t incomplete and messy. Some people never left, other people went elsewhere, and each of those has had more users than the previous, so they didn’t “migrate” from anywhere. Assuming Twitter survives in some form, some people will continue to be there, and probably elsewhere also.
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Social media has already become far more balkanized than it once was, and the idea of everybody belonging to a single social network seems quaint to me. I haven’t had a Facebook account in years, and many young people never have. One of my kids has a Snapchat snapscore under 1000, while another has a snapscore of more than 100k. One frequently sends TikTok links to a family iMessage thread that others have to then describe for the sibling who refuses to click on any TikTok links. My family uses iMessage threads primarily, while my spouse’s family primarily uses WhatsApp. I use Telegram to talk to my friends in Ukraine, and WeChat to keep track of my friends in China. It is probable that no one thing will replace Twitter, but that many people will spend more time on YouTube or Discord or TikTok or Instagram or something else, or several somethings else, while others start to spend time on a mastodon server or similar. Even my once Facebook-addicted mother spends more time on YouTube than anywhere else these days. It’s not always a mass migration all at once.
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But in this case, it sure seems to look like one. Mastodon servers have collectively grown by quite a lot in the last few weeks, despite putting their worst foot forward, so to speak. The onboarding is the single worst aspect of the mastodon user experience, and it’s the first thing people encounter. The fact that any of us make it though is remarkable, and the fact that more than 500k have in the last week is staggering. If you can read this post, but haven’t yet joined the bewildering service that is mastodon, you’re welcome to join me here. https://qoto.org/invite/H4qMWSGv
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Then again, Twitter has almost 400 million users, half of whom use the site on any given day, so mastodon’s 7 million isn’t putting a lot of pressure on Twitter in absolute terms. The site I pulled that stat from also says that “Twitter has 8.85% of the world’s overall social media user base,” suggesting the balkanization might already be farther along than I realized. https://backlinko.com/twitter-users
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It was easy for me to forget what an engineering marvel Twitter is. The “fail whale” of the days of Ruby are long gone, and Twitter is supporting unparalleled levels of traffic even now. If every single employee walked off the job, leaving only its new owner standing in the lobby looking for people to pose for photos with, I’m not sure how many developers would feel comfortable with their ablity to come in and keep things humming at scale, and have the skills to back up their comfort level. And that’s just to keep it running, not create “Twitter 2.0.” There are not very many companies in the world operating at Twitter scale. Twitter’s engineering blog is a good reminder that it takes than your average smart developer to keep Twitter running smoothly.
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It will take some time before I trust any deep dive into What Went Wrong™, but it seems like a few things are obvious already:
7a. Advertisers are not as easy to impress as “nerds with money.”
7b. Software is not hardware.
7c. There may be no end of people willing to put up with just about anything to work on rockets or electric cars, but that may not be true for large-scale web services with a reputation for toxicity.
I’ve managed to make it this far without saying anything negative about a single oligarch, so it seems like a good place to stop.
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Joined Nov 2022
