R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

@davew This is something you can do? Mastodon supports OAuth or something?

@rmerriam I want to engage in ways I don't regret later.

@chribonn @NorCal_Lynne @jeffjarvis @tomwatson Moreover, to use intelligently the Fediverse, you need to understand that nobody can be banned from the Fediverse or even Mastodon. You need to understand that, like Twitter users, many instance admins are hobbyists, volunteers who run their instances because they like to do it. You need to understand that your company can set up its own instance. Because these are facts that underlie the social interactions that happen here.

Putting a GUI over a computer system that makes it easy to use is laudable, because using computers is in itself morally neutral and often useful.

It is evil to put a "GUI" over a volunteer community that makes it easy to use, because it forces you to use people like inanimate objects, and using people like inanimate objects is evil. To participate in a community, you should engage sincerely with that community, seeking to create mutually beneficial interactions with them.

And the first step in doing that is treating that community as a community you are joining, not a company you are buying services from or a tool you are using.

@shay @cemerick Maybe only instances run by hobbyists should have private messaging. As shown by today's news about H&R Block sending the personal finance data of their customers to Facebook, for-profit companies are untrustworthy custodians of confidential data, because selling it is often profitable.

@bartoszb @larsks The city center of Hiroshima was destroyed when the Enola Gay's bomb bay doors opened, even though the people there didn't know it until the bomb exploded.

@nmoo I understand that you can include a limited set of HTML tags in your #ActivityPub posts that syndicate to Mastodon (@enkiv2 says the mastodon.py docs describe this but I don't see it in https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#writing-data-statuses) but apparently the #Markdown we're using here on #Qoto gets stripped out on Mastodon instances.

(Also, Qoto's Markdown implementation is massively broken.)

@frauenfelder I hope so. But Tumblr joining the Fediverse may push things the other way. We'll see.

Just now it occurred to me that optimizing a social network for engagement is almost precisely the same thing as trolling: showing people the things that are most likely to react strongly to.

The only difference is that trolls write their content themselves, while social networks promote content written by others.

@frauenfelder Maybe you don't troll hard enough for Twitter to promote your posts.

@BleepingComputer This hasn't happened on F-Droid, or yes? The file managers on F-Droid are still okay?

@frauenfelder But actually we have to absorb the massive influx of ex-Twitter people replaying the aggression they're accustomed to on Twitter.

@publicvoit @squirrelmonkey Is pretty similar to FidoNet in some ways.

@elsantonegro @mergerson Most instances are in the US and Europe, so is not surprising if popular ones are racist, because those cultures are fairly racist.

@bartoszb @larsks It's a website that destroyed the world's most powerful democracy, though.