@mathias @jupiter_rowland “Unlisted” posts are a lot less useful than I initially thought. In fact I can’t see any real use for them at all. They don’t do what I naïvely thought they did.
They still appear on your timeline and the timeline of everyone that follows you. They just don’t appear on the Local and Federated timelines, but as they are just impossible to use on larger instances anyway I doubt anyone would notice.
@MetalSamurai @mathias @jupiter_rowland
I thought it was just me! I also it was supposed to be hidden until you go down the tree of a post, but it really doesn't.
We are reaching points with the #fediverse similar to #blockchain. You need to decide whether it is better to implement something at a protocol level or application level?
Unlisted and public posts play a role in the federation and social graph of #Mastodon. Should we mess with it, or should apps adapt and filter unlisted posts from our timelines if we turn the feature on? Similar to how apps allow us to hide boosts from certain timelines?
A drum I beat as often as I can, because I think it’s very important for people to realize, is that under #ActivityPub ALL privacy or audience restrictions are only suggestions.
Effectively, ALL bits of content are public, just with notations asking instances politely to only share them with certain audiences.
People writing content into #Fediverse need to be aware that what they’re putting out there isn’t as private as they might be expecting.
So if you write a private post to a certain group, it’s entirely possible for some instance to ignore your privacy setting and blab the post to the whole world, or in other ways not act as expected with that.
Just be aware.
@volkris @Stark9837 @mathias @jupiter_rowland I realise that. I’m thinking more at the moment of separating group/forum posts from regular posts. More about tidying up the clutter rather than actual privacy.
Eventually private groups would be good. They are useful to have, even though there is always the risk of bad faith members taking screenshots or otherwise distributing content outside the group.
Currently people are mostly aware of the #privacy concerns, because we are not advertising #Mastodon to be end-to-end encrypted. So I think it is a good idea to first focus on the UI and improve the experience before going for such protocol level things.
As most things in #FOSS it will take time, but I think it is in good hands!
You say that, but I see so many people surprised by this.
I know for a fact that quite a lot of people are not aware because they tell me they’re not.
Personally, this is one of my major gripes against the core design of ActivityPub. It didn’t have to be this way, but choices were made to focus on instances instead of users.
Oh no! They DIDN’T choose decentralization, and that’s such an key point here.
ActivityPub chose to centralize around instances.
They chose a federated model, not a decentralized one.
Had they decentralized with key focus on users there’s a good chance stuff like this wouldn’t be such an issue.
The alternatives would be:
either fully centralised silos like Twitter or Facebook
or peer-to-peer, i.e. everyone essentially running a Web server on their end-user devices, be that a PC or a mobile phone, and all that comes with it, including humongous storage requirements
I'm shuddering at the thought of #PeerTube being truly peer-to-peer and serverless. Who could possibly host a full-blown video streaming server akin to YouTube, only that it's P2P, on a €200 Android phone connected mostly through 5G?
@volkris
It is the same as with many #blockchain solutions. You had to make sacrifices. They chose decentralization over scalability. #ActivityPub chose moderation and decentralization over imutability and single truths without trust.
We have a lot of trust in our instances.
@MetalSamurai @mathias @jupiter_rowland