The thing I find really interesting about your post and my reaction to it is that you frame #QT as talking about a person while I'd see it as very explicitly talking about the content.
If I quote something and expand on it, the major reference is to what was said, not the person saying it. The person is only included as an attribute, but the content takes center stage.
And to me that's the major point of QT: it takes some specific content and builds upon it in ways that can't really be done through other means.
QT isn't about the person. It's about the quote, and sort of furthering human knowledge by taking what a person has expressed to another level.
But then, I'm an academic, so that's just daily life for me :)
I think it's critical that we raise awareness of how any platform based on ActivityPub is inherently poor with privacy guarantees as that distributed platform is fundamentally reliant on different instances voluntarily respecting privacy features.
In general users need to be aware of things like post deletion being unenforceable. If you delete a post from your account, there's nothing to say other accounts won't ignore the deletion, and I think that's a big deal!
But when you talk about privacy controls for QT, everyone needs to keep in mind that all such controls on this platform are voluntary.
My point isn't to say that there's no reason to talk about this, but just to keep in mind the limits of what can be engineered here.
Well, there is no real fediverse policy other than the technical standard, but I'd say issues of expression like that are up to the person doing the expressing.
The content creator gets to create his content as he wants it to be.
I don't want to be dictating to people how they should express themselves per some policy.
I always had no use for #Twitter
Every time I dipped my toe into that platform I found it limited, constraining even, starting with its stupid character limit.
For me the appeal of #Mastodon is that it's far, far better than Twitter because of its interface to #ActivityPub / #Fediverse.
Here the platform isn't limited to exceedingly short posts, but can instead support long posts AND so much more: rich multimedia, and types of content that the standard hasn't even thought of yet.
For me the appeal of Mastodon is that it's exponentially better than Twitter ever was, empowering users and enabling forms of expression that Twitter never could match.
I think it's a HUGE problem that users won't know enough about Mastodon/Fediverse/ActivityPub to realize how this works, and they will expect exactly that deleting a post is effectively instant and guaranteed.
Users won't be aware of the technical model. They'll just be used to social media as it's always been, and assume this platform has similar behavior.
This has huge privacy implications.
FWIW, I'd rename the list from fediverse apps to fediverse platforms.
I think a lot of people would associate an app with a client running on a phone, so I had trouble finding the platform list.
But nice lists!
@hobs @blaine @Gargron Yeah, different people have different skills, and maybe @Gargron's skill is in building those features, not setting up organizations.
Me, I'd say Features in #Fediverse shouldn't be up to a single governance either.
And it's not. We're all free to build whatever we want to engage over #ActivityPub, even forking #Mastodon code if we really want to with our own features. Or using other platforms.
In short, on the whole there's a good chance Gargron SHOULD be working on features as we're already in a place of collective governance of Fediverse.
They don't make you the product.
You volunteer to be the product.
It's not that you can't stop them.
It's that you line up to take part.
Right, and the EC vote wasn't counted until January.
Messages before then happened before the vote, so the whole story is bunk, based on a misunderstanding of the US presidential election process that's all too often promoted in press reporting.
What law is that?
I find it a bit concerning how mastodon talks about their software and new features as if they exist in a vaccum. They talk about implementing a QT feature and forcing people to opt-in or not... Meanwhile the rest of the fediverse has had the QT feature since forever, including modified mastodon instances. We already have a standard, no you cant force opt-in.. .either implement it or dont, you cant force other software to block a feature just because you on your server didnt "opt-in". Its literally equivelant to a link to the original post...
Seeing as the dates on the texts were from before the election was completed, that story makes no sense.
@capntransit Why WOULD it be obvious?
Seems like the general assumption is that most people are at least vaguely interested in #reality...
@Azih Did you notice how that link is also leaping from correlation to causation?
It's nice to think that someday that might happen, but that's not the world we live in this year, and so TwitterFiles scoops were released as per the present norms.
Arguably it was more important to provide that transparency today than sit on it indefinitely waiting for the new world of publishing to be built.
That documents do not say what they were trying to censor doesn't change that they were trying to censor, though.
You might even believe this level of censorship and official nudging is good for society. Great! Then own it.
Healthy censorship, if there is such a thing, is healthy.
So let's support it instead of denying what we see with our own eyes.
Do you have many examples of journalists towing their owners' corporate lines?
Because the journalists I know in person are annoyingly loud about not doing that, and it seems like there are constant stories about journalists fighting their corporate owners, demanding everything from pay raises through more newsroom independence.
So what evidence do you really have to support your claims here? Because I really don't see it, AND I personally see the opposite really frequently.
Yeah, I'm critical of Mastodon for how it seems to have mainly been designed as a replacement for Twitter with even more restrictions rather than a broader platform to empower users above and beyond what Twitter offered.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)