As with any censorship resistant network, both #Nostr and the #Fediverse are going to have to concentrate some energy around anti-spam and on improving user-level curation tools.
There are other reasons, of course, but weak curation tools lead to #blockwars such as #fediblock.
I normally avoid reading anything that Mr Snowden says or writes, but this somehow got shoved into my timeline, and I generally agree. Most of the things that #blockwars / #fediblock fragments the network over are not worth the lost connections. Certainly not every time, but most of the time.
> Later on Truth Social Mr Trump said the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were "very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting".
> The "one-of-a-kind" assets in the digital world can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but have no tangible form of their own.
> They can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.
> Advocates say NFTs are the digital answer to collectibles, but critics have warned about risks in the market, which emerged from the wider world of cryptocurrency. Activity in the space has dropped this year, alongside a plunge in cryptocurrencies.
As I understand it, the actual files of #NFTs tend to be hosted on #IPFS, but if someone doesn't "pin" the files, they can eventually be deleted. And some have been hosted on a regular website, which really stinks if and when the site shuts down or even rearranges and replaces its former content with something new.
> A report for the US Congress this year noted that NFT sales have been used to collect credit card and other financial information, and been subject to other scams.
Which isn't surprising. Every other sales channel has been abused that way, from restaurant purchases to retail stores, to mail order. This line makes it sound like those are unique threats to NFTs, but they are part of the danger when one uses a credit card to buy anything.
By the way, #Trump's #Truth_Social #socnet is supposedly a modified version of the #Mastodon software. As far as I know, it does not federate (so there's no need to get excited about #blockwars and push #fediblock).
@evan@prodromou.pub @evan@identi.ca ( and formerly @evan@e14n.com ) has said this a few times, but here it is again.
"Every time you post on Twitter, you produce value for the advertisers.
You tell everyone in your network there that it's OK to stay. That you're all helpless to leave.
You tell the people who've lost their jobs, the people who are being hounded and harassed, that they are not important to you.
You know you're going to be ashamed of it later.
Just stop posting.
Do it here, not there. Connect here, not there.
Don't reply, don't like, don't retweet.
Stop feeding your life into the machine."
This was true before Elon #Musk bought #Twitter, but I guess it wasn't as important before.
I don't fully agree, simply because there may be some advantages to many people who continue to use Twitter instead of moving to the #Fediverse (e.g., #GNU_Social, #Mastodon, #Pleroma, #Misskey, #PixelFed, #Lenny / #Lemmy, etc) or they would have moved over already.
Also, because unless one self-hosts one's own presence, an angry instance admin is all it takes to lose all posts and connections and have to start over. Or, if one has contacts on a different instance, then irate instance admins participating in #blockwars (including #fediblock) can separate the person from some portion of their contacts.
So remember, everything that Twitter is or can do to you, your Fediverse instance can also do. Most instances will never do most of those things, but pretending that one is safe here could result in disappointment in the future.
In both cases, they are dead wrong, just like the #blockwars / \#fediblock people are. The #Fediverse is for everyone. Right or left wing or no wing at all. Government agencies, corporations, churches, non-profit organizations, individuals, groups, families, small businesses. Everyone.
The network derives its utility from the ability of people on instance A to interact with people on instance B, so indiscriminate instance-to-instance blocking and mobs chasing people away only makes the network less useful for everyone.
@clacke I don't know about that particular set, but most of the blocklists going around are poorly researched. If an admin is going to be diligent, those lists' quality is too low.
For example, they include sites that have never federated, sites whose "offense" is refusing to follow someone's call to block a third site, sites that have been closed for years, and sites where people from the blocklister's own site instigated trouble.
As an example, one recent list has "top 100" listed as a reason to block some sites.
Some of the vilest instances in the whole network (nearly equal in vileness to poa.st, nicecrew, beefyboys, and chud whatever) have admins and users that are among the most vocal #blockwars advocates.
I actually think that the overwhelming majority of blocking should be done by individuals curating their own timelines. I am sensitive to the effect on the Fediverse as a whole, especially as we've already been through this.
Even the original #bifurcation (when the largest instance at the time, Identica, severed communication with #StatusNet / #GNUsocial & #OStatus and switched to the #Pump.io protocol and software) and the subsequent #ActivityPub - #OStatus split have caused untold breakage. I've seen AP-side devs, admins, users patting themselves on the back while commiserating about brokenness that is built into the protocol itself or at least its common implementations.
I have also seen people telling other people to create "alts" on various instances, so that their posts can reach all of their intended contacts. Not for resilience against instance shutdowns or separating by posts and recipients by topics and interests (which is what groups and Diaspora style Aspects / GPlus style Circles are for), but because #blockwars prevents posts and members from one instance to be seen on certain others.
For the record, I think that instance governance is something that Mastodon should include in its instances.social instance-picker, along with instances' topical foci. People should have a way to see what they're agreeing to (and what the alternatives are) before the sign up.
In other words, it isn't my way or the highway so much as it is making it possible to know what one is getting into. I am certain that there are (or were) instances with democratically chosen rules. I also believe that we're not doing the people who use an instance any favor by not making it possible for them to contribute to the financing and administration of the instance. If you're paying all the costs and doing all the work to maintain and moderate the instance, it is difficult to let an election institute a policy that you disagree with. (I've started to really disagree with the idea of individuals hosting public instances wholly out of their own financial and time resources. Besides the "truck factor", it is much easier to keep an instance going if everything was already handled by a team and at least partly member supported.)
On the other hand, if the instance encourages those in its membership who can do so to participate in keeping it going, then it is perfectly reasonable to expect the admin team to carry out the decisions voted by the membership. I do realize that not everyone can contribute funds, nor can everyone do the technical labor ... but as @simsa04 will remember, things like writing documentation, contributing in discussions about improving the software, designing and implementing themes, and even marketing-type tasks such as creating a logo and a favicon or promoting the instance to people outside the #Fediverse are beneficial.
I think #Blockwars (and its #Fediblock subsidiary) is a negative thing for the network.
I want these sites to give individual users much more control over their own interactions, so that instance admins can concentrate on protecting against things which could violate laws or ToS. Someone uses racist, sexist, right-wing / left-wing negative stereotypes? Block them yourself.
Years ago, Pownce had a feature where you couldn’t just subscribe/follow someone unless it was mutual. I think Friendica had that at one time, but AFAIR, that was removed in order to federate better with StatusNet and Diaspora. Pownce was acquired and shut down, but we haven’t seen a lot of networks (federated or centralized) pick up their secret sauce and build a better burger with it.
I think the #blockwars folks may have indirectly caused this. There are people who file complaints against client apps that don’t build in blocklists against specific servers whose moderation policies they dislike.
I think that #Matrix / #Element competes with one or more Google-owned chat-type services. Since they gatekeep the overwhelming majority of Android users’ software installation, a good antitrust lawyer would be helpful. I’ll bet that faxing a bunch of documents to #USDOJ and various states would suddenly cause Google to decide that Element doesn’t violate their policies anyway.
(Someone said it was “Boomers at Google that don’t understand federation”, but first of all, I’m certain that most GOOG employees are far younger than you and I, and secondly, I’m sure someone at Google understands federation, though they obviously dislike not being in control. Google Talk was federated with #XMPP, while Google Plus was basically #Diaspora with federation stripped out.)
@delores (1) Because it makes the site's users dependent and helpless, despite having moderation controls available (they won't learn to use them, because someone else does the work); (2) Because it gives the site's admins (already rulers of their site) even more power over their users; (3) Because we already know how useless "somebody else's opinion" of whom to block is. That's the biggest lesson of #blockwars; and (4) Because the admin's blocks may keep the site's users from seeing posts by people they would otherwise enjoy communicating with.
Site-wide blocklists are unfortunately sometimes necessary, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, individual blocking and filtering is a better and more effective option.
@delores If the purchase leads to work on federating users & issues between repo hosts, then you won't have to care about that. An account on one interacts with any others (modulo blocklists, don't think you've escaped #blockwars).
@hobbithabit #WrongThink: wrongthink.net was once a GNU Social instance, but they replaced that with a home-grown non-federated site long ago. If you've seen them on some blocklist, that's just because those lists are poorly-researched at best. ( #BlockWars is the usual context in which wrongthink is raised. )
@hobbithabit@mastodon.host #WrongThink: wrongthink.net was once a GNU Social instance, but they replaced that with a home-grown non-federated site long ago. If you've seen them on some blocklist, that's just because those lists are poorly-researched at best. ( #BlockWars is the usual context in which wrongthink is raised. )