The first Mastodon Follow Pack Directory is now published on the Mastodon Migration Blog.
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The Nexus of Privacyreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
An interesting approach! A couple of questions
Did people who are listed opt in to this?
Are you the person who's curating all these lists? If so might want to say a bit more about your criteria.
You should probably mention that some of these accounts are on threads and so uploading the CSV could potentiall lead to your information being shared with Meta, whose privacy policy says they can use it for targeting ads and training AI. (It's not clear whether or not the current implementation does that, but they can change it without giving notice.). Some people don't care, but others do, so letting them know is important!
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to The Nexus of Privacy last edited by
Thank you for your interest in this project.
- People did not opt in. Administratively this would be prohibitive. When the pack is published all are @ mentioned in the directory post. No one has requested to be delisted so far, indeed most are very pleased, but the opt-out notification option should be more explicit.
1/n
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
- A general request for suggestions was made for each list and after initial publication an appeal was made for additional recommendations. The criteria is regular recent posters in the subject area. It is not a 'top posters' or exhaustive list.
- Really appreciate the Threads observation, and will remove the Threads accounts from all except for the US Politics Threads pack. Will add your suggested caution to this one. Thank you for raising this concern.2/n
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
The hopeful purpose here is to help people kick start their feeds in areas of their interest. It is anticipated that once they start following some people then they will see lots of other accounts in this area and follow them. Likewise people might find new accounts to follow.
3/n
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by [email protected]
A second purpose is to demonstrate the capability and encourage others to create their own Follow Packs of recommended accounts. This could be helpful for organic growth of communities. In order to help start this up have offered to author and host the .csv for a few interested people. If this is popular, as an option, maybe list these in a section of the directory.
It is all evolving and welcome any input and suggestions.
4/fin
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The Nexus of Privacyreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
@mastodonmigration Glad the input's useful, there are a lot of these projects around and similar issues crop up. Bluesky doesn't have opt-in or notification, the opt-out mechanism is non-obvious (you block the starter pack's creator, how intuitive!) nd there's no way to find out what starter packs you're on ... it's already causing problems in practice. So it's a good chance for fedi to do better.
For the threads issue, that seems like a good approach -- and if you're encouraging others to create their own, make sure they take a similar approach.
On the curation, it'd be good to describe the process. A couple of questions to think about: why should people trust these random suggestions? And, how do you deal with the situation where somebody's suggested an account that many people see as racist, anti-trans, and/or a troll -- or a scammer?
In terms of opt-in, there's an existing consent mechanism -- profile discovery (I think it's the "indexable" tag). If you've included somebody who hasn't opted in to that, it's a consent violation, and you should expect to get flamed (very justifiably IMHO) and "it would be prohibitive to get people's consent" hasn't been a convincing argument in other consent-based controversies.
Using indexable with an additional notification / opt-out mechanism on top of that might be seen as enough -- others are taking similar approaches. I don't have any intuition here ... the wording for the Mastodon profile discovery option arguably covers this case (at least in English) but I'm not completely sure everybody will see it that way.
Tagging people for notifications is one solution -- but what if they're filtering notifications from accounts they don't follow? Dan was thinking of DM notifications for his starter packs, but that's got a similar problem, probably even worse. It's tricky ... no sure what the right answer is.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to The Nexus of Privacy last edited by
The input is super helpful. One gets going with these things because we want to make the Fediverse better, but we need to be careful too. Agree that we want the Fedi to be more respectful of consent and privacy.
Have made the changes mentioned to both the initial pack posts and the FediBlog directory @mastodonmigration.wordpress.com .
How do you find out if an account has set the "indexable" tag?
1/n
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
The potential input filtering so they don't see the notice is a good question. Not sure how to deal with this one.
Interested in anything you learn from your poll. Please continue to provide feedback.
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The Nexus of Privacyreplied to Mastodon Migration last edited by
@mastodonmigration Unfortuantely I think you can only find out indexable via API. Here's another discusison of consent mechanisms, Julian might know. https://fietkau.social/@julian/113469285233683859
And yeah, I don't know a great answer about how to do the notification. It's similar to Ryan's problem with Bridgy Fed .... what's really needed is a general consent mechanism but that's a lot easier said than done.
And yeah there's a real tension between wanting to provide something that could help with this long-standing problem of "how do I find people to follow?" but also wanting to be careful. In general I feel like it's worth taking a little time to do it right. These current waves of people leaving Xitter and Threads will go on for a while, and depending on how things on Bluesky work out at some point there may well be another wave of people looking for something to complement it or even replace it.
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Mastodon Migrationreplied to The Nexus of Privacy last edited by [email protected]
Just watched a Dot Social interview with Bluesky CEO and feel like there is a lot of enthusiasm for going fast without as much concern for what might be some of the unintended consequences. We will see, but actually running a distributed network with thousands of sub networks actually exposes all sort of things that they have yet to reconcile. Have a feeling they will learn, and we may see a lot of these users disillusioned when things don't go as smoothly as they imagine.
