Testing out some of the interaction/reply controls in GoToSocial. Honestly, it's awesome.
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Testing out some of the interaction/reply controls in GoToSocial. Honestly, it's awesome.
You see your reply or your boost, but no one else does, and it doesn't go through until it's actually approved by the OP.
And then there's now the option to keep all your posts off of your public profile.
So here we go, with a test user:
https://tres.1sland.social/@lockdown
3 posts, at least one of which is Public, the rest unlisted, none of it visible on the profile. No RSS feed.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
Even in 'test mode' it's immensely satisfying as someone who originates a thread to be able to say "Nope" and DENY a reply.
And nobody else even sees it. This will work in an island network where most of us will be running GoToSocial and maybe eventually Pixelfed/Peertube.
And the interface for it is pretty simple. For Public, Unlisted, and Followers Only, you have three tabs for each of them.
And for each, you get to say if someone is allowed to boost, like, or reply to your posts. You can say 'Anyone', or 'Anyone (with approval)' or stuff like 'people I follow', 'people I follow, with approval', 'people who follow me, people who follow me with approval', etc.
But the simplest version I'm testing now is simply "Anyone (with approval)" for boosts and replies.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by [email protected]
Note that in cases where the OP mentions you, you're automatically allowed to reply.
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small patatasreplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@oliphant
Very cool! Can I ask what client(s) you're using these features with? -
Oliphantom Menacereplied to small patatas last edited by
@smallpatatas I pretty much exclusively use Phanpy for GoToSocial right now, as well as Mastodon, either the one on https://phanpy.social or the one I host at https://1sland.social
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@smallpatatas Note that setting up interaction policies and reviewing/approving posts is all handled in the native GTS interface (in the /settings endpoint)
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@smallpatatas There's now a 'Posts' where you can set interaction policies and an Interaction Requests area.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
This is kind of an illustration of how the implementation can hold people hostage to the design in such a way they begin to imagine that things can only be that way.
So the entire argument on Mastodon, for instance, that I routinely mock, "But bro, you're in Public, you're posting in public, it's right there on your profile, you can scrape it, there's an RSS feed--"
"I disabled the RSS feed."
"Wha? Well, you can still scrape it--"
"I disabled unauthenticated api access--"
"But that breaks the web! Plus, someone can still follow you and--"
"I approve all follow requests."
"Well that's just extreme, man, no one is going to go that far."
The conversation, had I been on GTS, instead goes thus:
"But bro, you're in Public, you're posting in public, it's right there on your profile--"
"No, it's not. None of my posts are visible on my profile."
"So you disabled unauthenticated api access? But that breaks--"
"No, because no api access is required to begin with to view my freaking profile. It's just static HTML. So no one had to develop a feature to disable anything in order to prevent that from being shown. So there are just settings to not display posts there. Or only display Public posts. Or display Public & Unlisted posts, like Mastodon does by default."
"...Well there's still an RSS feed--"
"No, those are disabled by default. Users have to opt-in. I never did."
".....Really? We can't disable them at all."
"Oh, I know."
"Well, someone can still follow you...."
"Not without my approval. Which, by default, is required. You have to turn that off."
"...Well, someone can just make a new account and follow you--"
"Not without approval. Even when signups are enabled on GTS, they still require manual review to approve."
"Well, someone can still reply to you and be a jerk--"
"Not with interaction policies enabled. I can just delete their reply and ignore them."
That's what I mean. The design of the platform itself makes certain conversations and entitlements about how much access to your posts is "normal" to feel arbitrary.
And so I often wonder if we'd all started on GTS or a platform like it instead of Mastodon, and gotten acclimated to the idea that what appears on your profile isn't a decision baked into the design of the platform but rather your choice and that disabling what posts appear on your platform doesn't require you on some level fundamentally breaking your install to enable it.
And there's no expectation of how your profile is supposed to look, because you can do whatever you want with your profile. And no one can scrape posts from your profile if you want and no one can assume you have an RSS feed and hoover up stuff that way, and no one can just follow you by default, either.
How much would it change the entitlement some people feel towards federation?
On top of that, if it had started as an allowlist, opt-in, island network where federation is based on mutual consent and shared understanding of rules and boundaries, how much better might we have treated each other?
I, for one, am trying to find that out.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
Software can be autobiographical. Design decisions you make speak for you about what's a priority, and what isn't.
So at a time when AI is feeling entitled to ingest all our data, GTS just has a robots.txt file installed, by default, that tells AI crawlers to fuck off.
And I literally watched it happen that someone said, "Hey, can we turn off showing posts on our profile page?" and it was like, "Yep" and there wasn't 16 comments from a bunch of randos following that question defending the status quo and explaining why it would be so hard and impossible to do, and how you'd have to break your install to enable something like that, and how you really shouldn't do it, man, because it's just not done--
Nope. None of that. The feature was just there like magic, in 0.17.
And when you go down the line on the features of the platform, it's just a yes from me for almost every design decision.
Interaction controls, authorized fetch enabled by default and hardwired and you're not turning it off, auth fetch blocks not just servers but individual accounts which appears to be a variance from Mastodon, RSS feed, follows, showing follows, showing posts on your profile, you're in control of all of these things. You start with 5000 characters for posts and the configuration to change it is right there, it's not something that someone keeps refusing to make configurable "because reasons."
There's just a certain rigidity and authoritarianism to "how this should be" from Mastodon I've come to increasingly dislike, especially with its privacy posture and giving users control over their data and interactions. And this includes some in the community on Github that seem to always have a million roadblocks for why you can't implement a checkbox and it has nothing to do with solving the problem and everything to do with trying to tell me that the problem I've identified isn't important. It creates in my mind this picture of someone with their arms folded, humorlessly going, "Yeah, I guess" or "No" quite often "No!"
And at the end of the day, more energy is often spent coming up with reasons to deny or say no than to just do the thing. Make it a priority. Oh, RSS feeds are a form of block evasion, they open up every Mastodon user to ingestion from AI bots and stalkers and anyone else for that matter? What an issue! We take this seriously! We should address that immediately!
Meanwhile, one day less than a month ago someone on ION was like, "I wish we could hide all our posts from the profile area" and I said, "You should file an issue with GTS" and they did and sure enough, in less than an hour, in the replies was a "Oh, yeah, we don't have 'disallow unauthenticated api access' because we don't use the api to render your profile page. Why would we? It's just HTML. So we'll take a look at that."
And that was it. And three days ago, it was released and I didn't even know that was going to be a feature, and I was thrilled.
So that's the difference.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
You know what GTS didn't make a priority?
Trends. Trending posts, approval for trends, trending hashtags, whatever, it doesn't have that.
And that's okay, considering what their focus has clearly been thus far. User safety, privacy, consent, and just.... respect for people, not to some ideal of how available your data should be to others.
Anyway, outside of being able to edit posts, I can't think of a single thing Mastodon has that I miss on GTS. Editing. That's it.
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FediThing 🏳️🌈replied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
Really, REALLY looking forward to GTS entering beta... ️
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YurkshireLadreplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@oliphant can I interact with this using my Mastedon client?
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to FediThing 🏳️🌈 last edited by
@FediThing With this release, it officially does.
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to YurkshireLad last edited by
@YurkshireLad Interact with GTS? You can interact with it like Mastodon or anything else. If you mean the UI, it supports the Mastodon api, so most of the same apps work. I use Phanpy as my front end for GTS.