Testing out some of the interaction/reply controls in GoToSocial. Honestly, it's awesome.
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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.
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YurkshireLadreplied to Oliphantom Menace last edited by
@oliphant yes with GTS. I tried searching in my mastodon client for this GTS user with no success.
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@oliphant do the individual gotosocial servers pass this info between each other in some way or does it rely on going to the original server as the "source of truth"?
i ask because if they do it via AP messages, and they write that up somewhere, other server software (including mine) would probably add that too! helps build a consensus protocol understanding that doesn't lean on mastodon so much
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Oliphantom Menacereplied to YurkshireLad last edited by
@YurkshireLad Yep, that's because they are on an #IslandNetwork (ION) that isn't connected to the regular fediverse.
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@robey As I understand, Pixelfed and Peertube both support this, or something like it, and will be working to support the GTS implementation, too.