"New Mastodon accounts should be private by default."
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Brooke Vibber :blobcatcoffee:replied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
@evan @luis_in_brief *nod* i want social networks where i can communicate with people who have something fun or interesting to say, not social media where i passively ingest what a few celebrities produce en masse.
of course, i'm probably not a very profitable customer for ad-supported networks
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to Tom Casavant last edited by
@tom it would be an irrelevant poll because meta already said they don't plan on ever doing that.️
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@tom I have not!
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Brooke Vibber :blobcatcoffee:replied to Brooke Vibber :blobcatcoffee: last edited by
@evan @luis_in_brief more generally i just think panopticon culture is *really creepy* and i think we need to get out of it, not embed it into our social expectations
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@Gargron Do we know if any other social networks are private by default? I can think of Snap and BeReal, but there are probably others.
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How do you get to know people if it defaults to private? I like the concept of private groups you can join or be invited to, like WhatsApp, Discord (etc) groups for "closed" social circles. When I joined Mastodon I knew nobody. How does one get get know people with private profiles but with whom you might share similar interests?
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Luis Villareplied to Brooke Vibber :blobcatcoffee: last edited by
@brooke @evan I'm mostly agreed philosophically, but from a product-management perspective, but you can't simultaneously build a twitter-style tool and be defacto DM-first. They're just completely different UIs, user expectations, ways of finding your friends, etc. So if Masto wants to build Signal or Discord on top of activitypub, that's fine! But that's an entirely different product than what they're currently building. And sadly there is no sign they understand any of that.
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@tom @evan @Gargron I was going to mention that too. As a response to criticisms from law makers, users who identify themselves as teenagers on IG are now private by default https://www.platformer.news/instagram-teen-accounts-private-default-daily-limit/?ref=butts
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Raphael Lullisreplied to Evan Prodromou last edited by
Strongly disagree. It's not real privacy and we should not pretend that anything on a social network is not available. Those that want/need privacy should be instructed to use proper, secure, group communication tools.
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@luis_in_brief @brooke Are you familiar with using friends-only mode in Snap, Instagram, Facebook, or other platforms? It's not SecureDrop. It's just a more pleasant, personal system where you can be more vulnerable.
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infinite love ⴳreplied to Eugen Rochko last edited by
@Gargron @evan maybe the people are wrong. maybe their expectations are shaped by hostile design of the past decade+. maybe we shouldn't replicate that design.
arguably this specific example is one of the lower-stakes ones, but "auto approve follow requests" defaulting to "true" is more accurate to what's really happening than "manually approve follower requests" defaulting to "false". spec/protocol-wise, all Follow activities need to be Accepted. that's the default flow.
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@hallenbeck @luis_in_brief you already know people, though.
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Evan Prodromoureplied to Doctor Popular last edited by
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@evan @luis_in_brief Ah so you're suggesting Mastodon could potentially be something like Signal or WhatsApp and, by default, be a private messenger (with encryption) that you then opt-in to on public posting?
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@hallenbeck @luis_in_brief no, more like Instagram in private mode. You share more personal information with people you already know.
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@evan I feel like this should be a zero-default value that has to be explicitly set by the instance admin, and then explicitly set by the user during registration. Adding threads to the fedi has made Mastodon so much more viable for some users, but it's also made it an incredibly more homophobic and transphobic space as well. Preserving the ability for accounts to remain private by default seems really important, and also probably shouldn't be enforced on everyone.
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> it's also made it an incredibly more homophobic and transphobic space as well
Has it? I haven't seen that. Are you seeing a lot of homophobic/transphobic content from Threads?
Since Threads users can't follow or @ anyone on Mastodon, I don't think we're seeing targeted harassment coming from there.
I'm not saying we won't; just that I don't see it right now. Then again, straight cis dude, wearing privilege blinders, fully acknowledged.
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@evan somewhat disagree, but really I feel there should be no default, the user should be prompted to choose when signing up. Options should be private, local-only, or federated.
It should be clear that federated means anyone can read it, and that includes search engines and bridges.