”But Mastodon also has [...] a lot on its plate including integration with Threads“It's lines like this that makes me completely unable to take those calling for a hard fork of Mastodon seriously.All Mastodon do for Threads is the same they for any fed...
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”The recent confirmation that release 4.3 still won't make it easy for new instances to start with a blocklist that protects people from the nazis and TERFs that are active on the fediverse is a good example“
Yeah, because I closed the pull request for that a) because the code was an absolute mess, b) because one-time imports of moderation data are really terrible & only at all useful for DNI lists.
That's why I'm working on FIRES with NLNet funding.
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The whole small vs big instances argument is also exhausting, you're somehow wanting consent with federation and every interaction, but expect your instance to be slurping up data from other instances such that your small instance isn't "quiet".
Where's that consent model again?
(And there's ongoing work by a and others around replies collections & the management of them, as to ensure you can request full reply trees)
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"Rochko's decision last year to change the signup process to default new users to mastodon.social highlights one aspect of the conflict of interest here“
But you don't even want those who are signing up to the flagship instance by downloading the official app, let's be honest here.
That or you expect them to install & operate fediverse software whilst not knowing anything about the fediverse?
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Again with "Mastodon's integration with Threads", it's quite literally Threads wants to use ActivityPub and publish & receive messages with compatibility with Mastodon (and Misskey/Forkeys)
That's legit it. There ain't no "integration" beyond speaking the same protocols the same way, as the protocols were designed to enable.
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“Will Mastodon's upcoming release 4.3 provide more tools for admins [...] ?“
Who do you expect to be writing these tools? The one full-time developer on the codebase who maintains backports of security bugs to 3 different versions of Mastodon, whilst y'all scream "quote posts now!!"?
The Managing Director of the project? He's busy having to wrangle US law to get a non-profit because y'all wouldn't fund the project without getting that tax kickback.
(Cont)
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(Cont)
The part-time CTO? Surely him, because he's not busy with long term tech debt, writing FEPs & grant applications, and trying to coordinate releases & work priorities.
Like seriously, who do you think is doing the work here to build better admin tools?
I've not been able to do much for Mastodon, because my donations have remained below €1000/mo. I simply can't afford to contribute much.
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”Meta's plans to offer automated moderation tools to fediverse admins“
You know these are opt-in tools being proposed, where Threads/Meta is willing to leverage it's engineering org to provide tooling to help the fediverse in some way, right?
You don't have to use said tools, you can just ignore them.
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Like, Renaud's proposal has nothing to do with Threads or Meta saying "hey, we've moderation tools we could maybe open up if you want them"
In fact, his proposal is still at the stage it was last year (much like FIRES), because we had to wait for funding.
And it certainly isn't favouring Meta, just enabling anyone who wants to build more advanced, possibly automated tools, for enhancing moderation teams.
It's a direct reaction to those demanding spam tooling.
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@thisismissem Regardless of what they offer... many of us don't want anything to do with Meta. Or Twitter. It's a poisoned chalice as far as many of us are concerned.
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It's also hella interesting to see this cropped poll result because the last options were "no" options which actually received a significant portion of the votes, but the poll now appears to be deleted (or I just can't find it anymore)
Like, it's one thing to run a poll snd get unfavourable results, it's another thing to crop the poll responses to portray it as giving favourable results.
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@tamitha @thisismissem right and part of this is that it's incredibly frustrating to see how immature the never-threads people are on so many levels
They just can't be pleased
And their ideas and asks are so disjoint from reality as far as current staffing and funding.
So it's just... So... Exhausting. Because they don't understand how open source development and maintenance works.
And I think MissEm does.
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@risottobias @tamitha it's also 100% okay to not take software anyone offers. Whether that's from Meta or what I work on at IFTAS.
But there's certainly things we can all learn from others. e.g., I've some Ideas for improving moderation in mastodon & pixelfed, directly inspired by Software I've seen elsewhere for moderation purposes.
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Andy Piperreplied to Emelia 👸🏻 on last edited by [email protected]
@thisismissem as I posted last night... the conspiracy theories and other speculations are (as you rightly pointed out in this thread) exhausting! https://macaw.social/@andypiper/112350599989018985
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@andypiper yeah, only, as now mentioned in that article at the end, I thoroughly rebuked it in this: https://medium.com/@thisismissem/why-a-hard-fork-of-mastodon-isnt-the-way-b37aecfe5c86
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@thisismissem *nods vigorously*
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@thisismissem @risottobias @tamitha Learning from each other is good. Yet we still have to keep in mind that Meta is, as a whole, an abusive and outright dangerous company no matter how nice those who work there are. Those who make the calls are not.
I shall be damned if those tools Meta will offer can be self-hosted without any legal or technical catch to them.
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@Natanox @risottobias @tamitha short answer is "we don't know" regarding those tools.
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@thisismissem @risottobias @tamitha That is technically correct. That doesn't mean one should give Meta even a slither of trust about anything.
If they want to contribute tools by making them Open-Source and self-hostable with a proper license like AGPL, sure. However doing or accepting anything else with/from Meta would just be ridiculously ignorant at this point.
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@Natanox @risottobias @tamitha for what it's worth, Meta has already been opensourcing tooling for trust and safety, e.g., https://github.com/facebook/ThreatExchange/
The algorithms from which power StopNCII.org to my knowledge.
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@thisismissem This is a seriously disingenuous crop to do and not explicitly disclaim what you did and why.
