The Fediverse has a different value system than commercial social media: striving for genuine connections, protecting privacy and championing accessibility
If you have any objection at all to your posts and profile information being potentially sucked up by Meta, Google, or literally any other bad actor you can think of, do not use the fediverse. Period.
It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
Sorry, but this always make me rage. It’s like these people are discovering in 2024 that public access means anyone can read it, not just 2000 individual tech bloggers. It’s like in 2024 they’re discovering that, but aren’t technicallly skilled enough to open a forum to have their closed-of discussions in.
Sigh.
No wonder the tech sphere is going to shits if this is the modern discourse around it. :(
It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.
That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There’s nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can’t really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.
I’m personally not 100% convinced that that vision is even possible though tbh.
It’s because of how people people on mastodon freak out over privacy and consent. That’s why he wrote that article as the expectations and views of a large number of users are fundamentally against what actually happens
From the “privacy nightmare” “article”:
It’s on the internet. Public. Got it. It’s almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It’s almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
Sorry, but this always make me rage. It’s like these people are discovering in 2024 that public access means anyone can read it, not just 2000 individual tech bloggers. It’s like in 2024 they’re discovering that, but aren’t technicallly skilled enough to open a forum to have their closed-of discussions in.
Sigh.
No wonder the tech sphere is going to shits if this is the modern discourse around it. :(
Sorry, rant over.
This is true for Mastodon and Lemmy and I generally agree with this sentiment.
That said, ActivityPub is more than just Lemmy and Mastodon. ActivityPub is more general than that. Lemmy and Mastodon are designed in a way where public discourse is the default and everything you write is expected to be public. But ActivityPub on its own has no such assumptions. There’s nothing about ActivityPub that says that you cannot build a more private social media with it. But actually you can’t really, because of the problems that the blog post points out. But the vision I think for some people is that this should be possible.
I’m personally not 100% convinced that that vision is even possible though tbh.
It’s because of how people people on mastodon freak out over privacy and consent. That’s why he wrote that article as the expectations and views of a large number of users are fundamentally against what actually happens