Mastodon - "Decentralized" Twitter Knockoff & Rat King Breeding Ground

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groupertherapy said:
http://archive.is/IHoK6
Transhumanist Mastodon user highly dissatisfied with the implementation of 'bot' account label. I missed the penultimate slapfight.
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They got mad when people online mocked them for this.
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Not sure if anyone cares, but this is a fairly objective post about one of the reasons of animosity between Mastodon and the rest of the network.


https://shitposter.club/notice/9549736

The message scoping issue was that instead of implementing a separate endpoint for scoped messages, Eugen tacked it on an endpoint for public messages, which meant the failure state of GS instances not understanding scoping was to make private messages public. This made all existing GS instances the "bad guy" for ignoring scoping.

Another decision that made GS the bad guy was the initial resistance to separating out local from federated timelines, which led to a shitload of mastodon people thinking they were being invaded by GS people. We literally could not get out of Mastodon people's faces if we wanted to, because of Mastodon's design. Not seeing the boundaries between servers didn't change the fact that some people were just assholes, but at least separating them reduced perceived turf wars. The NIMBY effect was in part because of this too.

The last thing I'll mention is that the "new" GS servers when they showed up got into conflict with most of the existing GS servers. Those servers banned people, silenced and sandboxed users on remote instances. Once those boundaries were set, relations between the servers cooled down into a live and let live attitude. Many Mastodon servers have been far more aggressive, engaging in organized slander campaigns against servers and individuals.

This note is in response to Trev's note, which I mostly agree with and consider my perception of events above supplementary to.
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Here is a much better and more coherent writeup of the history of the fediverse pre-Mastodon by an oldfag.

https://wiki.freedombone.net/introduction.html
http://archive.is/EAT0l

Mastodon's git always seems to be brewing some kind of drama. Eugen is a very stubborn person leading a community project, so he's got a lot of people attacking him for one reason or another including troons and disenfranchised developers.

The current drama is about the 'direct message' feature in Mastodon. Mastodon implements the direct message like a ordinary message but with a flag saying "please don't read this.". That means the message is federated across every instance, but not displayed. A self hosted user named @thanatos forked a version of Pleroma called 'pleroma disrespectful' that changed a few lines of code that made Mastodon's DMs visible to anyone using the software. Strangely, many of the more histrionic people on the mastodon side would again rather propose complete defederation with all non-mastodon instances rather than admit that their feature is broken if it can be cracked by changing a few lines of code.
 
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Niggerfaggot1488 said:
No Twitter/Facefuck/whatever social media clone website will ever be popular because most of the value of a social media site is based on the number of users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
Thus first mover advantage is massive, if your site doesn't have some kind of special feature that hugely distinguishes itself from other social media, no one will want to use it.
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So social media giants are, pretty much definitionally, natural monopolies?
 
Mastodon still has it's issues, despite usage from lefties increasing now that Twitter is banning people for spamming "KILL TERFS".
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It's a giant tl;dr tweetstorm, but basically they're angry at the devs of both Pleroma (for not implementing "anti abuse" tools that likely make it a hugbox) and Mastodon (for having "shitty people" on staff and not caving in hard enough to add enough "anti abuse" tools). The person who made the thread also linked to an ex dev (with they/them pronouns, of course) ranting about the project and part of it bitched about how white guys were running it.
 
If you can't find a little niche community for yourself on a place like Mastadon, maybe you are the one thats a toxic abusive person.
 
These guys always give themselves away. It's not about having oppression or abuse. It's about making everyone else post by your rules. Just find an instance with standards you agree with.

Mastodon is home to a lot of Ratkings but none of them get Twitter levels of engagement because the blocking tools are much better.
 
counter.social, the mastodon instance that our favorite soyboy Wil Wheaton has run to is a interesting instance because it's run by a leftist hacktivist named th3j35t3r known for well publicized hacking stunts against mostly low hanging fruit and enemies of United States foreign policy. They make some nebulous claims about 'COSOGUARD' which is supposed to be some kind of service that stops doxing somehow. The instance is probably one of the most closed off instances on the network, but sometimes even posts from trusted instances like mastodon.social don't federate. This may be because of a misconfiguration or because their changes to mastodon have accidentally broke compatibility with the rest of the fediverse. Unlike most instances, counter.social solicits for donations pretty heavily and a annoying popup asking for donations will show up every once in a while if you are a user on the instance. I might be paranoid, but between the isolation of the instance and the vague claims of security coming from someone who should know better, I get the feeling it's all just a honeypot to track the antifa losers who are getting banned from twitter.


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Thinking about it more, I think counter.social might actually be a honeypot:

1. counter.social country bans make absolutely no sense. Malicious actors know how to circumvent them easily, so the only people effected are non-hackers. A majority of 'trolling' and attacks are probably going to come from within the US. Blocking these countries is just performance. A notorious hacker knows better than this.

2. They also block VPNs and proxies (for their own users). The only motivation to do that is if you wanted to see where your users are from.

3. The whole COSOGUARD spiel seems targeted towards non tech-savvy people because the premise is absurd. Who is doing one click on-demand identity reports? I have an account on the site, and I can't find any details on it. None of these security features actually exists outside of the about page. It's bullshit.

edit: I found out what COSOGUARD does. There's a button on your profile, and when you click on it, you get sent this popup. It ostensibly scans a database to check if your log-in email has been compromised. You are then sent a private DM (not secure) from the COSOGUARD account. It's a lot more primitive than I expected from the sales pitch. I have no way of testing the effectiveness of this, but it's not really that different from a online virus scan scam advert.

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4. The instance exhibits abnormal behavior when federating. It seems to be use a very extensive instance blocklist, but some posts fail to federate regardless of their status on the blocklist. The site is quite broken, even by mastodon standards. On my browser (firefox), the throbber in the center of the page stops at 99%. I don't think this throbber means anything and it's definitely not in the main mastodon branch. Jester claims that the site is somehow a 'hardened' branch of mastodon but that's probably not true.

5. The heavy push for donations might just be plain old greed, but it would also be the ideal way to trick people into giving away their identities online.

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edit: the level of donation whoring is worse than wikipedia
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