Conversation

Notices

1. :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: (kaniini@pleroma.site)'s status on Monday, 27-May-2019 19:06:38 EDT :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy:

   anyway, i’m sorry for beating on @DashEquals, it’s really not his fault that the entire stack is utterly broken, and ArchiveTeam is not doing anything they aren’t otherwise allowed to do by the technology in question.

   but at the same time, i do believe that archive team is being impolite here.

   i would suggest that instead of attempting to archive all instances they deem “at risk of dying,” that they instead concentrate on situations where users from those instances request the instance be archived as a backup (including disclosure of who requested the archive, showing they really were from the instance)

   even better, they could write a fediverse bot that queues the archival job.

   while not perfect, this compromise would at least introduce some accountability until users have better control over what is really public or not.

   right now, many people make things public because the stack is broken and forces posts to either be completely public or followers-only, there’s no middle ground.

   1. :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: (kaniini@pleroma.site)'s status on Monday, 27-May-2019 19:29:46 EDT :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy:

      in reply to

      ultimately, SNS services like the fediverse are seen as intimate spaces by many. participants are not thinking about the long term consequences of their actions. to an extent, one can legitimately argue that more care should be taken with selecting the audience who receives a given post.

      this is of course, compounded by the fact that in typical implementations, there’s only one path to allowing posts to spread to a wider audience: labelling the posts with as:Public.

      there are many avenues of leakage in the fediverse, but the binary between as:Public and a user’s followers collection is too wide and leads to users leaking their own posts unintentionally to make them boostable, etc.

      if users have a middle ground, then they will use as:Public in a more appropriate way verses how it is presently used.

      of course, the scopes system in general is a UX misdesign because it doesn’t really reflect the open world nature of the fediverse well, and we are working on ways to mitigate that, but it will take time, but when you have a choice between only public or private posts, people will get burned as they try to expand their audience without thinking about all consequences.

      ultimately what i’m saying here is that i think there is value in what archive team is trying to accomplish, but the fediverse isn’t ready for it yet. it’d be nice if we could find a middle ground until we fix the way audience selection works (even a mitigation like as:Authenticated being widespread would stop most of the bleeding), and i think what i proposed about having archive team make a fediverse bot that allows a user to request their own instance be archived would be a good middle ground for now.

      what do you think, @DashEquals ?

   2. :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: (kaniini@pleroma.site)'s status on Monday, 27-May-2019 22:27:05 EDT :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy: :abunhdhop: :abunhd: :abunhdhappyhop: :abunhdhappy:

      in reply to
      as an update to this, @DashEquals invited me to their IRC channel.
      
      we are are discussing how to clean up this situation, as well as how to design and implement a fediverse-scale archival system that allows for users to have self-agency over the archivability of their data. this allows users who want their data to be archived to have it archived.
      
      it turns out that they did not have a clear understanding of how mastodon's abysmal scopes system causes people to self-leak posts that they didn't intend to make *really* public. after I explained to them how people are forced to make what would otherwise be followers-only posts public in order to allow them to be shared with other people in their indirect social network, they understood.
      
      `as:Authenticated` solves that problem and there appears to be reasonable support for the security label. unfortunately, we are still working on this mitigation or an alternative.
      
      if anything, at least the archival of berries.space has resulted in energy to actually work toward solving these long standing design flaws with AP implementations.