like, for MANY applications this is NOT a problem. the problem is when we bring LD into describing interactions between persons. it causes people to adopt the wrong kind of mindset. this leads to more damage, like LDSigs.
it's all so fucking broken, and eventually, people are going to pay the price for the arrogance of everyone involved in encouraging the use of LD in "social" environments.
the Linked Data principle is metadata-leaking by design. if you can't understand that, then you have an abysmal understanding of metadata hygiene.
Linked Data is a tool that is meant to help people programmatically collide document graphs, to derive new intelligence. defining the relationships that allow to set this up is the whole purpose of JSON-LD.
like the entire history is utterly wrong. don't get me wrong, I think evanp and cwebber are really smart guys. I really do. I even think Gargron is a smart dude.
but they have clearly never had to deal with harassment or moderating a space or being a sysop in an online community. if they had, AP would have been designed much differently from the start.
remember: Follow was not a three-part handshake in the original AP. this was added at the behest of Mastodon. when you have the moderately clueless (Gargron) leading the clumsily clueless (W3C SocialWG) on these problems, it is no wonder that the spec is shit to begin with.
i'm not and i'm equally angry at the W3C SocialWG for ratifying a specification that explicitly made security non-normative, but included a huge pitch for metadata-leaking JSON-LD malware.
@foxhkron imagine if, instead of ActivityPub, we had a network built on the fundamental foundation of user consent, with consent proven in the form of OCAP grants. not point fingers, but the decision to adopt ActivityPub by some software in an incomplete state, frankly, has done a lot of damage.
i mean, if it were UP TO ME, we wouldn't have such a broken architectural design that the only answer is to basically perform surgery on the experience through blocks. instead, we would have a federation protocol fundamentally built on the principles of consent and mutual understanding, which is easily accomplished with modern security primitives such as OCAP.
but this is now and that world doesn't exist yet. and that means as an admin, I have to make some tough calls once in a while. but it doesn't mean i particularly enjoy having to make these calls, or exclude people or whatever. i really don't like banning people off the island, i don't like receiving hate mail, etc.
i'm not "pro censor", but i'm not going to unnecessarily expose users to instances which are extremely likely to harm them (e.g. with doxxing or swatting or whatever). i think that's a fair balance.
i'm not handing out instance blocks or user blocks like Oprah over here. we *intentionally* let a lot of things slide that under other circumstances, we wouldn't let slide.
look, not all of us block early and block often like mastodon admins do. when i block instances, there's generally a damned good reason behind it. we generally block individual user accounts instead around here, but sometimes, that's not the right call to make.
users have freedom of choice. if they want a free for all where they have to make all moderation decisions themselves, they can join instances that work like that.
if users want a space that is comfortable, they can choose that too.
this isn't an either/or thing. admins which provide spaces that defang the fediverse like I do, are not any more or less evil than the ones which run free speech instances.
@foxhkron that's not the people i am banning. i'm more than happy to have legitimate discussion about what the goals of this space are and how we achieve them. however, if you come at me with "lol u are a faggot u cuck", then yeah, you get the wall.