ronguest
ronguest

I tried out Mastodon but I could never achieve a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio. It also seemed quite complicated. I love that micro.blog makes it easy to avoid really bad content. How the biggest decentralized social network is dealing with its Nazi problem - The Verge

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smokey
smokey

@ronguest This is probably something we do have to worry about, since any Mastodon (ActivityPub) user can end up imported to Micro.blog via ActivityPub replies to a Micro.blog user’s Mastodon cross-posts, or following, or, I think, username lookup (not that anyone would look upor follow a Gab user, but…) :-( Not lose sleep over, I don’t think, but I think the ActivityPub support could be a vector for transmitting unwanted content if someone specifically wanted to use it to do so.

This article also made me think that the tech community is going about federation and decentralization all wrong; we shouldn’t decentralize and federate the systems, but rather the people. Once again blogs and RSS got it right, but nothing newer has….

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johnjohnston
johnjohnston

@smokey

the tech community is going about federation and decentralization all wrong; we shouldn’t decentralize and federate the systems, but rather the people

Succinct. Fits really well with the idea @manton expressed about micro.blog being able to ban folk from the aggregation/community without silencing their own space.

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In reply to
ronguest
ronguest

@smokey Evil has a way of creeping in.The thing that worries me the most would be the humans running micro.blog being overwhelmed. It’s easier to scale algorithms. But as we see with the other platforms, algos can’t really deal with this kind of issue.

Like you I don’t see a major risk on the horizon.

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manton
manton

@smokey @ronguest We already block about a dozen Mastodon instances, and my intention was to keep that in sync with Toot.cafe's block list. They have blocked Gab, and so has Mastodon.social, so we should too.

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ronguest
ronguest

@manton That’s good to know.

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smokey
smokey

@manton Now that you say that, it sounds familiar; maybe I remember seeing you mention that you were blocking instances back when you first rolled out the integration. At any rate, it’s good to know there is a policy and protection mechanism in place 👍

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smokey
smokey

@ronguest Staying small has numerous benefits compared to going for scale, but if there ever is an attack, scale on the attackers’ side will usually trample humans :-( Luckily, it sounds like there are good defenses for our humans in this case :-)

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smokey
smokey

@johnjohnston Thanks :-) There’s probably a longer blog post in that, if I can steal some time…

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