Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

https://infosec.exchange/@postmodern/109523637731779949

by doener • 4 years ago

331 288 4 years ago

paulgb• 4 years ago

The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376

matwood4• 4 years ago

Agreed. And the fact they are blocking mastodon shows it must be impacting Twitter user numbers.

masklinn• 4 years ago

Or, just as likely, mastodon users are elon critics and thus hurt his feelings, which is a bannable offense.

Thus mastodon cross-posting and reposting is a proxy for bannable offenses, and therefore a bannable offense.

weinzierl8• 4 years ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you but when they start fighting you, you know you've won.

rapnie• 4 years ago

Mastodon wouldn't have become so popular if it weren't for all these Elon actions. Elon is single-handedly leading a massive 'Streisand Marketing' campaign to sublime perfection.

jl62• 4 years ago

Comedy is now legal on Twitter.

tjpnz3• 4 years ago

Only if it doesn't include parody or bruise Elon's fragile ego.

sandworm10110• 4 years ago

Lol. Kneecapping competitors is what billionaires do. You dont win capitalism by following all the rules.

koonsolo• 4 years ago

How many users will stay on Twitter because of this? And how many will leave because of it?

My guess: it's an extra indication that Twitter is not a reliable platform to build an audience.

Billionaires are billionaires because they build a product that everybody wants.

koheripbal• 4 years ago

It's what all people do when they have the ability.

SilverBirch• 4 years ago

I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating it.

fastball• 4 years ago

Musk's behavior in this whole thing seems far from competent.

rgbrenner• 4 years ago

Are we watching musk "get" radicalized? Or has he always been that way?

Because I remember way back, when journalists would write poor reviews of Tesla, he would go after them... typically accusing them of being compromised in some way, or not really being a journalist.

Then there's the swatting of a tesla wistleblower.

Or when a customer was "rude", he canceled their tesla pre-order.

Or when that tesla employee posted a self driving video of his own car--he fired him.

Or when there was an anonymous blogger that posted negative tesla investment advice, musk tracked him down, and called his employer trying to get him fired.

Im not going to keep going.. there are so many of these dating back a decade. I think the truth is he said what he thought people wanted to hear ("free speech absolutism"), and then once he obtained twitter, who he really is--exceptionally thin skinned--wont let him run it in a principled way.

A4ET8a8uTh03• 4 years ago

Yes. However, I would argue that is a good thing. Musk has become a poster child one can easily point to and ask a question along the lines of 'is it reasonable for society to allow a person with resources near some nation-state levels to exist and not limit their ability to gather that amount of resources?'

While in general I am very permissive and I hate imposition on my individual freedoms, I am increasingly convinced that leveling of playing field is necessary. You reach an upper limit of say 'five small islands' and you start seeing major increase in tax burden. As you can undoubtedly tell, I am no tax expert, but I am tired of this prince equivalent of our times. Wait, not princes ( princes had some structures that kept them somewhat in check ). Maybe robber barons is a better comparison. US managed to get them under control once, but that required a world war II. I am honestly not sure we can repeat that approach this time.

<< Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating it.

I would hesitate to characterize Trump as incompetent. He and Musk share some qualities and note that both of them managed to use the existing system to their advantage better than an average person ( leaving for a moment the above average starting point for both ). Still, fool and his money is soon parted and notice that both of them manage to screw everyone they interact with ( but themselves ), which indicates some level of competency. Unfortunately, that competency is focused only one thing.

In short, I disagree. Twitter saga is just better documented. WH by necessity is harder to properly scrutinize ( despite all the leaks and media attention ).

sandworm10110• 4 years ago

Radicalization is very interesting. Rather than talk of a person being radicalized in a paticular way (medical/religion/politics/flat earth etc) can a person become susceptible to radicalization across the board? Can someone be "radicalized" into taking radical stances in every context? I have seen older relatives fall down this hole. Every little thing is now life-or-death, order v chaos. Musk might be on that pattern.

hgdfhgdhgfdh• 4 years ago

How exactly is he radicalized? Because he suspended 7 journalists for 12-24 hours for doxxing the flight with his kid on it?

mcv4• 4 years ago

He's actually not coming across as that much more competent. He seems to be running Twitter into the ground, rather than improving it.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Yes, and how smooth it's been going. Human groups are still not well trained to resist this (especially if the rumor of remaining employees being under work visas)

jhgfjhfgjg• 4 years ago

What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?

api3• 4 years ago

I have seen a bit of that but most including myself still hold the same opinion. A private silo is not a free speech zone. Twitter wasn’t before Elon and isn’t now and never will be.

There’s layers of irony here. All the “libs” who were supposedly pro censorship ran off to the actual free speech zone. The Fediverse is almost uncensorable since you can hop instances or just run your own.

There is a difference though. It has no algorithm that boosts “engaging” content like craziness, hate, and trolling. I’ve always thought that what the far right was so mad about was loss of a free propaganda ploy that involved baiting the algorithm. You can always have free speech in a million places but a free promotion machine isn’t easily replaceable.

Of course the worst excesses of “cancel culture” were also driven by the algorithm. Moral outrage mobs increase engagement just like racism and wacko conspiracy theories do.

I personally hope centralized all encompassing social media burns. It’s driven all the craziest excesses everywhere.

hef19898• 4 years ago

I fall in the first camp. Elon's claimed stabd on free speech and his actions are just so opposite to each other, that calling out his hypocrasy makes absolute sense.

Pxtl3• 4 years ago

There's a big difference between how conservatives are calling the old order corrupt and criminal and calling for Jack et al to be arrested, vs complaining that Musk is being a clown and a hypocrite.

tremon• 4 years ago

What about it?

UncleMeat• 4 years ago

Now we are just having the conversation we wanted the entire time. Rather than having people hide behind "free speech absolutism" we can have a discussion about why some people think that transphobia is more acceptable on a platform than making fun of Elon Musk.

mcv4• 4 years ago

I don't really see that pivot. Only the opposite in Musk. What people are complaining about is his hypocrisy: he claimed not to ban anyone except when required by law, but instead it looks like he's banning more people, and more arbitrarily, than Twitter ever did before his takeover.

Sure he has the right to do so, but it makes him a liar and a hypocrite.

lettergram3• 4 years ago

Pretty sure Musk was discussing freedom of ideas.

That said; many of us also thought Kanye shouldn’t have been banned. Few on hacker news agreed lol

You either have absolute freedom of speech or none, in many ways.

That said, I appreciate that at least people are being told why they are banned. The prior set of billionaires who owned Twitter often wouldn’t say why.

Blocking links to competitors, blocking real-time tracking of people, and a guy telling the world how great hitler is are fairly mundane / reasonable things to block imo.

lapcat8• 4 years ago

at least people are being told why they are banned

This is not even true. "i did not delete anything. i received no notification about which tweet got me suspended. i still have no idea" https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1604227164416925696

mcv4• 4 years ago

You either have absolute freedom of speech or none, in many ways.

I don't think there is such a thing as absolute freedom of speech. Speech always has some limitations, and that's never been controversial. Threats, blackmail, libel, discussing plans to commit a crime, those have always been illegal in some way.

But at the same time, Twitter/Musk banning people is also protected by the First Amendment. He is not the government, and the government can't compel him to allow or ban people on his platform.

Well, unless his platform is considered a utility or a monopoly. Then it becomes a different issue. And especially banning competitors could be anticompetitive behaviour.

srajabi• 4 years ago

I wonder how long before Twitter patches this, one thought is that since they've fired so many people they may not be executing well enough to patch this quickly.

Also, is there a way to do this where they won't be able to patch? Maybe alternate domain names for these known domain names that are being blocked, similar to what thePirateBay did.

kazinator• 4 years ago

How long before Twitter's knee-jerk, whack-a-mole patching causes some regression due to insufficient QA, accelerating Twitter's demise?

drowsspa• 4 years ago

Something about authentication is already failing for me, it keeps thinking I've logged off randomly

jojobas• 4 years ago

Twitter's anti-Mastodon filtering is clown shoes amateur hour.

I'd think it will be effective for 90%+ of people trying to link to where they're leaving. This evasion manual will not be seen or understood by an average user.

vidarh21• 4 years ago

From what I've seen, it seems to have had the opposite effect. People have gotten creative and far more have spoken about it.

snvzz• 4 years ago

Loud minority.

The average user's exposure to any of that is minimum, and they're not about to abandon their twitter clout for some unknown platform.

ajb• 4 years ago

Every news outlet, and perhaps journalist associations such as the NUJ, should set up their own mastodon instance now and advertise that that's how to avoid Musk's blocks. There's no need for them to take this lying down.

nemo44x5• 4 years ago

And they’ll just be reporting news to each other leaving a massive vacuum on Twitter for others to quickly fill.

Most people don’t really care about this story. They’re just users looking for news, opinions, trending topics, etc. if you don’t follow these types of accounts then you haven’t noticed much change on Twitter.

Honestly if anything I’ve noticed Twitter is probably a bit more fun and interesting now.

_djo_4• 4 years ago

People are on Twitter because of accounts like that, across the spectrum. It was the one place where you could find everyone, including politicians, organisations, journalists, experts, and random people with cool interests, and interact on a more or less equal basis.

When enough of those leave it'll just become Truth Social or Parler. You might personally find that more fun and interesting, depending on your political background, but it'll never sustain the same user base.

robtaylor• 4 years ago

Hilarious you see the NUJ as competent enough for that. In my view the NUJ, NCTJ etc are (sadly) not the answer for the challenges of media in 2022 and beyond - it could be argued they are not fit for purpose.

codeflo7• 4 years ago

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.

But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic, but worse, fragments the community and creates (IMO) unacceptable privacy concerns. Self-hosting requires unnecessary hoops, loses some community functionality, and runs into the risk of "defederation", which only exacerbates the problem of servers being overly important. If you do decide to go with one of the existing servers, and hadn't been there early enough to get into one of those run by the foundation, you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

lukeschlather2• 4 years ago

you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar

I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person. I've only used Twitter a handful of times and don't really like the medium, but it's really not that hard to run a server. And I don't think there's any fundamental reason this doesn't scale. Every single community center runs a website, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine local, trusted Mastodon-type servers operated by all sorts of organizations. You may already be a member of an organization that has the capability and drive in your area, if you just can find the other people who want it.

vidarh21• 4 years ago

There are also paid hosting services, and more are sure to come.

nonethewiser• 4 years ago

I have some friends operating a Mastodon server, with a team of volunteer operators, and I'm pretty sure I've met all of them in person.

But this will never describe a significant portion of Twitter users. It might work for some, but it wont replace Twitter.

smcn2• 4 years ago

I agree with some of what you wrote, especially regarding selfhosting. I personally would like to see the ability to follow and post to local timelines, to ensure that you're able to be part of communities in a decentralised way.

However.

you're basically required to trust your online identity and private message secrecy to an anonymous activist admin with a kitty avatar.

Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok? Those companies are actively looking to exploit you for profit. Whereas strawman kitty avatar can't do anything. Especially are there are no private messages on Mastodon.

codeflo7• 4 years ago

Is this worse than trusting Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok?

Yes for the first two, no for the third. US-based companies are large targets for potential lawsuits, and consequently have processes in place to prevent random employees from accessing your DMs without cause. I obviously wouldn't trust those companies completely -- we're really arguing about probabilities here -- but there's at least some measure of accountability that makes them unlikely to do something trivially stupid.

there are no private messages on Mastodon

It does have a DM feature -- that they aren't private is exactly the point.

vidarh21• 4 years ago

In terms of local timeline inclusion that kind-of already muddies things, but WebFinger does provide for aliases and supports forwarding, so maybe the ability to have accounts on multiple instances but have them all forward to the same "follows"/"following" lists might work (likely not without changes, and there are many potential pitfalls there, though).

aaa_aaa• 4 years ago

I dont think it feels threatened. Most migrated Mastodon users dislike Musk and they deliberately rub him the wrong way.

whitepaint2• 4 years ago

You can export your data and move it to another server. If you're banned on Twitter, you're done.

Also, complete failures like banning important stories, banning presidents, banning journalists etc. cannot happen on Mastodon the same way that it has happened countless of times on Twitter and will continue happening.

Mastodon is obviously superior when it comes to the freedom of speech. Elon is afraid, because he knows. Funnily enough, he is the reason why we will get the better version of social media faster.

gebruikersnaam• 4 years ago

Note: if the server you're on is banned, you won't be able to move to a different server.

drexlspivey2• 4 years ago

What if your server that is run by a hobbyist suddenly shuts down without any notice? If they had an accident for example or they got hacked or whatever

aquova• 4 years ago

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power. But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronisticm.

I don't understand what decentralized internet service you would prefer then? The ability for anyone to host their own decentralized instance is exactly what a return to the protocols of old would look like. They may not have had anime avatars, but you were just as susceptible to the whims of your IRC admin. Either you trust in the faceless centralized conglomerate or in your smaller devop. What third option is there?

codeflo7• 4 years ago

Peer to peer networks, with servers being purely optional for convenience (for convenient access from mobile, for example). Nothing about the social experience -- including your identity -- being tied to the "server" you're using to access the network. Technology has advanced since the invention of IRC.

ehnto• 4 years ago

fragments the community

I think this is a feature for most communities to be honest. Twitter is great at inter-networking, and a decent soap-box, but communities there are shallow and when your audience is "everyone on the platform" the chilling effect means only certain types of people are participating honestly and in full. There's probably some great communities that happen to be on twitter in spite of there being almost no open functionality that helps with that, but I bet they would all grow and foster better conversations if they added a discord server or something similar. Twitter is about as good as a blog comment section for long-term community building.

codeflo7• 4 years ago

I agree that subcommunities are a useful feature. That only proves my point, though. The positive example you give, Discord servers, are a lot more like subreddits than they are like Mastodon servers. You can join multiple of them, the power of the moderator is local and doesn't affect your account as a whole. Discord and Reddit are of course centralized services, but in theory there's nothing preventing a decentralized system from having a similar feature.

tjpnz3• 4 years ago

I just downloaded the app for a second time and tried to create an account. I failed.

I thought I'd try mastodon.social but couldn't find it on any of the lists so chose the search option. Found it but it wouldn't let me register an account. Go go site, there's a register button but rather than taking me to a signup form I just get a big wall of text about how I can't be a sexist or a transphobe. Fine, I won't. But why can't I register?

vidarh21• 4 years ago

So you pre-decided to sign up for a specific instance which was closed to signups and is then surprised you can't sign up.

Go to joinmastodon.org or instances.social, not directly to a specific instance.

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

That server is swamped with registrations and had to pause them. Pick another.

darkerside• 4 years ago

It's interesting that now, when it would be most relevant, discussion about a social media platform running on blockchain has all but disappeared.

If not now, then when?

whitepaint2• 4 years ago

Because blockchains are definitely not built for that..?

codeflo7• 4 years ago

Assuming you mean an actual blockchain and aren't just using it, as some people seem to do, as a catch-all term for cryptographic signatures, it's expensive overkill. Social media really doesn't need to pay the brutal computational costs to solve the Byzantine generals problem. You don't need to establish an immutable record under adversarial conditions because there's no "double spend" problem. A simple synchronization mechanism for cryptographically signed posts (to prove authorship) is enough.

3232• 4 years ago

But everything about Mastodon seems badly designed and engineered. The focus on "servers" seems technologically anachronistic

Jack linked to nostr which tries to solve some of these problems: https://nitter.it/jack/status/1603945963944480768

The problem with Mastodon and similar programs:

- User identities are attached to domain names controlled by third-parties;

- Server owners can ban you, just like Twitter; Server owners can also block other servers;

- Migration between servers is an afterthought and can only be accomplished if servers cooperate. It doesn't work in an adversarial environment (all followers are lost);

- There are no clear incentives to run servers, therefore they tend to be run by enthusiasts and people who want to have their name attached to a cool domain. Then, users are subject to the despotism of a single person, which is often worse than that of a big company like Twitter, and they can't migrate out;

- Since servers tend to be run amateurishly, they are often abandoned after a while — which is effectively the same as banning everybody;

- It doesn't make sense to have a ton of servers if updates from every server will have to be painfully pushed (and saved!) to a ton of other servers. This point is exacerbated by the fact that servers tend to exist in huge numbers, therefore more data has to be passed to more places more often;

- For the specific example of video sharing, ActivityPub enthusiasts realized it would be completely impossible to transmit video from server to server the way text notes are, so they decided to keep the video hosted only from the single instance where it was posted to, which is similar to the Nostr approach.

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr#very-short-summary-o...

r721• 4 years ago

Previous HN discussions of Nostr:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29749061 (11 months ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33746360 (22 days ago)

vidarh21• 4 years ago

You can easily achieve the same with ActivityPub relays and a few small tweaks - if this turns out to actually.be useful it'd be easy to provide gatewaying relays for those who care.

hk__23• 4 years ago

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

How do I find people to follow?
First, you must know them and get their public key somehow

And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.

beowulfey2• 4 years ago

I am a little younger than the days of decentralized social media, but I caught the tail end of it. To me, Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media. I think a lot of people are so used to centralized platforms that it seems crazy to have it be decentralized again.

I suspect as Mastodon grows, there will be more servers that become popular and will likely host the bulk of people, in much the same way that gmail pulled in the bulk of email users—but it will still be possible to have other “addresses” too. The idea is starting to grow on me.

mmastrac4• 4 years ago

Technology Connections put it well

https://hachyderm.io/@TechConnectify@mas.to/1095298448544650...

"Imagine you signed up for a sort of reverse-email address where your sent emails landed on a public page that anyone who knew your address could read if they wanted to and even follow you for more."

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

Mastodon feels like an “email address” for social media

And it’s waiting for its AOL and Gmail.

weinzierl8• 4 years ago

I think I'm in the same demographic as you, but I don't see it as negatively. Most of the issues you mentioned don't bother me as much or could be fixed.

The only thing that concerns me is the risk of defederation. Why would anyone want to run an instance if they (and their users) are at the risk of being excluded on the whim of a small and intransparent group of people?

I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

In the end it's all a matter of trust and it would be good if more organizantions ran their own instances so that we would have bigger plurality of large instances.

skissane11• 4 years ago

I mean so far moderation on Mastodon seems to work, but it still does not sit right with me that we basically replaced a dictatorship with the (benevolt) oligoply of the group of most popular server's owners.

Elon Musk has made some dumb moderation calls, but he seems open to changing some of them in response to popular feedback and media pressure. I don’t know if the same is true of those people. If new Twitter bans whoever, odds are high everybody will hear about it, and if they shouldn’t be banned, odds are decent it will be reversed. I’m not sure the same is true for this “oligopoly” for whom few know who they are. Seems even worse than Twitter as far as transparency and accountability goes

petesergeant• 4 years ago

I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but I’ve switched off my Twitter and I’m going to really try and make Mastodon work because I think all issues except the network effect are surmountable here

ajross• 4 years ago

Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

I don't want to be too glib, because your technical concerns are legitimate and well-argued. But... have you actually tried using it?

It works fine! It doesn't work as well as Twitter and has rough edges, but at this point it's well past the "will it work?" stage. There are real people there posting real content and engaging in real ways. If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, people could all just move over and... it would be fine.

So it's OK to criticize, but the idea that it's somehow fatally flawed seems weird to me. It works fine.

jackmott42• 4 years ago

Yeah so instead of worrying about all the stuff you are worrying about, I've just been using Mastodon and its been fine. I see the toots from the people I follow, I find the people I want to follow. Its been fine.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

Every one of your complaints about individual servers apply to Twitter as it is already, and some of them I see as features. For instance, not completely losing your community because Twitter or Discord or whatever parent company decides one day you don't belong there.

You can move accounts to a different server if you stop liking where you're at, which is a feature nobody has elsewhere it seems.

I view Mastodon as if Twitter, a Microblogging platform, and IRC had a child.

Let's take the reverse tack though, and agree with your opinion that it's a clusterfuck. Twitter should be threatened by Mastodon because they're losing users to it in spite of all those "problems".

that_guy_iain• 4 years ago

I'm exactly in the target demographic that desperately wants a a return to the old, decentralized, protocol-based internet. We need working alternatives to Twitter to prevent a single mentally unstable billionaire from having this kind of power.

Personally, I think we should have this stuff regulated. We have power, mail, phones, internet, etc but most of the internet just isn't. Which seems really odd considering that for most people their Outlook/Google email is far more important to them than their postal mail but can be taken away from them because they emailed a photo to a doctor. Your revenue generating Twitter account can be suspended because you tweeted something some random person just didn't like with no real recourse. YouTube is probably the worse for kneecapping people's livilhoods over dodgy claims.

Decenteralized just seems like it'll be a pain for me to find stuff. And instead of being held hostage by a big company with policies and processes and money to sue them. You're being held hostage by some random guy who may decide he doesn't like being connected to a certain network and all of sudden you've got to create a new account somewhere else.

unloco3• 4 years ago

Mastodon, regardless of your server, can see and connect to everyone in the federation. The servers are just for how your name appears, local and moderation rules.

infosec.exchange can talk to and see content in mastodon.social

rc_kas• 4 years ago

I have build https://sendie.com as an alternative. Twitter doesn't seem to care about me and my 100 users :D

pxoe2• 4 years ago

lack of algorithmic feed (and the whole anti-algo slant) and lack of openly viewable likes on people's profiles are actually gonna backfire. mastodon is gonna get lonely and boring, because it's kinda hard to do content discovery, particularly the kind where you get recommendations based on people you follow or interested in, so that those recs would be in closer proximity to you, rather than just getting random posts from trending. for how much algo stuff (like topics, suggested tweets, etc.) and particularly algo feed gets talked shit about, it's vital to discovery of new posts and new people.

without those things, it's easier to just run out of stuff and people to see, and end up in a place where you're caught up with things, and new people aren't entering your circle, and the activity just stops. well, it is also unlikely, because people just do stuff and mix other people in, but it's easier to end up in that static state, when you don't get suggestions in other ways.

at least there are reblogs. but there's also no option to filter those out right in someone's profile. so it's gonna get real annoying if those are gonna be the only way for someone to push content from somebody else.

vidarh21• 4 years ago

When you follow someone, you can mute just boosts from them if you like.

Other than that, all of these things are things people can build using the API. I agree they're needed, and I think enough others do that things will get built.

I certainly want to build my own algorithmic feed, because reverse chronology is already a nuisance to me.

sangnoir• 4 years ago

Any article tangentially related to Mastodon inevitably has a comment like yours voted to the top, even when it's off-topic and adds little to the conversation. I'm reminded of the immortal slashdot comment about another "inferior" disruptor: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame

Why Twitter should feel threatened by this clusterfuck at all is a mystery to me.

Perhaps because Twitter has metrics on how many times the Mastodon links are posted and followed, and you don't?

kornhole3• 4 years ago

I trust an anarchist admin with my DMs more than any corporation, billionaire, intelligence agencies, and their data miners, but you do you.

kornhole3• 4 years ago

I just setup a new instance in less than 30 minutes. There are many ways it can be done.. Hoops are optional.

rcade2• 4 years ago

Mastodon looks workable to me.

Choosing a Mastodon instance is like signing up for an email provider. Email is decentralized and seems to be doing alright.

I picked an instance that was good-sized at 9,000 users with a focus I liked: indieweb.social. That gives me a Local feed of interesting indieweb-related content in addition to my Home feed of people I follow. I didn't have to trust my privacy to an anonymous activist. I know who is running the instance and support it via Patreon.

ATMLOTTOBEER• 4 years ago

I think mastodon will be ok. The lesson learned from comparing twitter to Reddit, hacker news, and Facebook is that creating a successful social network is a moderation problem not a technology problem. BYO moderation strategies like those in use by mastodon, Reddit, twitch and discord can scale (while those of hackernews, fb, twitter cannot).

LinuxBender• 4 years ago

They mention base64 encoding messages to evade filters. There were actually other base{n} methods [1] created specifically for Twitter to be more space optimized though not as readily available to operating systems. I guess this is less useful if they are really expanding the text limit to 4k soon but figured I would add it in the event they add a parser for base64.

This assumes most people would be able to:

    npm install base2048

I think it might be interesting if Mastodon added a function to automatically detect and decode base2048 for browsers in javascript since JS is required to view a Mastodon site anyway. Bots would then have to adopt this logic, rendering most bots useless until they adapt and evolve. But I am not a developer and maybe this is just not possible.

[1] https://github.com/qntm/base2048

lapcat8• 4 years ago

This link shortener works: https://spacekaren.sucks/

It seems to work by blocking connections to the Twitterbot User-Agent while allowing other connections.

Nux• 4 years ago

They'll then just ban links they can't open. They should serve some sort of content instead.

lapcat8• 4 years ago

It's unlikely that Twitter has the (human) resources at this point to implement comprehensive censorship of Mastodon. They're currently only warning about links to popular instances such as mastodon.social, but links to smaller instances such as the one I use are still fine. One advantage of decentralization.

zipidedoda• 4 years ago

From the very bottom of the Mastodon front page: "Sponsorship does not equal influence. Mastodon s fully independent." This has never worked in the history of everything.

fareesh• 4 years ago

If it becomes a popular trend for youtube channels to upload YouTube videos that are just previews with a links to Rumble videos, and the destination videos violate YouTube TOS, if YouTube created a Rumble filter to quickly address it, it would solve the problem.

Would it be accurate to call this censorship or a quick and dirty solution against accounts trying to evade TOS?

Framing the Mastodon filter by omitting that context is insincere. This type of insincerity is fairly typical in politics (which this entire ordeal is).

DoctorOW• 4 years ago

This is being echoed throughout the thread but Mastodon instances whose TOS is similar or stricter than Twitter are also being banned. This is why I feel it's anti-competitive. The thing that makes yours a false equivalence is after looking up Rumble it appears to be a centralized. This is more like if Microsoft decided to block servers without the Windows Server headers citing the use of Linux servers in illegal activity. Windows server likely does make up a small amount of CP servers but that's not something within the control of those software competitors. In both instances the only link between illegal content and the vast majority of legit users is using a competing software.

matwood4• 4 years ago

Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it. My (and I think most peoples) problem is the hypocrisy displayed by Musk and his sycophants. I would respect Musk a bit if he dropped the free speech charade and simply said it's his playground and he'll do whatever he wants.

I don't think YouTube has ever claimed to be a public town square or a desire for free speech absolutism.

guerrilla3• 4 years ago

Musk comically overpaid for Twitter and can do anything he wants with it.

No, he can't violate anti-trust (or any other) laws.

jansan• 4 years ago

I like how Mastodon is becoming the new Outkube:

https://www.theonion.com/new-decoy-website-launched-to-lure-...

jw1224• 4 years ago

Also, TIL you can put a meta-redirect inside of a data:text/html URI and it will indeed redirect. That will probably come in handy at some point.
Also TIL, <script> works just fine in data:text/html URIs, despite me having NotScript installed... Also remembering that one for later.

This seems pretty concerning to me… I would’ve expected the browser to prevent this somehow. Any security experts able to verify?

blacklight• 4 years ago

I am an admin of a small instance that most likely isn't on Twitter's block list, so my profile name and description could report the link to my Mastodon profile without getting me banned.

However, even without a ban from their side, this has really been the last nail in the coffin between me and Twitter. Suspending accounts for posting links to another (open-source) social network is wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start listing them.

So I've decided to permanently deactivate my account and say goodbye for good to the stinky fascist shithole that Twitter has become.

concordDance8• 4 years ago

Note that the vast vast vast majority of people and posts on Twitter are not fascist. Stinky shithole I'll grant, but that's been true for a decade.

concordDance8• 4 years ago

I'm never sure if people are downvoting because they disagree or because they think its a bad post that doesn't contribute to the discussion... maybe we should have a system with more than one way of voting?

soheil• 4 years ago

Glad to see Twitter is doing this.

The reason Musk bought Twitter was to rid it of the type of behavior you frequently see on m6n. It's a direct competitor to Twitter. Twitter is a commercial product and needs to maintain its users and revenue. It'd be foolish for it to amplify a coordinated attacked on its existence by the very people who very publicly advocate for the destruction of Twitter.

I'm sure many people will do their best to minimize the influence of these cult-like echo chambers with negative contribution to society.

guelo• 4 years ago

Free speech absolutism is so complicated

tiffanyh3• 4 years ago

For a free service, there’s a lot of strong opinions here.

While I’m no Elon fan, he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns. And he paid a bunch of money to have that right.

dEnigma2• 4 years ago

I think people mostly take issue with the hypocrisy of claiming to be a paragon of free speech while censoring all kinds of things because Musk personally dislikes them.

tiffanyh3• 4 years ago

Isn’t the simple answer, just stop using Twitter if you feel so strongly about this n

lapcat8• 4 years ago

he’s entitled to do what he wants with what he owns

As has been said already many times, the debate is not whether he has the legal authority to do this, the debate is over his hypocrisy of claiming free speech absolutism.

garganzol• 4 years ago

This should be targeted by antimonopoly committee, now. This is a clear violation of fair competition rules. Antitrust law enforcement in 3, 2, 1.

yboris• 4 years ago

I tried to post the link to this particular post (article?) on Twitter and it claimed there was an error:

Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.

Twitter is not letting me share this information!

FireInsight2• 4 years ago

It's a toot on Mastodon that's why

im3w1l• 4 years ago

It's so unreal watching this unfold. Whenever you think it can't get any worse they go one step further.

avinassh• 4 years ago

These are some fine tricks. But potential downside is Musk could start banning people who are evading the censorship

RivieraKid• 4 years ago

I don't think Mastodon has any chance of overtaking Twitter. Here's how I would do it:

Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.

Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.

Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.

mmastrac4• 4 years ago

It's not about the look of the social network - it's about the people you are interested in moving to a place and you following them. Mastodon has been that for me (the infosec people moved over and enough interesting "celebs") and I've been enjoying my time after a couple of days of adjustment.

d0m• 4 years ago

Not that I care, but you could even copy the current twitter usernames to your new twitter, alongside all their public tweets and followers. So, when switching, a user wouldn't even need to add back their data or find back their previous followers.

kevincox• 4 years ago

But then you have a platform with all of the architectural problems Twitter but doesn't yet have a disliked leader on charge.

It is basically inevitable that eventually this same thing will happen again and we are back in the same place.

This is why Mastodon is enticing. It provides some architectural advantages that mitigate this problem at a fundamental level.

FireInsight2• 4 years ago

You'll probably get that if Musk steps down as CEO... The best part about Mastodon IMO is that it's NOT Twitter, speaking as a Mastodon user of course. It feels way more manual and it feels like I need to build my feed and community myself, but it's empowering for specifically those reasons.

drooby2• 4 years ago

Given how clumsy this "censorship" is, I highly doubt that this is a conscious effort of censorship, and is instead an automatic filter that was already in place to prevent malicious activity.

Mastadon's original account was suspended for breaking the new TOS for linking to content that was in violation (the jet tracker), which then prompted many other people to break the TOS.

I suspect there is some algorithm that twitter has had for many years that checks:

IF link is highly associated with TOS violation, THEN flag content as "potentially harmful".

lapcat8• 4 years ago

"Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter." https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

drooby2• 4 years ago

Lmao! My comment did not age well.

shepherdjerred• 4 years ago

Wow. I can't believe they actually wrote this down.

rkapsoro2• 4 years ago

I suspect this whole "Twitter blocking Mastodon links for anticompetitive reasons" narrative is wrong to the point of being disingenuous.

People have been tweeting links ElonJet trackers on Mastodon instances (including the official @joinmastodon account!), getting both themselves and the target Mastodon instance domains flagged. This is edgelord behaviour.

Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information. Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information (https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/security/privacy/privac...). Those tracker accounts are using non-public information.

Jack Sweeney, the guy who runs ElonJet, is on record saying he'll stop tracking if paid money. This is extortion. That is why Elon is pursuing legal action against him.

The only criticism I believe one can make here is that Elon's personal involvement (albeit brought on by attacks on himself and his family) has meant Twitter's moderation team has made enforcement of this particular ToS violation a priority. I agree that the solution to Twitter's previous bias is not more bias, and I look forward to Elon & the Twitter team coming up with a better solution for this.

Unfortunately left-minded techies have uncritically jumped on this narrative of Elon cravenly blocking Mastodon links because 'he feels threatened by it'. Just because someone has been very successful does not mean it is legitimate to mistreat them.

JumpCrisscross3• 4 years ago

Twitter's policy is simple - do not dox people with real-time location information

This is a novel Twitter policy interpretation and everyone knows it. It’s par for the course for Twitter. But it’s hypocritical of Musk to be doing it.

Elon's jet has a PIA which limits legal use of broadcast ADS-B information

No, it does not. It lets operators rotate their aircraft address. Elon didn’t. He held the phone wrong.

If the FAA wanted to restrict the use of this information, it wouldn’t be publishing it.

thefourthchime• 4 years ago

My understanding is that the information is public. Can you provide some links to support that?

rkapsoro2• 4 years ago

Alas.

Since I made this comment, Twitter announced their new Third Party Social Media policy, and it looks terrible and unnecessary.

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

class4behavior• 4 years ago

You should be able to choose with your wallet or whatever you're paying with - your self in this case - but for communication classic server-client structure does not offer that option because you have to rely on the choices of the rest of your contacts. That alone is enough to support alternative solutions.

Yet, it's really funny how so many on HN, the vanguard of startups among news aggregators, rather continue to fanboy Musk than engage in brainstorming opportunities the Fediverse and ActivityPub offer.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

Imagine you're the schmuck who agreed to Elon's "hardcore" work environment, showed up at 1 AM to do spontaneous code review, slept in the office, all because you so fervently believe in Elon's grand vision, and this is what you get assigned to implement.

rolenthedeep• 4 years ago

People love to play this game of "well actually mastodon is bad because in this extremely specific situation you can lose your account or not be able to migrate"

In the case where all of the normal options are gone, sure, you're fucked. But in 99.9% of cases, you do have options to migrate.

Mastodon has options. You are given control, even notionally. Twitter doesn't even pretend to give you options. If you're banned, fuck you, that's it. If a billionaire buys the platform, fuck you, that's it.

If a mastodon server starts going downhill, you have options. If a mastodon admin goes off the rails, you have options. If dama happens and the server defederates from another, you still have options.

Mastodon gives you more opportunity and choice in all circumstances. There is no escape hatch for Facebook or Twitter, if something goes wrong you're just fucked. There isn't even a live person you could hypothetically talk to about it.

Sure, mastodon has problems. The exchange is that it's a truly free service without adversiments, algorithms, or coerced engagement. You don't generate money for the platform owner. That comes with risks, and you have options to deal with that risk.

Whether or not you like those options is entirely irrelevant. The options exist on mastodon, they do not exist on Twitter.

Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion

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