我可能發布了 XI 的視訊聊天記錄…

抱歉 - 這可能是我的錯

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TIL Mozilla has a mastodon server. Have an upvote.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Kbin is the Jamaica of the Fediverse, a land of special people where champions grow.

This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven’t done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn’t surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

I think the Fediverse.observer stats for the 19th are off - it’s showing that drop across all software categories - Mastodon and Kbin show the same dip.

Silently hoists the Jolly Roger…

The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).

I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).

As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.

Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.

Kurt Vonnegut advises doing exactly what you’re doing with your RPGs. The end of that lecture touches specifically on it.

I completely understand about keeping that part of your work private. I have done much the same thing for the same reasons with the vast majority of my creations, and you’re wise to protect the part of yourself that keeps your imagination flowing.

That being said, should you reach a point where you’re ready to share work (RPGs, writing, or just things that inspire you), the magazine is always open to you.

Re: Philosophy - I agree on the difficulty of the writing. I’ve read some small amount of Sartre (Being and Nothingness), but I remember being frustrated at the density of the arguments, which often seemed an over-articulation of the obvious for the sake of precision - and the entire work felt like a response to work we hadn’t covered. In my college classes, it was presented as existentialism (in fact, we went from Descartes to Hume to Sartre), and now, looking at it’s place in phenomenology, I feel robbed that the connections to Husserl and Heidegger weren’t properly illustrated - the historical context would have helped me finish the book. Looks like I’ll have to give it another shot :)

You just introduced me into an entirely new field of study. Phenomenology wasn’t even mentioned in my philosophy or history of consciousness studies back in college. I’m going through the wikipedia on the field now and it describes in amazing detail the line of reasoning behind the imagination engine. If you have more sources on it that you enjoy, please feel free to forward them or post them to the @13thFloor.

The same goes for your RPGs - they’re more than welcome if you feel they’re ready for public consumption. In fact, this comment made me realize that we’re very RPG light right now, so that’s a great content idea to start including.

Oh, and regarding removing the downvotes, I lost one sub who was vocal about the change on the thread I posted in kbinMeta about how to do it, then gained 5 more afterwards. I’ve got a thread up to see how the community feels about it, but no comments yet, so I think the change is a positive one. I’ll probably make it permanent unless one of our regular contributors complains.

This has been one of the most positive interactions I’ve had on the Fediverse, which is kinda funny as it was spawned in reaction to troll harassment. You’ve got my thanks yet again - it’s been a good day as a result.

Holy shit - you’re brilliant. It took some tweaking, but this code works on kbin:

{span style="color:#323232;"}.vote__down { display: none !important; } {/span}

I’m going to go and post this solution in @kbinMeta (if you don’t do it first) - there are a lot of mods that want this functionality. I and our users thank you! Consider this an open invitation to @13thFloor if you’d ever like to stop by.

You got banned because you spam downvoted multiple comments without commentary, then continued the behavior after being asked to back up your downvotes with comments. You’ve escalated and continued the conflict by following me around the Fediverse downvoting my comments outside the forum - for over two weeks now. I will continue to call you out until your weird and creepy behavior stops.

You can play innocent all you’d like, but there’s literally a public paper trail of your behavior, that any one can see by going through my comments and seeing the same two sad little trolls who downvote every comment they can.

You want me to go away, get the fuck out of my life. That’s it.

You don’t want to? Fine, I’ll use your downvotes to call out your history as a racist, transphobe, fascist bigoted idiot again and again and again, because each time I do, folks are appreciative of being warned of your behavior, and I end up with new followers and traffic. Besides, I have no moral problem stalking a known stalker to keep them from harassing someone else.

This ain’t one you’re gonna win kid. Take a hint and your pacifier and go home to mommy.

@anafroj Thanks for the kind words and advice - much appreciated. Unfortunately on Kbin (where I run my forum) we don’t have that option - the software exceeds lemmy in many ways, but there are number of lemmy features (including removing downvotes) that I’d like to see on Kbin. I’m glad that the solution worked for you and your users.

To compensate on Kbin, since the forum I run is built as be a safe space for creative folks to submit OC and their inspirations, one of our rules is that if you downvote, you need to leave a comment explaining why. This allows critique without anonymous negativity, which adds nothing to the discussion.

As for myself, I don’t care that the trolls above are obsessed with downvoting what my profile posts (which literally says “For Amusement Purposes Only” at the top - another indication that they can’t read properly).

They tell more on themselves than I with the downvote spam, and it actually helps drive engagement with my commentary because they’re triggering the “activity” sorting algorithm - it’s not like reddit where enough downvotes will actually hide anything. But neither troll is smart enough to realize this, so that’s why I just smile and tell them to keep digging. If they keep going, I get more upvotes through the additional views than they could possibly downvote, so that’s a win from my perspective. If they get tired and stop, that’s a bit of a win as well, even though they’re no longer contributing to my marketing campaign… ;)

You decided to spam downvote multiple posts before you were banned from our forum. Then you continued to do so, after being blocked and banned, on my reasonable comments against racism, transphobia, and about law outside the forum (including one comment that was nothing but the text of the 14th amendment), proving yourself in the process to be a racist, a transphobe, and an absolutely idiotic fascist who doesn’t realize that kbin lets everyone see what you downvote.

I feel it’s my civic duty to call your dumbass out, as you’re clearly an unhinged, vengeance driven stalker who’s likely doing the same or worse to other users.

As to the reverse trolling, I’ll know I’m out of your head when you stop spam downvoting (which is really a useless effort, as you’re gonna need at least another 2k downvotes a week to keep up). Calling you out on your dumbass nazi self is just icing on the cake.

Just living rent free in your head, lil man. Go ahead and have your nap now. You must be tired after that big tantrum of downvote spam, and you gotta start early tomorrow if you’re gonna keep up.

Well how about that. Looks like he’s got your scent. Sweet dreams, and remember to wear your sunscreen.