I’m not sure I would go that far. A lot of “trust and safety” type things are like this, just soft boundaries to try to shape the types of interactions people are going to get themselves into to be a little more on the pleasant side. There’s nothing wrong with Pixelfed trying to show some honor to the same advisory boundary. The real problem comes into it when projects like Mastodon start giving people the impression that “private” posts that are federated out are going to be able to stay private. As long as the user expectation is clear that it’s just an advisory setting that will tweak the algorithms for showing the post in non-assurable ways, it is fine.

you are not engaging with the argument, just stating ideals

Correct. I’ve engaged in the past with people who are convinced Dansup is committing some kind of horrible sins. I examined the arguments in detail and decided they were bullshit.

I don’t really feel like rehashing the arguments again, but you can read if you want to see them:

https://ponder.cat/post/1151008/1352919

https://ponder.cat/post/2151188

I actually wanted to find some more of the more transparently bullshit ones, but they had been removed by mods because they were transparently bullshit. Like I said, I’ve seen enough criticisms and had them turn out to be bullshit to reach my limit, there was one earlier today that I looked into a decent amount of detail, too.

Periodic reminder that shitting on someone who’s making free software and giving it away is an entitled, counterproductive, selfish thing to do.

I have no interest in using Pixelfed or Loops, it’s just not my thing. But the idea of criticizing the person who’s making them because of a variety of made-up reasons is a bunch of crap.

Also, fedi developers should get paid. They’re doing work. They should get paid. The idea that someone who’s optimizing the video pipeline for the next ad network can make $150k a year and it’s a problem if Dansup fills up his fundraiser because people love the stuff he’s already done is, also, a bunch of crap.

Give it a rest. A fork of Mastodon created a new abstraction for “private posts” and started sending to instances some posts that were marked in a new way as “private,” and now they’re trying to blame Pixelfed for not adopting their homemade standard for what posts their servers are sending out to everyone that they’re not supposed to show, and what ones they are supposed to show. And, Pixelfed fixed it once they became aware of the issue.

It’s fixed in 1.12.5. Why is this not titled “Mastodon instances claim to their users to offer ‘private’ posts but send them out exactly like normal posts, get surprised when software that hasn’t magically adopted their new standard is showing them to people”?

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/email-isnt-private/20662

Yeah. One of the very few design feature of AP that I like is that actors have their very own keys, which means that in theory you could have the keys stay in the browser unlocked by a passphrase or something, and make it so no one could forge a message by a user except that user.

It would be pretty easy to extend that, so that Lemmy DMs get encrypted with the key of the actor meant to receive them, private posts get multi-encrypted with the public keys of any approved followers, et cetera. But yeah it seems like the amount of attention this stuff gets is very minimal.

I would consider it similar to email, should we abandon it (yes, but not because of this) just because a malicious email server started publishing all the emails it recieved? AP is just email but social media.

Yes, and people implemented PGP for encrypted email, and also made SMTP over TLS the standard, so that they wouldn’t have to demand that every router and every SMTP server everywhere on the internet agree not to republish or store secret information that was passing through it, because it started to become understood that email was in no way private.

A proper standard for private posts would be similar. You could have all private posts be encrypted with a rotating key, for example, and have them decrypted by anyone who had the key, on the client side, and stored and transmitted in encrypted form. Being approved to follow the private posts would involve your user being given a copy of the key through some kind of private key exchange. It sounds complex (and it would be, a little), and it would involve moving to the client some of the key management that currently happens on the instance server (and thus undoes some of the actually good design of ActivityPub, by just putting the instance software back in the position of keeping every actor’s keys for them and doing all the crypto work on behalf of the users). Anyway, it would be work and involve some redesign. I’m not saying that’s what they should have done. I’m saying that’s what having private posts as a feature would mean. Anything else is non-private posts that are pretending to be private posts.

Yeah, so there’s no real way to implement private posts on Mastodon.

I mean, it is fine if you want to implement sort of “best effort” semi-privacy and make it clear to everyone involved that that’s what it is, but for any reasonable definition of “private,” the requirement that it not get shown to people outside the list of people allowed to see it needs to be enforced better than this. There will always be server software that doesn’t “cooperate.” That’s just the nature of open distributed systems. If you’re making assurances to your users that their posts will be private, you need to be the one enforcing that, not everyone else on the network and the protocol needs to be set up with the ability for that to happen (which ActivityPub is not, which means it’s misleading that someone told users that they can have “private” posts via this hack.)

private posts are only sent to instances

Well, obviously they’re sent to some other ones, or else this wouldn’t be an issue.

This is a design flaw in the protocol. If your instance is going to send your private posts to other people, they’re not private. The authors need to fix your instance software, not demand that every other software in existence needs to “cooperate” and find out whether they’re “private” and not show them to the users if they are.

• I would give it a similar but distinct name, and just be aboveboard in the docs about where people can find the original project, what the differences are, and about what’s going on. As long as you’re open about what’s up I think it would be hard for any reasonable person to take offense if you prefer a less unixy style of output or whatever.
• I would create an issue on the original project just explaining what you like and what you implemented in the new one, and saying you’re happy to contribute although the changes may not be wanted et cetera. Just be honest. You’re fine. More communication is usually a good thing.
• git is powerful. It’s worth learning about the concepts if you do decide to invest the effort. You don’t have to get into a crazy workflow, but having your own ongoing branch and being able to merge/rebase changes from upstream as they happen can make your life easier. However, like a lot of tools from that type of toolbox, it can also make your life a lot harder if you’re not certain of what you’re doing, so YMMV. I would try to read a specific guide about how to set up the workflow you want, not just the reference documentation. Git has a ton of features, 90+% of which you don’t need, and many of its core features are called strange things or work in an unintuitive way.

deleted by creator

They talked about that, buying from the US is apparently the cheapest way to get the helicopter they wanted. They did look at other options.

I’m not trying to be overly self-promotional, but rss.ponder.cat + piefed.social’s “feeds” could probably do this very well. I actually really like the combination of having aggregated RSS feeds I can control, along with other people voting on them so particularly interesting stuff from them get surfaced more than other stuff.

Lol

If you know what you’re doing, then sure. I do not. I know too many stories of people who attacked delicate machinery with their good ideas and then got all surprised when it afterwards functioned worse, and not better.

“Wildfires” is a surprisingly large area. I wonder what the 2025 area for it is.

The natural tendency of any government is towards tyranny. They’re not indomitable, though, and so sometimes the people fight their way a little more towards justice.

Inevitably, when the pendulum swings back, it develops that talking about the old justice-type of government that somebody won with their struggle, is punishable severely at the hands of the new government, which is simultaneously completely happy to be claiming for itself the mandate of the old government. When the old government wasn’t even all that “good,” just a little better than the norm in some respects.

We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before, during and after the revolution. We just wrote a bunch more stuff down (since for some reason even really important stuff in English law is still this kind of “everyone knows it’s that way” weird type of oral history system.) We also modified certain aspects in a more democratic spirit. But a lot of the bedrock, things like precedent, judges, juries, appeals, habeas corpus, and so on, comes from that system, so Bushel’s Case is still relevant in terms of talking about the nature of the judge/jury relationship.

The judge cannot. They can prejudice the jury severely through unequal treatment of evidence, witnesses, and through clearly showing their bias at trial, which in practice can affect the verdict dramatically. On the other hand, doing that makes it a lot easier to overturn the verdict on appeal.

The case which unequivocally established the right of juries to countermand the judge was fucking wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel’s_Case

The judge was putting William Penn and William Mead on trial for leading an unlawful religious assembly. The jury found the defendants, basically, guilty of “speaking,” but not of the crime they had been accused of. The judge blew his stack and ordered the defendants to be tied up (?) and the jury imprisoned without food, water, or heat. After two days with no food, the jury returned, and amended their verdict to “not guilty.” The judge got pissed again, ordered the jury to be fined (?) instead, and one of the jurors said he definitely wasn’t paying that, and appealed the whole judgement. The trial involved some physical violence in the courtroom when the judge would order something to happen and the person involved would tell the judge to fuck off and then resist the people who came in to try to enforce the ruling.

The appeals court sided with the jury. People remember Bushel (the juror) and his name is remembered as linked with the principle of law, and all people remember about the judge was that he was an asshole.

I don’t really know, but I would assume that taste represents quite a bit of random poisonous stuff in your food. Probably if you do it a couple times, it’s fine, the human system can take a lot of abuse in short doses. But if you made a habit I think it would mess you up.

!mongabay@rss.ponder.cat