Hey, Evan, this shit isn't okay.
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@alice yeah he runs a lot of little polls which ask people's opinions on particular topics around fedi politics and.......
well, like, it's a thing people could do with the best of intentions. in fact, the horribly malicious thing it reminds us of (which we'll skip describing, for brevity) was also implemented by people with the best of intentions
@ireneista @alice I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI. The interactions around that were so completely toxic and boosterish that I think of Evan as a bad-faith actor as a result.
(Another for the annals of AI and boosterism damaging trust.)
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@ireneista @alice I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI. The interactions around that were so completely toxic and boosterish that I think of Evan as a bad-faith actor as a result.
(Another for the annals of AI and boosterism damaging trust.)
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@matty @alice here is my problem with the "it's posted public so it's for everyone to do whatever they wanna do with it" argument: there is something like an unwritten social etiquette in the fediverse based on mutual respect and especially on decency. Automating this all away for the sake of algorithms and reach is effectively throwing all that into the bin, removing the human factor from the loop. That's not why I joined the Fediverse...
@bitbraindev @matty @alice yeah, it’s confusing. Maybe because he’s been involved in ActivityPub so long, he has this image in his head and thinks he has ownership over the space, but the culture and social space of the fediverse is a distinct thing now. This is not mass social media, this is more a “people socializing at a cafe or community center” kinda place, with social norms that have emerged in connection with that. I think a lot of us, like you said, see ourselves as interacting with human beings and even friends on her, rather than “accounts” or brands or content or whatever.
It’s disappointing since dude should know better, but thanks to the open source nature of things here, and the large quantity of IT catgirls, things could always fork off and leave him behind if he’s going to be immature or creepy about this stuff.
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Thanks, I appreciate your answer and explanation. Pretty much every Mastodon instance has an equivalent page, so for example:
https://berlin.social/tags/LearnLockpickingWithAlice
https://masto.nyc/tags/LearnLockpickingWithAlice
https://beige.party/tags/LearnLockpickingWithAlice
https://mamot.fr/tags/LearnLockpickingWithAlice
(I picked this basically at random, not to single out these particular servers)
Do you consider yourself to have given permission for these?
I am asking this because I want to understand whether the Mastodon software (and other fediverse software) behaves in a way that matches what users understand themselves to have consented to.
@ricci I think it's expected behavior that my posts should be visible from instances we're federated with, but that new "services" that do something different or unexpected should *always* be *explicitly* opt-in.
The difference is that Evan's "service" created new accounts for all of these hashtags and used them to boost the posts in what came across as a very creepy, entitled, and nonconsensual way.
I don't want a bot called AlicePics on some other server, happily spending its life boosting only naked photos of me. That's creepy.
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@FinchHaven @winst0nsmith @alice this "claim a hashtag" kinda gives off NFT vibes. I should shut up otherwise I give some people ideas
@bitbraindev @FinchHaven @winst0nsmith @alice Back soon. I'm going to claim #(redacted)FuckYourselfWithARustySpork
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@ricci I think it's expected behavior that my posts should be visible from instances we're federated with, but that new "services" that do something different or unexpected should *always* be *explicitly* opt-in.
The difference is that Evan's "service" created new accounts for all of these hashtags and used them to boost the posts in what came across as a very creepy, entitled, and nonconsensual way.
I don't want a bot called AlicePics on some other server, happily spending its life boosting only naked photos of me. That's creepy.
@alice Yep, thanks! I know you've spent too much time already dealing with this, so I appreciate your willingness to answer!
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@ireneista @alice I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI. The interactions around that were so completely toxic and boosterish that I think of Evan as a bad-faith actor as a result.
(Another for the annals of AI and boosterism damaging trust.)
@ireneista @alice I should add that supporting the violation of consent required to scrape creative labor into AI training sets is already a huge red flag for how someone will approach consent in other ethical questions around social media networks. I do not trust Evan as a result of either incident, let alone tge two taken together.
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As far as I can tell, anything with #capitalists at the helm doesn't understand consent. And capitalism and sexual assault share a lot in common.
'Keep asking until they say yes.'
Or
'Do it anyways, and apologise if caught...and keep doing it'
Or
'Ignore criticism and keep doing it cause they cant stop you'If you are not explicitly asking, you did not ask.
If you are not explicitly confirming, you did not confirm.
Humans who are not being explicit hide.
Humans who hide from explicit consent do so because they know what they hide is not consented.
Nothing about this is especially difficult to reason out.
Unless you are avoiding it.
The avoidance flags itself, so accept that when it does.
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@bitbraindev totally.
And this "I found it online, so it's fair game" mentality is something I fight against constantly with porn accounts who steal from sexworkers and repost it with the disclaimer "DM me to take your photos down".
It's like "no, asshole, you DM *me* if you want to use my work".
@alice @bitbraindev @matty EXACTLY THAT!
Just like one has to #license content for commercial use (and stock with #licensing terms).
- So unless it's EXPLICITLY licensed permissively to include that, it's a no-go!I too don't get to just throw a commercial (= anything but me and family/friends at home) screening event wothout negotiating licensing BEFOREHAND.
- And those #Hashtag - #Boosting #Bots ain't genuine human appreciation, but just waste. -
@bitbraindev strong agree.
I had a Twitter account, and used to be a YouTuber, and I have way smaller reach here, but folx here are *way* more engaged in an absolutely wonderful way that I never experienced in other places.
I'd trade volume and reach for authenticity and community any day
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@alice @bitbraindev @matty EXACTLY THAT!
Just like one has to #license content for commercial use (and stock with #licensing terms).
- So unless it's EXPLICITLY licensed permissively to include that, it's a no-go!I too don't get to just throw a commercial (= anything but me and family/friends at home) screening event wothout negotiating licensing BEFOREHAND.
- And those #Hashtag - #Boosting #Bots ain't genuine human appreciation, but just waste.@alice @bitbraindev @matty What annoys me more is that this isn't a.new problem and that @Mastodon developers are aware of the problem but choose to refse to even fake to care¹ so that users and admins can at least if not stay ahead, at least slow.down the #Enshittification of the #Fediverse.
- Blocklists are sadly needed and the fact that #Mastodon, unlike every network-centric application I know - doesn't support #BlocklistFeeds is inexcuseable!
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@ireneista @alice I should add that supporting the violation of consent required to scrape creative labor into AI training sets is already a huge red flag for how someone will approach consent in other ethical questions around social media networks. I do not trust Evan as a result of either incident, let alone tge two taken together.
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@bitbraindev strong agree.
I had a Twitter account, and used to be a YouTuber, and I have way smaller reach here, but folx here are *way* more engaged in an absolutely wonderful way that I never experienced in other places.
I'd trade volume and reach for authenticity and community any day
@alice @bitbraindev @matty
Yeah, a large chunk of the seemingly lower reach is the much lower number of bots here, which make up the vast majority of "engagement" on the corporate networks: we don't have a financial incentive, so we block those to preserve the integrity of the network itself. -
@alice @bitbraindev @matty What annoys me more is that this isn't a.new problem and that @Mastodon developers are aware of the problem but choose to refse to even fake to care¹ so that users and admins can at least if not stay ahead, at least slow.down the #Enshittification of the #Fediverse.
- Blocklists are sadly needed and the fact that #Mastodon, unlike every network-centric application I know - doesn't support #BlocklistFeeds is inexcuseable!
@alice @bitbraindev @matty @Mastodon as for said Hashtag - #SpamBoost - #Bots: I have listed their domains² already…
So once @MastodonEngineering decides to take on this issue, it could be as easy as adding Adservers to #pfBlockerNG…
- Manually importing is slow, cumbersome, error-prone and not scalable. Plus Mastodon doesn't properly ignore comments³…²: https://github.com/greyhat-academy/lists.d/blob/main/activitypub.bots.domains.block.list.tsv
³: https://github.com/greyhat-academy/lists.d/blob/main/activitypub.bots.block.list.tsv -
@ireneista Where I chimed in earlier: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/116218901305439808
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@ireneista @alice I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI. The interactions around that were so completely toxic and boosterish that I think of Evan as a bad-faith actor as a result.
(Another for the annals of AI and boosterism damaging trust.)
@xgranade @ireneista @alice I would argue fedi isn't hostile enough towards AI but...
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@alice Yep, thanks! I know you've spent too much time already dealing with this, so I appreciate your willingness to answer!
@ricci sure 🩷 I feel like I was in a particularly good intersection¹ to be able to bring what I perceived as a gross misuse of technology on Fedi into the light.
¹ Being a sexworker and ex-tech executive, who uses specific hashtags containing my name, with a large reach and a lot of community goodwill on Fedi—who also had their name and nudes broadcast by this bot service.
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@toothpaste_sandwich several people DMd me to say that he had been working to get Threads into Fedi, and his projects list those socials for contacts.
I can understand the justification for (though I strongly disagree with) having accounts on X, Threads, BlueSky, or Facebook—they're huge, and a lot of people are still (unfortunately) there.
But I considered Threads move to "participate" in Fedi a hostile act by a company known for violating privacy and for removing protections against hate speech from their platform.
@alice @toothpaste_sandwich I think it should be added that Alice is not the only person who views the infection of the Fedi by Threads to be a hostile act. I blocked that weaselly little fuck previously just for that - being a Zuckerberg cuck working to co-opt the Fedi. He’s now scraping and stealing people’s posts for unauthorized uses. The fucker should be banned.
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@alice I see, thank you for taking the time to respond. I can see how this would circumvent the blocks you had set up, yes. And I agree that having to personally ask him to add exceptions for those hashtags is not particularly workable.
What makes you say he is "in bed with" those companies, though? That seems strange for someone working on the ActivityPub protocol.
I would like to make a correction here regarding the the technical mechanism used; I want to make it clear that I'm not doing so to minimize how creepy it is or how it violated consent, which are things he needs to answer for.
The boosts that tags.pub uses are block-preserving: that is, they let the server that receives them know that the post exists, but do not contain the contents of that post - no text or images. The receiving server must contact the original server the post came from to get those, and the origin server will apply its own policies. These boosts *do* let more fediverse servers know about posts, but they don't circumvent blocks, eg. if the origin server has defederated from the recipient, or if the poster has blocked that server, etc., they won't be able to get the contents.
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@ireneista @alice I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI. The interactions around that were so completely toxic and boosterish that I think of Evan as a bad-faith actor as a result.
(Another for the annals of AI and boosterism damaging trust.)
"I most vividly remember his little poll trying to show that the fediverse was too hostile towards AI."
Assuming here we're still talking about Evan
I've had quite a bit of direct contact with his; he's had me blocked on at least two instances I've known him to be on
Over the years I've simply come to think of Evan as #MrMaxiFedi
Other than being very, very full of himself, he's simply never heard of an idea that might expand the reach of the Fediverse that he didn't like and didn't subscribe to 110%
Mr Maxi-Fedi
That's our Evan...
cc @ireneista @alice
