Today, an unknown bot swarm started using my name, boosting my posts, and inserting itself into communities I helped create.
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@alice You always very kindly ask everyone not to dogpile the people in question, which I admire. But does this not sidestep the issue of their lack of understanding of basic consent? When we turn the other cheek, aren't we encouraging them not to learn? I've never seen good things come from letting people off the hook when they're refusing to acknowledge how consent works. We all fuck up at times to various degrees, that's human. But it's also necessary to learn from our mistakes and endeavour not to repeat those. When someone takes the I-did-nothing-wrong-and-will-now-victim-blame-to-deflect-the-heat approach, they're clearly not interested in learning unless there are actual negative consequences, be it through social pressures, financial cost or what not. They simply move on to their next victim. How do we protect each other while getting people to do the work they need to do on their own consent practices?
Because that's the only winning scenario imho - someone taking a step back, acknowledging that they got it wrong, and working on remedying the harm already done and avoiding causing future harm. Maybe a person simply hasn't had the benefit of an environment where they could have learnt this sooner, but isn't that all the more reason to ensure they get caught up? Learning to suppress the instinctive defensive response and actually listen to the other party and engage in self reflection is hard work, but work that everyone needs to do. Even if they don't want to. Especially if they don't want to.
And to be clear, I don't have a magic solution, but I'd like to hear what others think and have experience in.
@anyia I use "please don't dogpile" as a shorthand for "please don't be shitty to this person just because I'm calling them out for some behavior". It doesn't preclude things like challenging them, agreeing (or disagreeing) with things I've said, boosting, etc.
Just please be kind to folx—even if you think their position is bad.
My one exception to this is the paradox of tolerance. If they break the social contract, then they're no longer protected by it either.
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Today, an unknown bot swarm started using my name, boosting my posts, and inserting itself into communities I helped create. I treated it like any other potential attack and started defending myself and our communities as best I could. This has taken up more of my day than most malicious bot attacks, because it had the air of legitimacy—despite taking the actions of a threat.
When the owner, @evan ¹, came in with the same justifications as the porn-scrapers and LLM-owners I regularly fight against—repeatedly doubling-down in the face of backlash²—I felt more and more sure of my response.
I now feel justified in calling for a #FediBlock of tags.pub (and probably his other projects), at least until a better opt-in consent model is built into the project.
¹ I'm including his name as he's a public figure associated with Activity Pub, and our whole conversation today is already a public record, but please don't dogpile; just defed or block as you see fit and call it a night (or day—I'm not your mom).
² Receipts: https://lgbtqia.space/@alice/116824281370893420
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Today, an unknown bot swarm started using my name, boosting my posts, and inserting itself into communities I helped create. I treated it like any other potential attack and started defending myself and our communities as best I could. This has taken up more of my day than most malicious bot attacks, because it had the air of legitimacy—despite taking the actions of a threat.
When the owner, @evan ¹, came in with the same justifications as the porn-scrapers and LLM-owners I regularly fight against—repeatedly doubling-down in the face of backlash²—I felt more and more sure of my response.
I now feel justified in calling for a #FediBlock of tags.pub (and probably his other projects), at least until a better opt-in consent model is built into the project.
¹ I'm including his name as he's a public figure associated with Activity Pub, and our whole conversation today is already a public record, but please don't dogpile; just defed or block as you see fit and call it a night (or day—I'm not your mom).
² Receipts: https://lgbtqia.space/@alice/116824281370893420
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@alice I don't think there is and that hinders discoverability of as of yet unknown persons massively. This is a direct function of the concept of federation, balanced against the load requirements of servers. We're firmly in the design philosophy territory of ActivityPub here, and social-graph forming via hashtags is a complicated issue, again predominantly disadvantaging small/one-user instances
@DJGummikuh we already have opt-in solutions for that. I'm registered with like a dozen of my most-used hashtags on multiple discoverability services.
But I chose those.
I chose to be listed as someone who talks about data privacy, LGBTQ topics, etc.
No one assumed I'd be okay with being listed there.
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@alice always keep in mind that ActivityPub has no master servers, so an inclusive "Push" to all servers is as impossible as an inclusive pull, as there is no central registry maintaining a list of all federating servers. Cheating around that 'short-coming' with an approach like theirs releases pressure on this pain point for people running one-user instances, which in turn simplifies the life of people trying to push for more instance-diversity as opposed to everyone going to the big instances
@DJGummikuh it's a bad solution that will be abused by bad actors to harm vulnerable people, and it takes control of my content (in this case, personal hashtags and photos of my naked body) out of my control.
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