When I first moved to Mastodon I was excited to write a bunch of software for the Fediverse. Finally a social platform I can hack!
After seeing the vitriol directed at other devs by some parts of the community and the level of required genuflection, I lost all interest.
Maybe I’m an evil surveillance capitalist and this is working as intended. Maybe I’m wrong to feel this way. Maybe it’s an acceptable side-effect. I don’t know, but it’s a sad outcome 🤷♂️
I hear I’m supposed to experiment with tech not people, and must not use data for unintended purposes without explicit consent. That all sounds great. But what does it mean?
This is literally an ecosystem based on collecting (on each instance) the data of others (their public posts) without their explicit consent (by following them).
Any change I make to the functioning of any component might not be how the author intended me to consume their content, and people do actually complain.
@filippo yes, people were quite unhappy/anxious when mastodon introduced /explore and public timelines from what i have heard. i wasn't around for that.
about the explicit consent part: follow requests/private accounts exists, that's seen as the consent mechanism from how i understand people. people who care about explicit consent have follow requests enabled.
even without that enabled, the user has clear insight into who has a copy of their posts. that is entirely missing with many scrapers.
@untitaker @filippo i don’t think there is a consensus but there is a very vocal group of people I don’t want to interact with that stand in the way of a lot of things I wish Mastodon had.
