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Fediverse @lemmy.world
PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

The fediverse has a bullying problem

So check it out: Mastodon decided to implement follower-only posts for their users. All good. They did it in a way where they were still broadcasting those posts (described as "private") in a format that other servers could easily wind up erroneously showing them to random people. That's not ideal.

Probably the clearest explanation of the root of the problem is this:

Something you may not know about Mastodon's privacy settings is that they are recommendations, not demands. This means that it is up to each individual server whether or not it chooses to enforce them. For example, you may mark your post with unlisted, which indicates that servers shouldn't display the post on their global timelines, but servers which don't implement the unlisted privacy setting still can (and do).

Servers don't necessarily disregard Mastodon's privacy settings for malicious reasons. Mastodon's privacy settings aren't a part of the original OStatus protocol, and servers which don't run a recent version of the Mastodon software simply aren't configured to recognize them. This means that unlisted, private, or even direct posts may end up in places you didn't expect on one of these servers—like in the public timeline, or a user's reblogs.

That is super relevant for "private" posts by Mastodon. They fall into the same category as how you've been voting on Lemmy posts and comments: This stuff seems private, because it's being hidden in your UI, but it's actually being broadcasted out to random untrusted servers behind the scenes, and some server software is going to expose it. It's simply going to happen. You need to be aware of that. Even if it's not shown in your UI, it is available.

Anyway, Pixelfed had a bug in its handling of those types of posts, which meant that in some circumstances it would show them to everyone. Somebody wrote on her blog about how her partner has been posting sensitive information as "private," and Pixelfed was exposing it, and how it's a massive problem. For some reason, Dansup (Pixelfed author) taking it seriously and fixing the problem and pushing out a new version within a few days only made this person more upset, because in her (IMO incorrect) opinion, the way Dansup had done it was wrong.

I think the blog-writer is just mistaken about some of the technical issues involved. It sounds like she's planning on telling her partner that it's still okay to be posting her private stuff on Mastodon, marked "private," now that Pixelfed and only Pixelfed has fixed the issue. I think that's a huge mistake for reasons that should be obvious. It sounds like she's very upset that Dansup made it explicit that he was fixing this issue, thinking that even exposing it in commit comments (which as we know get way more readership than blog posts) would mean people knew about it, and the less people that knew about it, the safer her partner's information would be since she is continuing to do this apparently. You will not be surprised to discover that I think that type of thinking is also a mistake.

That's not even what I want to talk about, though. I have done security-related work professionally before, so maybe I look at this stuff from a different perspective than this lady does. What I want to talk about is this type of comments on Lemmy, when this situation got posted here under the title "Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances":

Non-malicious servers aren’t supposed to do what Pixelfed did.

Pixelfed got caught with its pants down

rtfm and do NOT give a rest to bad behaving software

dansup remains either incompetent for implementing badly something easy or toxic for federating ignoring what the federation requires

i completely blame pixelfed here: it breaks trust in transit and that’s unacceptable because it makes the system untrustworthy

periodic reminder to not touch dansup software and to move away from pixelfed and loops

dansup is not competent and quite problematic and it’s not even over

developers with less funding (even 0) contributed way more to fedi, they’re just less vocal

dansup is all bark no bite, stop falling for it

dansup showed quite some incompetence in handling security, delivering features, communicating clearly and honestly and treating properly third party devs

I sort of started out in the ensuing conversation just explaining the issues involved, because they are subtle, but there are people who are still sending me messages a day later insisting that Dansup is a big piece of shit and he broke the internet on purpose. They're also consistently upset, among other reasons, that he's getting paid because people like the stuff he made and gave away, and chose to back his Kickstarter. Very upset. I keep hearing about it.

This is not the first time, or even the first time with Dansup. From time to time, I see this with some kind of person on the Fediverse who's doing something. Usually someone who's giving away their time to do something for everyone else. Then there's some giant outcry that they are "problematic" or awful on purpose in some way. With Dansup at least, every time I've looked at it, it's mostly been trumped-up nonsense. The worst it ever is, in actuality, is "he got mad and posted an angry status HOW DARE HE." Usually it is based more or less on nothing.

Dansup isn't just a person making free software, who sometimes posts angry unreasonable statuses or gets embroiled in drama for some reason because he is human and has human emotions. He's the worst. He is toxic and unhinged. He is keeping his Loops code secret and breaking his promises. He makes money. He broke privacy for everyone (no don't tell me any details about the protocol or why he didn't he broke it for everyone) (and don't tell me he fixed it in a few days and pushed out a new version that just makes it worse because he put it in the notes and it'll be hard for people to upgrade anyway so it doesn't count)

And so on.

Some particular moderator isn't just a person who sometimes makes poor moderation decisions and then doubles down on them. No, he is:

a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.

a vile, racist, zionist piece of shit, and anyone who defends or supports him is sitting at the table with him and accepts those labels for themselves.

And so on. The exact same pattern happened with a different lemmy.world mod who was extensively harassed for months for various made-up bullshit, all the way up until the time where he (related or not) decided to stop modding altogether.

It's weird. Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have? Why are people so un-amenable to someone trying to say "actually it's not that simple", to the point that a day later my inbox is still getting peppered with insistences that Dansup is the worst on this private-posts issue, and I'm completely wrong and incompetent for thinking otherwise and all the references I've been digging up and sending to try to illustrate the point are just more proof that I'm horrible?

Guys: Chill out.

I would just recommend, if you are one of these people that likes to double down on all this stuff and get all amped-up about how some particular fediverse person is "problematic" or "toxic" or various other vague insinuations, or you feel the need to bring up all kinds of past drama any time anything at all happens with the person, that you not.

I am probably guilty of this sometimes. I definitely like to give people hell sometimes, if in my opinion they are doing something that's causing a problem. But the extent to which the fediverse seems to like to do this stuff just seems really extreme to me, and a lot of times what it's based on is just weird petty bullying nonsense.

Just take it it with a grain of salt, too, if you see it, is also what I'm saying. Whether it comes from me or whoever. A lot of times, the issue doesn't look like such a huge deal once you strip away the histrionics and the assumption that everyone's being malicious on purpose. Doubly so if the emotion and the innuendo is running way ahead of what the actual facts are.

122 comments

  • A highly relevant post, particularly the part "Address the Elephants in the Room". Just imagine, for a moment, if all the people who were banned from Reddit for being too toxic were to come over here? In that case you would get... Lemmy.

    Yet we are here as well. It is an odd mixture. And it is why we aren't really growing (well, barely) despite all the fuck-ups done by Huffman. Meanwhile e.g. Bluesky is really gathering people together! That's the difference that listening to people makes: they go where there's a nice environment, which addresses their concerns, in large part bc it makes them feel heard.

    People most definitely don't come to Lemmy to be heard. Well, to be more precise, they do not stay once they learn that it isn't going to happen, without MAJOR efforts on their part to block a goodly fraction of the Lemmy userbase that will not control their own words, hence making anyone who does not enjoy listening to such need to put in the work to do that for them.

    • Yeah. That's one thing I think Piefed is really doing right. They're trying to make it so that normal people will have a fairly pleasant normal-person experience.

      I think Lemmy's core developers including explicit acceptance for toxic online behavior, and some of the original core instances openly celebrating and modeling it, really may ruin the platform for the long term. And yes, you and dubvee are completely right as far as the lack of action in any respect by a lot of people who run the instances to do all that much of substance about the people who seem to want to ruin the experience on those instances.

      • You can read in my (successful) Petition to defederate from hexbear.net some stories not only about that instance but also some for Lemmy.ml, including an incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP), then double and tripled down on that thought, all entirely protected by the admins (discussed further here).

        When I first considered leaving Reddit, this kind of thing gave me strong pause, and it was only the fact that Kbin.social also existed that got me even a toe-hold into the Lemmyverse. This despite me not caring about Mastodon and thus any of its Microblogs, which lead to me mostly interacting with Lemmy magazines remotely, though with different sorting metrics which did help a little for me to see content that was not merely highly upvoted by people using Lemmy (including hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, etc.) and instead prioritized more by like-minded people using Kbin, and then later Mbin.

        PieFed goes MUCH further, providing not merely different voting metrics on mostly the same content but actual tools that even pro-authoritarian Lemmy users want (categories of communities, combined comments across cross-posts, hashtags, etc.), as well as people who want the opposite, it's really extremely flexible.

        And I think PieFed is the only hope for the Threadiverse to go mainstream. I'm not saying that I think that we necessarily will, or even that we all want to or should, just that if it were to happen, it won't happen with Lemmy. I'm currently at 100% of people I've told about it irl actively chiding me for having so much as recommended it, which makes a great deal of sense only once you realize that (i) a Google search pulls up lemmy.ml as the top instance, (ii) that instance shows Local rather than All by default, and thus (iii) what someone will be exposed to is content making fun of Western society. Mainstream normal people don't want that! I don't want it either! We learn how to block it, but mainstream normal people don't want to expend hours upon hours to make Lemmy usable - and by hours I mean like tens of, continually, as they keep swatting off the bullies, but there are always more.

        The alternative would be to make better mod tools. Which on Lemmy are barely happening, extremely slowly. PieFed is still catching up to Lemmy in terms of base features though, e.g. there is a Preview option but only for posts but not for comments, and many Notifications point to things to read but then won't actually show you the thing when you click on it (due to many reasons, possibly having been removed in the meantime, or being hidden by an auto-collapse or auto-hide feature, or you've blocked all the users from an instance but nonetheless notifications are still sent, etc.) - i.e. it still needs some polish. Hence in the meantime I am not recommending Threadiverse tools to anyone irl atm, unless they are already reading something here and then I recommend to check out PieFed:-).

  • Some people have privacy expectations that are not realistic in an unencrypted, federated, heterogeneous environment run by hobbyist volunteers in their spare time.

    It you have something private and sensitive to share with a small audience, make a group chat on Signal. Don't invite any reporters.

    • Nothing is private on the fediverse, and Mastodon's bodge only gives the illusion of privacy. There should be zero expectation that any fediverse software will follow their non-standard extensions.

      • I think the confusion from fediverse’s claims of privacy stem from poor enunciation elucidation of the nature of the privacy from its proponents. It is definitely more private in the amount of passive data mining for ad tracking purposes compared to for profit social media. The architecture is designed to discourage instance managers from implementing ad-tech from building sophisticated user profiles of your behaviour in order to serve you more targeted ads from the people that manage the infrastructure. There’s no monitoring of clicks, click through rates, time spent on the platform, the type of content you like, etc. And the price for that mechanism is, making public, data that cannot be monetised on a large scale, which for profit social media guaranteed “privacy” to(in quotes because it was private from prying eyes through E2EE but not your keys not your data.)

        I can see where the confusion might arise for nontechnical people who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of ActivityPub implementations. I don’t think there should be any confusion for technical people in understanding the architecture clearly guarantees a total lack of private data, seeing as how decentralisation works.

    • This is my thought on it, too. I don't disagree with any of the point OP is making, but I think a larger issue is people misusing ActivityPub platforms and trying to make them into something they're not. It's not meant to be a messenger, it's not meant for privacy. Everything being public and transparent is part of the core design of the Fediverse. The idea of private groups/posts on the Fediverse seems counterintuitive to me.

    • I definitely think it's important to make people aware of the difference in the fedeiverse. Especially since that is not how it worked in non-federated social media

      • Well, where are you all when the Fedi cheerleading squad keeps posting about how bad it is that this or that competitor stores this or that information and how secure and private and great it is in Fedi servers because they don't store anything?

        Because I've spent years chiming in to explain these things in those and it normally just gets people angry and complaining that you're shilling for corporate social media or whatever. The image being projected, both accidentally and on purpose is that no centralized data collection means your data on Fedi is private when it is extremely not.

    • it's not unrealistic to keep trust at the server level. following your rationale, you can't trust my reply, or any, because any server could modify the content in transit. or hide posts. or make up posts from actors to make them look bad.

      if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.

      servers will deliver, not modify, not make up stuff, not dos stuff, not spam you, but apparently obviously will leak your content?

      fedi models trust at the server level, not user. i dont need to trust you, i need to trust just your server admin, and if i dont i defederate

      • There's a significant distinction between servers that are actively malicious as you're describing and servers that aren't fully compatible with certain features, or that are simply buggy.

        Lemmy, for example modifies posts federated from other platforms to fit its format constraints. One of them is that a post from Mastodon with multiple images attached will only show one image on Lemmy. Mastodon does it too: inline images from a Lemmy post don't show on vanilla Mastodon.

        I'll note that Lemmy's version numbers all start with 0. So do Piixelfed's. That implies the software is unfinished and unstable.

    • This is exactly why ActivityPub makes for such a mediocre replacement for the big social media apps. You have to let go of any assumptions that at least some of your data remains exclusive to the ad algorithm and accept that everything you post or look at or scroll past is being recorded by malicious servers. Which, in turn, kind of makes it a failure, as replacing traditional social media is exactly what it's supposed to do.

      The Fediverse also lacks tooling to filter out the idiots and assholes. That kind of moderation is a lot easier when you have a centralised database and moderation staff on board, but the network of tiny servers with each their own moderation capabilities will promote the worst behaviour as much as the best behaviour.

      But really, the worst part is the UX for apps. Fediverse apps suck at setting expectations. Of course Lemmy publishes when you've upvoted what posts, that's essential for how the protocol works, but what other Reddit clone has a public voting history? Same with anyone using any form of the word "private" or even "unlisted", as those only apply in a perfect world where servers have no bugs and where there are no malicious servers.

      • Just because the average user doesn’t consider whether they should trust the platform, doesn’t mean the fediverse is less trustworthy. It’s not. Nothing online should be considered trustworthy if it’s not encrypted.

        You still have to consider whether Facebook is trustworthy with your posts and click data, whether the thousands of advertisers they sell your info too are trustworthy. Whether the persons you message are trustworthy and that they won’t get hacked.

        About the same risks as with trusting a fediverse instance operator except they don’t have the same motivations to sell your data.

        I’m not sure if you are aware of fediblock which allows instance operators to coordinate banning and defederating bad actors from the network. And of course you can always mute or block any user or instance you wish independently of your instance’s block list.

        Your data being leaked to “malicious servers” in this case also requires approving a follow to a user on that instance or having your profile set to public (and at that point you should expect your content to be public)

        I do think you are right that it is a paradigm shift of thinking for new users who aren’t familiar with federation. But I think anyone who wants to join will just either have to give up control to big platforms and stay put or shift their thinking.

    • It’s perhaps a communication problem, where the privacy settings should clearly state this. Or these settings shouldn’t be offered. But maybe this current structure is fine for most people?

      Regardless, it’s how existing social media used to work. In that sense, federated social media can’t offer an alternative and that could be a problem for some.

    • This poster... its like every other social media platform is not anonymous?!

      Why should this one be? Did you really think i.e. reddit wouldn't corpo-analyze the fork out of your data with data science practices? Anonymous upvotes? LOL

  • This guy is being reasonable, get the pitchforks!

    • This guy also being a perpetrator of bullying because he didn't like moderation decisions makes this post a bit ironic though 🤷

      • Yeah, I alluded to that when I said I'm probably guilty of it sometimes.

        A reasonable person could say that I tend to bully the mods when I disagree with something they've done. I do think that when you sign up to control people's experience and delete messages you don't agree with, you're signing up to have your decisions criticized. Reasonably or not. It's absurd to say that no one is allowed to get upset or air their grievances when the moderators apply moderation in a way that they don't like, because the end state of that setup is Reddit. But in fairness you are not wrong, sometimes I take it too far, and I think I should cool it at least a little with getting embittered about people moderating me in ways I don't like.

        Also, just for the record I've never had any issue on any level with you specifically. My whole anger at one of your moderators posting electoral propaganda and then banning people who disagreed with it, was that I thought he was hijacking his way into the slrpnk good graces for his own agenda, not that that was the intent behind the whole instance or anything. I've started being snarky towards the instance as a whole since the slrpnk admin team for some reason came out swinging hard to defend him on that, and then also gave out some further deletions and bans afterwards that I thought were equally silly, but it was more because I felt like you were supposed to be one of the good instances that supported people being able to have the conversations they wanted to have, and move the whole network in a good direction. I definitely wasn't happy about it or looking for that embittered interaction.

        (For context for anyone who's confused, here are some instances of what might be called bullying that I've done previously. The second one in particular sort of makes me cringe to post here, because it's exactly the kind of sour grapes innuendo that I'm complaining about when people aim it at Dansup.)

  • IMO, Dan has some responsibility but more of it lies with Mastodon and other microblogging software that labels this post type as "private", "followers only" or similar without any further explanation. It needs to be clear that it's dependent on good faith and competence of remote servers that may collect that information.

    Moreover we need to do a better job of letting users know that anything posted on the internet, and especially anything posted to the fediverse where it's backed up on potentially thousands of servers, should be assumed to be publicly-visible and eternal. If nothing else, it will be backed up on the internet archive. If you want to communicate privately, this is the wrong place.

    I wish there was a private social media platform but it seems like the closest we're going to get is Signal.

    Also "the bullying problem" has nothing to do with the Fediverse and everything to do with people in general and the erosion of nuance.

  • I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you're both wrong. Here me out.

    As other commenters have said, there should never be any expectation of privacy on the fediverse. DMs here and private items are not actually private, they're quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens. I feel like I have to say that a lot. I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it's unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix (and you can put your matrix handle on your profile).

    However. I'm also disillusioned by Dansup. He made a great project with Pixelfed. It got off the ground and has a great following. However, I've read through the code, I've tried to spin it up, hell even tried to help contribute - but it's a spaghetti'd mess of unmaintainable code. What irks me is rather than dive in and fix the code, help those who honestly want to spin up his projects, he starts a completely separate project (off the same spaghetti'd base that barely scales), and goes on a whole PR junket talking about it. Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.

    And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn't feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work. Pixelfed is a great experience - but it's one of many all working together, and the developers are a huge chunk, but you have the infrastructure, us admins hosting, those out there vocalizing it, those trying to start communities, it's an ecosystem, and I just felt like he ignored the fediverse and instead pushed Pixelfed.

    • good reply but private items are not "quite literally blasted out to anyone who listens", AP spec has audience targeting and content gets sent capillarly, like email. a Note for bob gets sent ONLY to bob's server

      as:Public content gets broadcasted by some software (relays) and inbox forwarded by others (mastodon, mitra).

    • What parts of the codebase did you look at and not like how they were implemented?

      Why is it a problem if he makes server software and then publicizes it? Like can you show a couple of examples of authors of some other software who are giving credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people, and how they are giving credit? What are they doing differently than Dansup?

      • A great example is his handling of Laravel, scaling, and Docker. It's pretty clear that he doesn't have a huge understanding of Docker - or at least hasn't managed docker images at scale. A huge thing there that I ran into constantly is that the Pixelfed containers both are 1) Stateful and worse than that 2) depend on each other's volumes. These are both anti patterns specifically called out in the docker best practices. It ultimately means that the Pixelfed containers must share the same host as it's workers. He put a lot of time and effort into building scripts that would simplify the setup for a docker compose file, but never thought horizontally - scaling these containers out on a cluster or separating workers off away from the web-api nodes at all.

        I spent 3 weeks trying to de-tangle that all and got nowhere. I've been watching the guys over at Pixelfed Glitch ( a fork of pixelfed ), and from what I see they're trying to do the same thing. I wish them godspeed. Until then, I can't recommend Pixelfed as it just can't horizontally scale. Sure you can throw a more expensive machine at the problem, but that's not a fix.

        As for the last, I don't have any examples - and I think that's because no one else has gone on a press junket like he has. The owners of Mastodon started a foundation a while back, I think that's the most official news I've heard out of them. I think that's what bothered me - for the vast majority of people that was their first chance to hear about the open web. Instead of saying "We have a thing called the fediverse. I'll spare you the details but you can choose Pixelfed, Mastodon, even Wordpress or many others, and they all work together". Instead all I heard anywhere was Pixelfed. Feel free to call BS there, maybe he did somewhere and I just missed it.

    • I actually like how Lemmy handles it, it warns you that it's unencrypted and that it recommends Matrix

      It also uses an entirely separate AP type that's not used for anything else (ChatMessage) unlike Mastodon which uses Note, which is also used for: Mastodon posts and comments, Lemmy comments, most likely others.

      ChatMessage type also has strict requirements about recipients, the chances to leak them are slimmer. Additionally, if the target app does not support the type, it's very unlikely it will handle it at all, but Note will most likely be handled in some way.

      In conclusion, Lemmy PMs are very hard to leak accidentally (still very easy to leak intentionally).

      Sadly, Lemmy will be moving to Mastodon-style PMs.

    • Then when I see people asking questions of his code or how to do things he usually jumps down their throats - or completely ignores them.

      And honestly the biggest thing that irked me was that I didn't feel he gave credit to the hundreds - thousands of other people who work to make the fediverse work.

      Anyone who's ever touched the Mastodon dev process knows that Gargron is much the same, FWIW, minus getting angry in public. These days I just have to shake my head at all the bright-eyed bushy-tailed noobs updating issues on the Mastodon repo, because those of us who've been around since the start know exactly how far that's gonna go in nearly all cases - and in the cases it does go anywhere, it'll be because Gargron implemented something similar with zero discussion and no credit where credit is due.

      But yeah, follow Dansup long enough and you are guaranteed to see some regrettable behavior on main.

  • So, I was probably (one of) the first to post that “Pixelfed leaks private posts” thing on here? I first wrote a long reply to this, but it sort if got away from me. The short version would be,

    A) sure, the fediverse has a bullying problem in the sense that people do, and that that is usually exacerbated in any online comment field. People are awful, and that includes me, you, Dansup, and anybody reading this. We're also usually pretty brilliant when nobody's looking.

    B) despite what I write above, I don't take bullying lightly. I am really uncomfortable with how you use the generally phrased headline to address this specific case. You're not writing about the fediverse as such, you're casting Dansup as a victim.

    C) Dan's up, Dan's down, Dan's a victim, Dan's throwing a fit online and then deleting the tweets. As you cite in OP, some people attribute all sorts of unrelated evil to him. Most of all, my impression is Dansup has as a hard time separating from his role as main developer on Pixelfed, Loops, etc, as online commenters has separating his work from (perceived) personal faults.

    D) let's imagine those projects were fully open sourced and developed by the community already. Would we be in the same situation here? Again, resorting to ad hominem bullying in online discussion is unacceptable, but I do question that Dansup is an unequivocable victim. Nor is he an evil mastermind who has engineered this situation to garner pity. He just seems to be extremely hard working, with a generous pinch of need for control of his projects.

122 comments