Mastodon, the only remaining social network that isn’t a fascist hellhole like Twitter or Facebook, is changing its legal and operational foundation to a proper European non-profit.
Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.
[…]It also means a different role for Eugen, Mastodon’s current CEO. Handing off the overall Mastodon management will free him up to focus on product strategy where his original passion lies and he gains the most satisfaction.
↫ Official Mastodon blog
Eugen Rochko has always been clear and steadfast about Mastodon not being for sale and not accepting any outside investments despite countless offers, and after eight years of both creating and running Mastodon, it makes perfect sense to move the network and its assets to a proper European non-profit. Mastodon’s actual control over the entire federated ActivityPub network – the Fediverse – is actually limited, so it’s not like the network is dependent on Mastodon, but there’s no denying it’s the most well-known part of the Fediverse.
The Fediverse is the only social network on which OSNews is actively present (and myself, too, for that matter). By “actively present” I only mean I’m keeping an eye on any possible replies; the feed itself consists exclusively of links to our stories as soon as they’re published, and that’s it. Everything else you might encounter on social media is either legacy cruft we haven’t deleted yet, or something a third-party set up that we don’t control. RSS means it’s easy for people to set up third-party, unaffiliated accounts on any social medium posting links to our stories, and that’s entirely fine, of course.
However, corporate social media controlled by the irrational whims of delusional billionaires with totalitarian tendencies is not something we want to be a part of, so aside from visiting OSNews.com and using our RSS feeds, the only other official way to follow OSNews is on Mastodon.
I think the fundamental error in the Mastodon design is that server admins can decide to forcefully defederate from other servers. There’s even whole server blacklists out there so you can be in your cozy echo chamber. The problem is some servers even start blocking other servers that DON’T defederate with the “””bad””” servers. So it ends up splitting the whole network into multiple sub-networks that can’t talk to each other. It would have been better if only users can decide to hide/block servers for themselves, rather than server admins deciding for their users.
“but you can self-host…” yeah but most people won’t
Yeah, that is the biggest problem with the Fediverse. Instead of having one massively powerful corporate overlord in a silo, you now have a myriad personal fiefdoms, who can cut off connections with others on the basis of personal ideas. You are not part of a global network. You are stuck in an archipellago, where several islands are sworn enemies. You trade an algorithmical bubble for an ideological foam of microbubbles.
For corporations I am just a means to a revenue stream. In the Fediverse I am a spectator of infighting and personal enclaves. Neither gives me anything truly useful.
There’s no other way to remove a bad actor in another node of the Fediverse.
Parodper,
It’s one thing for an owner to censor their own servers, but it’s quite another have an owner try to exert censorship power over others. You may feel like censorship of something is justified, but then you become complicit in opening the door to parties censoring everything under the sun and connectivity breaks down. Just imagine if your ISP or carrier did this. For example ATT backed far right news outlets and might conceivably be interested in blocking liberal news outlets.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/how-att-helped-build-far-right-one-america-news-2021-10-06/
I think it’s a good thing they’re not allowed to do this. Illegal content can be taken down by authorities like the FBI, but in general users should be entitled to make their own choices without overzealous operators controlling user access. I concede that Mastodon network splits are much less important than the connectivity of the web/internet as a whole, but this is because Mastodon is so niche. In principal if Mastodon were a critical service that a majority of people relied on, then blacklist powers become much more serious and draconian.
“””It’s one thing for an owner to censor their own servers, but it’s quite another have an owner try to exert censorship power over others. “””
Sorry but this is the reality. If you are hosting server you can be held legally accountable in many countries for what it hosts even if it third party people posts if you don’t do moderation/censorship.
The reality is the owner has to in many countries exert censorship power over others to remain legal.
The thing is just because there are things you need to legally censor like deformation, fraud and other illegal items yes if a lot of this is coming from particular servers it makes sense for a particular server to block them.
Problem starts when people start censoring based on their own personal bias instead of what the law and proper public safety requires.
oiaohm,
This isn’t what j0scher or Parodper are talking about, which is blacklisting other’s servers, not the censorship of contents of their own servers that the owners are responsible for.
“””This isn’t what j0scher or Parodper are talking about, which is blacklisting other’s servers, not the censorship of contents of their own servers that the owners are responsible for.””””
The thing is related. If a server happens to have a large group of people who are doing things against the laws of what you can host the simple solution can be black list that servers.
Alfman remember the legality most countries there is not punishment for blocking too much just punishment for blocking too little.
We have an older thing that is federated and that is email yes see the blacklists of smtp
https://www.mailreach.co/blog/woodys-smtp-blacklist
That have been used to control SMTP relay servers being used to put email spam into the network. Yes this is not 100 percent effective. Yes email is a very old federated system and yes the banning of servers has been part of how email traffic has been prevented from going completely out of control with garbage.
Like it or not part of a federated system for operational stability of the federated system is blocking servers.
There is a problem with most modern federated clients only supporting 1 identity . Notice how a email client allows you to add more than one identity. So you can be connected to to different parts of the email federated system that cannot talk to each other due to existing SMTP blacklist.
Alfman like it or not percentage of blocking other servers is required either for legal reasons or for network operational safety or general public safety(yes this is cutting off spammers so that general user can see their important messages)..
The reality we need the clients to be designed to cope with the federated networks fragmenting and rejoining. Yes it should be expected that different federated nodes will blacklist each other as part of normal operation sometimes for perfectly above board reasons other times not so above board reasons.
Yes a rule less federated node interacting with federated node that has to obey legal rules lot of cases does not work out well for the federated node that has to obey legal rules this was discovered with email well before these existing federated systems..
oiaohm,
No, you are responsible for your server and that’s all. If you want to report illegal activity on other people’s servers then you are entitled to do that but what you are suggesting is overzealous and goes too far, which inevitably harms innocent users. Your ideas for vigilante censorship are autocratic and incompatible with open federated networks, If your intention is to dictate everything then you may as well run a private network.
“””Your ideas for vigilante censorship are autocratic and incompatible with open federated networks, “””
Alfman there ideals and then there is reality. Open federated networks are older than lot think with BBS and Email and IRC and other solutions being older Open Federated networks.
The health of the older federated systems has depended on server admin right to blacklist even other servers. You will have like it or not bad actors who will do actions that are harmful to the network.
“””If your intention is to dictate everything then you may as well run a private network”””
Email example every person running that server has the right to dictate what the filter and what servers their server will receive connections from. There are other examples of open federated networks that work quite will allowing all admin todo their own things.
“””If you want to report illegal activity on other people’s servers then you are entitled to do that but what you are suggesting is overzealous and goes too far,””””
https://brandsec.com.au/hosting-safe-harbor/
Alfman that you wrote missed the legal problem. As hosting of anything safe harbor does not allow knowing hosting illegal content. So if X server comes known to you is sending you illegal content for you location and they are outside you legal law you cannot report them for what they are doing instead you can come legally forced to remain protected by safe harbor to block the server. Reporting some site as a providing illegal content does not keep your safe harbor protections intact as a site admin in fact it means you have just presented evidence against you that you cannot host the content from that site without at least filtering if not complete server ban..
The legal requirements have that between federated nodes connections may become blocked and the admin of that node blocking may have no legal choice to but to block to stay protected by safe harbor.
Alfman this is not autocratic. This is the general law safe harbor at play. Federated networks need to be designed to cope with administrators of servers doing their job as the law requires this include like it or not blacklisting servers from putting data on servers they control.
Yes study of the laws on older federated networks and what server admins have to do kind of says our current federated social media attempts protocols are lacking important bits of counter censorship tech in the clients and have not be design that the servers by law will have to censor so you need counter censorship tech where you can join up multi servers in different locations with different admins and different laws at the client and display to the user what was the uncensored debate even that every server the client is connected to is in fact censored so missing bits and pieces of the debate.. Open federated networks protocol design need to look different to cope with legal requirements.
oiaohm,
Ok then let me phrase it more aggressively: you are wrong in reality. Owners are not responsible for what happens on other people’s servers especially when what we are talking about is two degrees of separation.
Blacklist abusers on your server. However you keep missing the point that j0scher made that I’m trying to explain to you. So I’ll repeat it again: “The problem is some servers even start blocking other servers that DON’T defederate with the ‘bad’ servers.”
This goes far beyond blacklisting servers that you don’t want your users to connect to. It’s actually punishing other operators for not censoring their own users on their own servers. Think about how draconian and autocratic this is. It would be like your provider blocking you from communicating with your friend Fred because Fred’s provider’s won’t block Fred from communicating with Sid, This is draconian as hell. It breaks federation at the core if everyone were to start dictating blacklists like this. The result would be many defederated networks like j0scher describes.
“”“The problem is some servers even start blocking other servers that DON’T defederate with the ‘bad’ servers.”””
Email blacklists and BBS relay block lists have done this. Again by safe harbor the administrator of the server is to block known illegal content from getting from there server.
“””It would be like your provider blocking you from communicating with your friend Fred because Fred’s provider’s won’t block Fred from communicating with Sid, “””
Yes this absolutely does happen with email even today with the email blacklists. This use to happen a lot with BBS relays back in the day as well. Reason at times for needing more than 1 email account in different locations.
Lot of internet email relays will try multi different routes to get messages around servers that have blacklists blocking a message passing though them so most users don’t notice that this happens with email even that it the case..
Alfman this is the problem people think this is a new problem not a problem so old its not funny that predates the internet being a big thing with BBS being a big thing.
Yes blocking servers and blocking servers that are not apply the same standards have been happening from the early 1980s all the way up to the current. Yes the 1980s is the fidonet blocking between BBS.
Alfman what people are complaining about with server blocking and blocking servers that will not apply the same rules is just the nature of servers and what server administrators need to-do to be legal in many countries. So new federated protocols should be designed to deal with this reality. The old fed orated protocols like BBS ones and Email have documented this has the case for over 40 years.
Alfman please not I am saying that these actions don’t have bad effects but you have to think about it this way. If a server admin cannot do these actions of blocking servers and blocking servers that don’t follow compatible rules with where server the result is that server can itself have to be removed from a federated network.
A heavily censored federated server providing some information is better than have no federated server at all. This is the problem you make it that server admins cannot filter these ways the result is less federated servers because the administrator can run into legal trouble for breaking his or the hosting countries safe harbor requirements so causing servers to be shutdown.
Alfman this is absolutely the health of the federated network means to spread load is absolutely on the line if you take away server administrators means todo this..
Counter filtering client should be able to use the nearest censored server to get what that server provides and then spread out to other servers. So the information provide load is still assisted by the highly censored server.
The key thing as well ALfman have forgot you are trying to say server administrators that either own the hardware or are paying to use the hardware don’t have the rights to control their hardware as they see fit by saying they have no right to censor as required. Yes this is blocking direct posts this is blocking known rogue/illegal server and blocking any server that end up relaying rogue/illegal.content to the server they control.
This is a case you might not like it but its the nature of how the system has to operate to be inside the law. Yes the safe harbor laws cover 98% of the human population. Yes this covers all of China, Russia, India as well Weston countries and the list goes on.
Like it or not successfully spread everywhere fedorated network has to support filtering of messages, filtering of servers and filtering for servers that will not filter other servers at the servers. Problem is most social federated protocols are not designed to work with this being the reality.
oiaohm,
I doubt you can find a single documented case of an email blacklist that works the way j0scher is describing. You are severely misunderstanding or misrepresenting blacklisting. Email admins blacklist the servers that send spam, naturally. However they do not care that other servers employ different blacklists for themselves. Federated email would totally collapse if blacklists worked that way. Legitimate users and servers that have posed no harm to your server would be blocked too for no technically justifiable reason. Luckily real email providers don’t blacklist that way.
“””However they do not care that other servers employ different blacklists for themselves.”””
Alfman this is not always the case.
https://www.redeye.com/resources/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-google-and-yahoo-email-sender-changes/
Mandatory authentication. Yes the big common ones do force requirements on those sending email to their servers.
“””Email admins blacklist the servers that send spam, naturally. However they do not care that other servers employ different blacklists for themselves.”””
Except this is not always true.
“”” Federated email would totally collapse if blacklists worked that way. “””
The thing is it does not collapse because not every server does this.
“””Legitimate users and servers that have posed no harm to your server would be blocked too for no technically justifiable reason. Luckily real email providers don’t blacklist that way.”””
Bad news what you wrote is absolutely not true. Because real email providers in many countries have to blacklist by law in a unified way.
https://www.accesstochina.com/information/access-to-china-articles/being-seen-on-the-chinese-internet/emailing
Yes when you start needing to email inside china you either have to pay for accounts on china approved email servers. Or setup you email server with blacklists the way the government wants. Yes this is not the only country like this.
If you are trying to make a federated network that can operate in as many countries as possible you have to support the case that a segment of your network will be operating under unified blocking rules and anyone who does not agree will not be allowed to send into that segment.
Alfman like it or not what I am saying is the reality we have to be able to work with. In open markets where governments are not forcing blocking its going to be a competitive disadvantage blocking more than you should.
Alfman think about it a government said that it servers are not allowed to receive messages from X country as a host operating in that country you have to obey that rule. If some other party in country Y is going to relay a message from country X to your country Z you have to block the so you don’t break the countries law.
Federated social networks have not been designed to allow law conformance. Like the client knowing you are sending a message by a china server so know that contact with particular countries are blacklist so do relay those messages in so the china server does not have a legal problem instead use a different country server to route the message by.
Alfman this is my problem point you are trying to go down we have to deal with when dealing with places like China to be able to send email their dependably.
Do note that the china blacklists is that you don’t relay stuff into their network segment that on that blacklist. Not that your servers based outside china cannot receive messages from servers on the blacklist just those messages cannot be displayed inside china.
This is where you start seeing issues with how federated social media works. Most of them are not designed to deal with the case that particular server cannot be sent particular messages. Yes instead depending on that the particular server will do the filtering themselves. This is what leads to the effect.
Of we will only federate with you if you implement our blacklist globally because most of the federated social media does not have the option of apply blacklist to messages being sent to X server and only X server so we don’t send X server any messages it admin does not want for personal or legal reasons. legal reasons that could get their server shutdown and the admin sitting in jail or disappeared. You can do this filtering with email so you don’t relay email where you should not send it. This is a network safety thing.
There is give and take required here. Blacklisting and censorship like or not need to be designed into the system. Need to be designed in with enough options so it does not need to be over applied. But it also has to be accepted that at times blacklisting and censorship will need to be applied so servers in particular areas can in fact legally operate.
Doing a globally usable federated network is not place for being overly idealistic over blacklisting and censorship the legal frameworks you have work inside don’t allow you to be.
oiaohm,
SPF/DKIM/DMARC are not examples of what j0scher’s talking about. These technologies explicitly effect inbound emails and do not constitute autocratic censorship over users on another network. Not only isn’t it censorship, it doesn’t even require other operators to block emails to their users based on these technical checks.
Ok, let’s look at china specifically. Find a documented case of one operator trying to oppress the users of other operators with blacklists as we’ve been describing. And be specific.
Government censors set the law of the land and their role, albeit an autocratic one, to enforce everyone’s compliance. And because China’s firewall makes it a closed network, they have full jurisdiction. They’re not going to shutdown the email providers who aren’t even harboring the suspect… it’s counter productive and it makes no sense. To the extent that China wants to censor something new, they’ll just pass a law and it will be done applying to everyone. The Chinese government has the power and authority to shut down the sources.
“””Ok, let’s look at china specifically. Find a documented case of one operator trying to oppress the users of other operators with blacklists as we’ve been describing. And be specific.””””
Alfman you cannot email to china major email providers from gmail account because gmail will not implement china blacklists.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/china-lawmakers-protest-e-mail-blocks/
We can go back to 2002 where the reverse happened where western providers were if you don’t implement spam filtering and protected servers we will just blacklist all china email servers even the ones that had spam filtering……
This has been a on going back and forth with China. Sometimes USA and other countries walling in China internal emails from leaving china other cases China walling out other countries.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/19bjihi/companies_primary_domain_name_is_registered_in/
There are a lot of notes over the China problem around.
“””They’re not going to shutdown the email providers who aren’t even harboring the suspect”””
Not true in china.
“””Potential IP Blocklisting – If the Chinese government or ISPs flag your server’s IP for any reason (e.g., perceived misuse, hosting politically sensitive content, etc.), your emails may be blocked or delayed. Setting up a reliable email server requires careful monitoring to ensure IP addresses don’t get blocked.”””
You will find your email server in china black-holed for any believed infraction. Yes this include relaying messages with not approved content. This is not the only country like this.
Alfman we need system that can play inside government regulations around the world.
“””Government censors set the law of the land and their role, albeit an autocratic one, to enforce everyone’s compliance. “””
Yes making a federated network you will be operating with different countries censors what have different defines on what is legal. Remember in some of these cases like china you know you have broken the rules when you service is taken off line no please don’t do this again messages. This means that admins in those areas may block items they suspect might upset the censors. Why because they don’t have exact list of what will upset the censors and that how those governments want it.
What china does is not exactly autocratic. Autocratic is presuming government official turns up to tell you that you have broken the law and come into alignment. You will find that china government uses “nationwide culture of self-censorship” this is done by not informing people exactly what they have to censor then apply absolute sledge hammers.
The way china does censorship and large number of Authoritarian States is not by Autocratic censorship. Its by censorship systems designed to make the population have a culture of self censorship so that content will be even more censored without the Authoritarian state being able to be directly blamed. Part of doing this is punishing people and systems for information handling rules breaches without telling them ever what they have done wrong.
Federated network design need to include how to cope with this. Yes this does mean being able to filter what you send to particular servers based on what the admin on the other end tells you. Their government caused fear will mean if you don’t do this they will just block your server so no information gets in just as the Authoritarian State wants. This is why this problem is way more complex and you cannot say admin cannot block me if I don’t filter. The trick is being able to apply these filters in controlled ways. Lot of federated solutions don’t have the controlled options.
oiaohm,
You are continuing to miss the point. China doesn’t allow any providers to bypass their national firewall. A national firewall is technically very different from what j0scher has described which is one provider of a federated network punishing another provider for not abiding by the first provider’s blacklist.
This has nothing to do with government or law. If it did the provider would just report the crime and the offender would get shut down at the source using legal avenues.
You want to focus governmental abuses, which is fine but also extremely different from this scenario.. Governments including china go after the source, they don’t go about prosecuting providers who aren’t even guilty of hosting the illegal content. They go after the guilty parties, which translates to police raids or leaning on international treaties. So far you haven’t provided any examples of a provider that’s not hosting illegal content getting in trouble. Can you find even a single case where they got in trouble for content another provider was hosting? If this happens as commonly as you suggest, then you ought to be able to find tons of examples of it.
Again though, blocking providers that send spam is not the controversy here. It’s blocking other providers who won’t censor their own users. Please stick to this topic!
“””Governments including china go after the source, they don’t go about prosecuting providers who aren’t even guilty of hosting the illegal content. “””
This is not china. China will block you IP just because it gets too much traffic China does start prosucting providers even when they don’t host illegal content as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country
Blocking items just because something has high traffic out of the 21 countries known to to have not free internet 10 countries do this. So about 50%
In the about 30 in the party free internet about 5 are know todo the same thing so 1 in 6.
Alfman you are applying innocent until proven guilty. Lot of Asian and Islamic countries are guilty until proven innocent. Yes this include places like Japan. China you are guilty of hosting illegal content if as you cannot prove you are not doing everything you can to prevent it. Yes hosting illegal content is not the crime is allowing the possibility to host illegal content.
Yes countries with heavy internet censorship commonly have countries laws of guilty until proven innocent. Yes this does not have law following the illegal content instead has the law going after hosting providers to make hosting providers stop illegal content. China also did a public white paper on why to keep the censorship rules hidden and how doing this would cause hosting providers to over censor and they classed this is great idea.
“””A national firewall is technically very different from what j0scher has described which is one provider of a federated network punishing another provider for not abiding by the first provider’s blacklist. “””
No it not. The national firewall and censorship of china is just one of the examples where a federated network is forced by a legal problem to punish a another provider for not following the blacklist the provider requires on the contents they send to them.
j0scher was being very black and white. Saying no admin ever had the right this form of blocking. The reality is a percentage of admins due to their countries laws being guilty until proven innocent will have to be proactive on censorship not to be in jail or disappeared.
Alfman the problem here I would say both of you are from innocent until proven guilty countries. 60% of the world population lives in guilty until proven innocent countries. Yes that 60% its not if they hosted illegal content is if they have done nothing or not enough prevent hosting illegal content that will get them into trouble. The illegal content does not need to be present on their systems in that 60% of the world population for them to be in trouble.
Servers in countries where the law is guilty until proven innocent will need to be censorship proactive to be legal..
“””Again though, blocking providers that send spam is not the controversy here. It’s blocking other providers who won’t censor their own users. Please stick to this topic!”””
Blocking spam is a form of censorship.
oiaohm,
Please do a better job with citations because I can’t find what you are talking about.
You keep failing to provide sources, which is what I asked you to do initially. Handwaving is fine to establish an opinion, but it falls short of establishing fact. Please don’t attempt to establish facts with more hand-waving, it doesn’t help. Respectfully: I need specific examples.
Again, you don’t seem to be understanding what OP said. I don’t know if there is a language barrier issue here, but we’re NOT talking about providers protecting their own users from things like spam. That’s totally different.
Yeah, they didn’t want their flights to be tracked and published.
What do you have against the AT protocol based Bluesky? It seems to make more sense to me on a technical level than activity pup ( the basis of Mastedon) . But others have different conclusions. It seems to be more robust in terms of features like choice of algorithm/feeds moderation, etc.
We’re still to see how their federation actually works in practice once they have to make money. I agree that it’s technically better, but as far as I know Bluesky’s is the only Relay running.
Bluesky censorship model has been tried by X/Twitter and Facebook as well. Yes looking at how that hooked in tells a very big story.
https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-architecture
Just because something sold as federated does not mean it is correctly. Note the labeler in the top diagram.
Yes if your post is not labelled it cannot make it back to personal data storage.
Bluesky has federated storage but it does not have federated content transfer. Yes the labeler is the single point of failure of the AT protocol/Bluesky design.
ActivityPub protocol of Mastodon is in fact based off AT protocol without the single point of failure of the single labeler. Removing the single labeler does cause it own issues.
Parodper is not one relay its one labeler and the design only really allows for 1 labeler. ActivityPub allows functions without labeler also allows for multi labeler to be running.
I would not say the AT Protocol is technically better than ActivityPub. Both designs have their downsides.
I see what you mean, apps can hardcode a labeler, but I think it’s a CAN not a MUST. Bluesky’s app will, of course, hardcode their own labeler, and that network effect will be very strong.
I don’t think there’s an equivalent for ActivityPub, their moderation is supposedly a instance-level issue. Sure, there are some list of blocked servers, but that’s orthogonal to the protocol; not unlike the old Usenet Death Penalty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking
There are a lot of activitypub networks out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol#/media/File:Bluesky%E2%80%93AT_Protocol_federation_architecture.svg
Yes this is another picture of the AT_Protocol include the theory extra servers. Yes your PDS the personal data storage does not contain your own labeler. Yes you cannot be trusted to label your own stored stuff for even your own personal usage under the AT Protocol design.
The labeler is the censor bit and the point of failure bit of the AT Protocol.