Some parts of the Mastodon community are hostile towards VC Funding, AI, and cryptocurrency, particularly because of their entanglement with enshittification and hype cycles. These people are worried that this relationship will lead Mastodon down an unhealthy path that prioritizes the wrong things. It’s a totally understandable concern, but it’s important to remember the mission and purpose of Mastodon’s US entity: to manage and raise donations in the United States. This is not an executive department making decisions for the Mastodon project, and they aren’t shareholders expecting to make some kind of financial returns. A healthy board requires a diverse set of opinions and experiences that educate the real decision-makers so they can get multiple perspectives on problems they need to solve. It seems like this board’s variety of backgrounds has been set up to do exactly that.
...This really doesn't soothe my concerns at all! Actually, up until right now, I hadn't even been paying enough attention to have concerns. So... if anything, this article has inspired concerns I didn't already have.
It's like if the server at a restaurant came up to you and said "now I know what you're thinking... we did in fact recently hire some cannibals. But they only work in the business office, not the kitchen!"
Yeah I had no idea. Now I have one and I'm immediately considering moving to a different fedi microblog platform. I've already lost quite a bit of trust for Rochko due to his extreme eagerness to federate with Meta.
Overall seems like a pretty balanced board. Al Shafei and Bezuidenhout have backgrounds aligned with the type of Mastodon I want to see. The lawyer guy dabbles in crypto law, but also did tons of pro bono work for Mastodon. Seems to me like he’s just passionate about emerging tech. Biz Stone is also an interesting inclusion. He’s obviously well connected to the VC space but has been pretty critical of Elon Twitter.
I was confused on what they were trying to accomplish, and even after reading the article I am still somewhat confused.
Instead, when a user posts something, the algorithm automatically reads the content and tags it with relevant interests so it shows up on those pages. Users can turn up the serendipity slider to branch out beyond their stated interests, and the algorithm running the platform connects users with related interests.
Perhaps I'm a minority, but I don't see myself getting much utility out of this. I already know what my interests are, and don't have much interest in growing them algorithmically. If a topic is really interesting, I'll eventually find out about it via an actual human.
You're on slrpnk.net, I assume it's not implementing any of this stuff. As long as you don't sign up for Maven I don't see how this is going to affect you.
ActivityPub doesn't do DMs per se. Many ActivityPub implementations will use AP messages that are not posted on any public list or timeline. Basically, a Tweet with visibility set to "only people mentioned in this thread".
This design makes it quite easy for AP servers to misimplement DMs. Asking a server for all messages of a particular user (to get their timeline) and forgetting to filter out messages not published globally is trivial to get wrong.
ActivityPub DMs are, in my opinion, not a good feature. This has come up before in Mastodon, where DMs mentioning a third account will add that account to the thread and destination of all future messages (and possibly authorise it for accessing past messages); one mention will give them full access to your "direct" messages.
I doubt this scraper did anything wrong here, I think it's just a matter of a buggy server or users sending DMs that aren't really DMs because of Fediverse software with GUI design flaws.
Seems if the messages are sent in an inherently insecure fashion, all one would need to do is set up an instance that purposefully does not filter out all the things it’s supposed to be kind/competent enough to filter out, and boom it has everything.
Yes, just like on twitter, reddit, and most of the other platforms the Fediverse is trying to replace, server admins are free to read your messages. There's no encryption. The Fediverse just adds more server admins to the mix.
I would not recommend using the DM function on most Fediverse platforms for things you'd like to keep private. While in most cases there are no privacy risks, there are also very few guardrails to ensure that.
You're better off using a federated platform with encryption support like Matrix or XMPP. Neither of those are very safe if you don't verify the other's keys (although neither is any other chat service, even Signal) but both are much safer.
If it weren't for the lack of shared credentials, I would've expected someone to add a minimal secure chat client to the Lemmy frontend already. Especially on the servers that host a Matrix server already
It's not "inherently insecure" at least not to that degree. (Once could argue that lack of E2EE is insecure.) If you stand up an unrelated instance you shouldn't be able to access private messages that don't relate to an account on your instance. So only bugs in your instance, or your conversation partner's instance, will be able to leak those messages.
If we hit these AI companies with targeted suing, like how Scientology got their way with the IRS, maybe we then they can listen to not steal our shit.
The MPAA and RIAA have created all these laws and used our own government againat us. Maybe we can use these same laws and do the same.
Maybe we have some bias on this topic, but I had the same thought. Maven is such a well known tool in IT, that I'm surprised they just created a social network with the same name. Until they get a bit famous this won't be good for SEO.
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