@matt@oslo.town so cool to see more location-based communities in the fediverse ✊
@mayel I also think I disagree your takeaways from it?
Like, looking at what my hypothetical person 2 thought they were doing -- there is no need for them to assume that is a clean or perfect block, or that there is no way for it to get exposed. Most people who have used blocks in any sort of social platform know that with alt-accounts or friends, or just normal social dynamics, the person they block can find out. That capacity even with that limitation is nevertheless /enough/ for them to want it.
In this case, that still-CAN-be-revealed requires either active testing of each possible block, or very engaged social surveillance.
Which is often discussed, and which people seem to discuss and understand Bluesky's block issue as being qualitatively different than.
@gaditb@icosahedron.website oh yeah they're definitely different! maybe enough that each (or something in between, like showing what boundaries you applied to people who you give permission to) may be desired in different situations or use cases?
@mayel As a side-point, that I don't think has any safety impact and also don't REALLY have fully-theorized to a necessarily-useful level of specifics, and also haven't really run it by people as like "are my thoughts here, like, coherent? and useful?",
I have thoughts re:
"""
From your perspective, those replies disappear, and new ones won’t appear at all. Your instance silently enforces these boundaries by ignoring unwanted interactions, even if the sender’s server is unaware and still allows them to post.
"""
about the concepts of who "owns" (and can curate) the comments section of their post, from whose perspective. (It's never going to be a single person curating/moderating, but I.. think?.. people feel ownership feelings over it nevertheless.)
@gaditb@icosahedron.website yeah that's an interesting line of thinking, I think the authors of these to FEPs have been exploring that: github.com/bonfire-networks/...
@mayel How visible is the exclusion itself, though?
Like, if I send to "Hey does anybody have a place I can crash tonight?" to @group--attendees_of_this_hacker_gathering but invisible to @guy_I_dont_trust_to_be_alone_with_but_really_dont_want_to_get_into_a_public_confrontation_about_that_right_now,
is there a chance that @defender_of_that_guy_who_sees_fear_of_him_as_an_attack_on_his_character sees that block in the metadata of the post and starts flaming me about it?
This is a contrived example that I don't have specific experiences I'm translating it from,
and sometimes technical limitations or just "we don't have a better design for that yet" mean that you can't AVOID exposing that, so it's not necessarily "it Must Be Fixed if it reveals this",
just,
(a) finding what intuition might be, and checking the implemented teality against that
(b) exploring what attacks there might be, and knowing where they might be made less post-hoc surprising
e.g.:
https://old.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/18ebrhx/blocks_being_public_is_already_leading_to/
@gaditb@icosahedron.website
I think the Bluesky example you linked to is an unfortunate illustration of what happens when we expect technical tools to cleanly solve social problems. Making a blocklist public is obviously egregious, but even private exclusions can be exposed through old-fashioned social interactions. For example, someone casually referencing a post might unintentionally reveal to someone else that they weren't included.
In Bonfire, boundaries aren’t meant to control what others do on their own instance (apart from defining who an activity is addressed to, similarly to BCC with email). They’re more about controlling what reaches you on yours. Since ActivityPub doesn’t yet support strong security features like end-to-end encryption or object capabilities, boundaries are designed as a local-first mechanism. They help shape your experience and interactions rather than enforcing strict rules across the network.
So, in your example, if someone starts harassing you, you can block them, or just silence them or the thread in question. From your perspective, those replies disappear, and new ones won’t appear at all. Your instance silently enforces these boundaries by ignoring unwanted interactions, even if the sender’s server is unaware and still allows them to post.
It’s not perfect privacy or hard enforcement but harm reduction and local autonomy in a messy, federated world...
@mayel (You can tell me to, like, look into it myself rather than asking you to explain every detail and stuff. I'm not in a situation where me having that info is relevant to my safety or supporting anyone where it is relevant to theirs. I'm just asking hopefully-useful questions, so while I like learning about how this works from this angle and am enjoying it, if my repeatedly-asking-details is not particularly enjoyable/useful to you/the project, like.)
(I'm not getting thst impression from you, but just in case/to be explicit about my conversational position rather than try to rely on tonal nuances.)
(I'm not getting thst impression from you, but just in case/to be explicit about my conversational position rather than try to rely on tonal nuances.)
@gaditb@icosahedron.website Don't worry I'm enjoying it, keep em coming!
@mayel (After a certain level of depth to this conversation I hit the wall of being a Fake Geek Girl™ who hasn't actually read @sarahjamielewis 's Queer Privacy or more than a chapter or two of @sarahjeong 's Internet Of Garbage or looked deeply into the work and critiques that @evacide has done over the years or ... .)
@gaditb@icosahedron.website Thanks for the reading materials! 😊
@evacide@hachyderm.io @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social @sarahjeong@mastodon.social
@mayel Oh wow! I didn't even look at the specifics yet (another reason this was dashed-off and non-specific), that's great that you've already been thinking along those same lines!
The actual specific thing with Bonfire set me off on this line of thinking was:
"""
E.g. you can share a post with several circles but only allow replies from a specific circle, or make a post public but invisible to specific people.
"""
"Make this invisible to X, Y, Z" strikes me as something that can requires very nuanced and situation specific careful stepping around disclosure/visibility and trust. (Ranging from "none", e.g. planning a birthday party, to much higher stakes.)
@gaditb@icosahedron.website Good catch! We usually try to explain things in a more comprehensive way than in that short blurb. Specifically in this case, if something it shared publicly there can be no gurantee that they won't see it. For non-public posts there's no guarantee either (because there's no end-to-end-encryption) but there's a better chance, since we distribute it only to the actors who were given permission (in a similar way as BCC in email).
A bit of a longer post to hopefully come (but I AM bad at Task, and currently behind on many things) but I think there's a widespread antipattern in UI presentation of calling a functionality (especially safety functionality) what the user WANTS rather than what it DOES.
I think this is especially... not "dangerous" exactly, but more impactful -- in federated/distributed networks, where there isn't a Single Platform/Owner able to play god with the single database (and with a stronger ability to pretend to play god with every user's endpoint).
Iike, "Delete Message", e.g. I think should be called "REQUEST Delete" -- it relies fundamentally on a basic minimal level of politeness from instances (federated) or individual endpoints (E2E chat).
A lot of these are "request"s, but it gets more obviously complicated when you add it in explicitly.
Like, "block user" -> "request block user".
Who are we Requesting things of? That is, who are we trusting? And who hears of this request?
@gaditb@icosahedron.website great point! This is what's currently shown when you delete a post in Bonfire, I guess we could make it clearer that this:
- deletes it on your local instance
- sends a deletion request to other instances (and to which ones?)
Domani andiamo in campeggio vicino il lago di bolsena con la mia compagna e mia figlia treenne 🏕️ Da ieri leggo sarà una settimana di caldo infernale, con temperature che toccheranno i 38°..
Mi chiedo se sia ancora il caso di partire oppure no 😒
Ma quanto è bello l'Ex Asilo Filangieri a Napoli? Sono innamorato.
Alle 7 facciamo un talk e dopo cena festa (suono anch'io!).
@kenobit@livellosegreto.it l'exasilo è un posto magico, saluta cecè <3
Long-form content in Bonfire: Part 1
Inspired by @evan@cosocial.ca 's recent article on advancing long-form text in the social web, we've taken the leap and developed our first prototype for publishing and reading articles on Bonfire, based on the FEP-b2b8 draft specification.
Beyond microblogging
From day one,...
Bonfire
Am I the only one out of the loop on what @Bonfire is? Am I correct on that it's a collection of software (some of it in Elixir?) to do different federated things? Bonfire Social seems to be a Mastodon alternative? https://bonfirenetworks.org talks in very lofty terms about a network but a network of what? There seems to be a website builder (Mosaic) that also has some ActivityPub support?
You got that mostly right! We are indeed working trying to improve our website and how we describe the project...
Bonfire is entirely made up of extensions/plugins written in Elixir with Phoenix/LiveView/Surface.
Mosaic is more of a service offering to build digital spaces by using/extending/creating Bonfire extensions (all open source).
Hope that helps!
@tchambers@strypey
Indeed, we have FEPs that either directly address the UX issues mentioned in your post, or could be parts of final solutions:
The Sin of Overwhelming Complexity: Instance Selection Paralysis
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/61cf/fep-61cf.md
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae97/fep-ae97.md
The Sin of Remote Interaction Purgatory: Federation Gymnastics
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/07d7/fep-07d7.md (withdrawn; https://fedilinks.org is a similar proposal)
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/3b86/fep-3b86.md
The Sin of DM Disasters Waiting to Happen
Some FEPs talk about limited visibility posts and private groups:
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/171b/fep-171b.md
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/db0e/fep-db0e.md
The Sin of Ghost Conversations and Phantom Follower Counts
Synced conversations:
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/1b12/fep-1b12.md
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/171b/fep-171b.md
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/76ea/fep-76ea.md
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/f228/fep-f228.md
The Sin of Invisible Discovery: The Content Mirage
The Sin of User Discovery Hell
I think ActivityPub relays could be used to solve those problems:
- https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ae0c/fep-ae0c.md
Thanks for compiling that list! We've opened a few issues with FEPs to investigate: github.com/bonfire-networks/...
@jonny@neuromatch.social @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz @tchambers@indieweb.social @moshidon@floss.social @pre@boing.world
Has anybody built a UI for browsing longform writing over #ActivityPub?
@jsit@social.coop we're working on it right now 😊
@yala@degrowth.social thanks for the feedaback! we're just doing different tests with federating long-form articles, suggestions welcome...
@silverpill@mitra.social thanks! I was just doing different tests with federating long-form articles...
"[...] Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier… and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable… to sit alone with images on a screen… given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine in low doses, but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCfpOugmd9E
Bonfire's progressive web app is getting cool 🤟
@dajb@social.coop that's my current list (mostly flipboard accounts)
