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Beyond technical features: why we need to talk about the values of the Fediverse (part 1)
(blog.elenarossini.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:
I think she's obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.
It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.
There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it's best, this is a "people before economy" value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.
The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?
From the "privacy nightmare" "article":
It's on the internet. Public. Got it. It's almost as if, and hold on to your hats here, the whole point of posting on something like Mastodon or Lemmy or so is to have a public discourse, as you cannot know who will be replying anyways. It's almost as if, and this is getting wild, I know, read-access being public is intentional and explicitly part of the design.
Sorry, but this always make me rage. It's like these people are discovering in 2024 that public access means anyone can read it, not just 2000 individual tech bloggers. It's like in 2024 they're discovering that, but aren't technicallly skilled enough to open a forum to have their closed-of discussions in.
Sigh.
No wonder the tech sphere is going to shits if this is the modern discourse around it. :(
Sorry, rant over.
It’s because of how people people on mastodon freak out over privacy and consent. That’s why he wrote that article as the expectations and views of a large number of users are fundamentally against what actually happens