Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle@mastodon.social
Surveillance, privacy, crypto policy, and ethics of technology. Penn Law / Stanford CIS.
You know instance admins can read your direct messages in the fediverse? Twitter and Facebook also can - and sometimes do - read your private messages, and they have infrastructure to comply with law enforcement requests. I'd love to see some end-to-end encryption built into Mastodon clients.
Presented without comment. https://youtu.be/K3b6SGoN6dA
kɜ:ʳ 
INTRO TO FEDERATION 2:
1. Servers (instances) mostly communicate 2 ways: sending posts to each other & sending profiles to each other
2. When person A's profile is first sent over, it only has their name, avatar & bio*
3. When someone on your server Y follows A, their server will send Y their toots & these are A's only toots that Y knows about*
4. # of toots/followers/follows on A's profile on Y all refer to the # of t/f/f which are actually on Y directly or indirectly
*simplified 4 brevity
#mastocats Matilda (aka Tilly).
The more I think about, the more I kind of like having multiple platforms for the same social media identity. It allows me to keep twitter for... well, exactly what it's good for:
Terse commentary and easy snark. Current affairs and outrage boosting.
Sustaining a loose affiliation with people in my line of work, and developments in that field.
Whereas here, of course, I can develop a parallel and expanded persona while not dissociating one from the other.
The medium is me.
On that topic, Dorothy Roberts and I wrote a short essay on Trump's "Law and Order" platform: https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/6615-editorial-dorothy-roberts-and-jeffrey-vagle-on
For those interested in police reform (especially given AG Sessions' fixation on removing what few reforms that are in place), this piece gives an interesting overview of the roots of policing: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-myth-of-liberal-policing/
Check this Wired article about #mastodon http://www.wired.co.uk/article/mastodon-social-network-what-how-create-account
What's funny is - issues with rapidly overloaded instances aside - mastodon's UI is a lot faster than birdsite's.
In other news, Mastodon-the-band keep talking about my project and I don't know how to process this, it's just too amazing https://twitter.com/mastodonmusic/status/849424628401541121 Damn, if they decided to start an instance... What would they even be called. So many instances are already called mastodon XD
give @Gargron money
give @Gargron money
GIVE @Gargron MONEY
he's not selling your data, he's been basically doing development singlehandedly at this point, he deserves a couple bucks or euros or whatever currency you use:
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=619786
Bitcoin: 17j2g7vpgHhLuXhN4bueZFCvdxxieyRVWd
Anyone else still seeing OOO delivery?
Bzzt. "500 Internal Server Error."
Comfort level with UI/performance rising. Recent update of Amaroq also seems to be a big improvement.
Birdsite: One or two words?
It seems that Mastodon is (thus far) a forum for people to discuss Mastodon. Trying to remember--was birdsite like this in the early days, as well?
Edges seem a bit rough yet.
hypothesis: if too many early users sign up on mastodon.social instead of other instances, federation will end up becoming a second-class feature. (imagine what email today would look like if gmail had existed in the 90s.)
other instances need to be able to compete with mastodon.social for growth, or https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177 should be implemented.
Huh, totally unexpected effect of 500 chars: more conversation with people I've known on Twitter for years; a DM always feels like too big a step unless you already really know someone.
Food $200
Data $150
Rent $800
Twitter alternatives $3,600
Utility $150
someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying
