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Archive for November, 2017

Mastodon is Actually a Lot Worse Than Twitter When it Comes to Free Speech. Avoid It.

Mastodon is Oppressive

Mastodon oops

It has been three days since the ban (“suspension” they said) and it turns out I was wrong to believe that this was temporary. It’s actually a lot worse than this. They added insult to injury.

As it turned out, the Mastodon network had effectively shadowbanned me for months. This isn’t the fault of one person or one instance because — as it turns out — the network/federation maintains some sort of blacklists for arbitrarily silencing particular instances/people. So even if I self-hosted my toots, I would be visible/active but blacklisted. What’s the point of such a federation then? It’s pure marketing from Mastodon! It’s a lie. And other people (elsewhere) have pointed this out too. It’s worse than Twitter in that regard. The only difference is that the code is “open” and one can run it oneself (outside the entire network).

It “sounds like mastodon is run by crybullies,” one person told me (MinceR). “Though it’s getting worse it has not bottomed out yet,” another person told me. “Be that as it may, reflecting on Mastodon I have always worried about how it is implemented in practice. While it’s great that it is federated to some extent, the nodes are basically fiefdoms controlled by a local sysop who turfs people out if they don’t both agree 100%. Of course people can and do then start their own nodes, becoming sysops themselves, but then the other sysops go out of their way to block the new nodes that they are not in 100% agreement with. Thus balkanization of ideas and populations continues.”

As I then pointed out, moving from node to node also means that the address of the user changes, which leads to other issues. It’s like starting from scratch all over again.

They had me shadowbanned for several months (people told me, but I naively thought it was a bug), so it’s clear they just didn’t want me there, as if I was some kind of radical or something. Twitter never treated me this badly; neither did Identi.ca or Diaspora*. So I wanted to concisely write about it and warn other people to stay away from Mastodon.

The sysop in question does not reinstate my account. He does not even respond to my E-mails. He’s rather arrogant about it and talks to me as though I, a person who brought many new users to his instance, am just a nuisance. What a nerve. What an attitude.

I decided that my posts about it (or tone) would be less gently-worded when the irreversibility of the ban is confirmed. Being gentle with words would not be useful/effective at warning other people, including existing users in that network.

A friend of mine called it “nasty stuff,” noting that “authoritarianism is ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ even to people who don’t dare admit it…”

I don’t want to name any names, but the sysop in question has depression problems, which he admits in his own blog. He is an Apple fan and his latest post says: “I’ve got an appointment tomorrow with my psychiatrist to follow-up about progress on the new med, hopefully I’ll be up to a therapeutic dose within another week or so.”

So a bunch of oddballs run the instances and when they get angry at something (like the volume I post or maybe even my criticism of Apple) they just toss me out without prior warning.

I cannot even get back in just to export my contacts (I was banned without notice!). What good is a federation where the sysops can throw you out and deny access to something as basic as your contacts?

Avoid Mastodon. The underlying software may not be garbage, but the people who manage the Mastodon network are garbage. And they’ll shadowban or even ban people whose views are quite reasonable. Game over.

Mastodon is Free Software, But It Does Not Respect Free Speech (Updated)

This is what I get when I log in

Mastodon oops

SO-called ‘social networks’ (I’ve coined the term “social control networks” for these) are supposed to facilitate a diversity of views. Not threats. Not calls for genocide. These strands of ‘speech’ constitute violations of very particular laws and for defensible reasons. But the point being, let people express their views, even if and when you disagree with these views.

I am not vulgar, I don’t really curse, and I don’t write negatively about vulnerable groups; my criticisms are usually directed at large organisations, institutions, corporations, political parties and so on. I never really considered myself worthy of censorship of any kind, yet Twitter has, on several occasions, shadowbanned me for no reason at all or simply because I was being bullied (shadowban by algorithms can lead to that). Time-limited shadowbans are not so severe because the user is typically not aware of them and can still post (albeit the audience is severely limited, it’s almost like talking to oneself sometimes).

Twitter, to its credit, never ever suspended me. Ever. The funny thing is that people in Mastodon say that I should delete Twitter and not participate in it. Eventually, as it turns out, it’s actually Mastodon that censors me. It’s an actual suspension for which I have not been given reason other than some people reporting me (as if that alone merits action, DMCA-style).

I am guessing that the suspension will eventually be undone, but that may still result in self-censorship. I was actually very surprised when it happened and spent over an hour investigating what I assumed to be a technical fault. The above says “error”; it does not tell me that I got suspended.

As Mastodon has just suspended me (mastodon.technology to be precise), I believe it can do it to virtually anyone. Apparently all it takes is a complaint citing something from the rather vague ToS, which can be interpreted as “don’t cause people offense” (or make an “oppressive” environment — whatever exactly that may mean). Even without insulting any other user — let alone a mention of another user — one’s views/links can apparently get one the ‘boot’, without as little as due process of some kind.

Mastodon was always known to be tough on Nazis; it was known that they were strict on free speech only to a degree. After the treatment that I received yesterday, however, I can no longer recommend Mastodon. It may be Free software, but it’s very weak on free speech.

The most insulting thing about all this is that I wrote many hundreds of toots/tweets/other in favour of Mastodon, urging people to join. I also wrote a lot in that platform and had amicable conversations there. To be treated this poorly by Mastodon admins hurts somewhat.

Update:

Mastodon Censored Me for a Long Time, They Just Found an Excuse to Ban Me As Well

So, after an E-mail exchange it turned out they had been silencing my posts for a long time, simply because of volume (people alerted me about this omission of posts, but I foolishly chose to believe it was due to a software bug) and it all ended when, totally out of the blue, I got banned without them even informing me (again, making it all look like a technical error/glitch, which I spent a long time trying to diagnose). The trigger was used was “Islamophobia” — I presume a link to some news article whose content someone found to be offensive. Everything was done to avoid showing me that they had been censoring me for a long time, albeit quietly.

There’s a lot at stake for me: Losing thousands of connections (people), tens of thousands of posts and replies, and no migration option (I cannot even log in to export anything!). They’re suppressing speech and then canning me, in spite of me being among the most popular users.

Identi.ca did something similar 4.5 years ago, though it was not censorship but merely a migration that nuked everyone’s posts.

BT Spies on Tweets About BT, Ignores Complaints About Price Hikes

BT mistake

NEW recruits can make mistakes; I get that. Some mistakes are a little more embarrassing then others however.

BT, like many other companies, tracks any mention (in Social Control Media) about BT. I’ve always wondered how that works behind the scenes and under an hour ago, after I had mentioned new price hikes, I got the above tweet from Laura. She must have entered her message in the wrong place in some program because it says they basically ignore such complaints. I responded accordingly (“Is this intended to be an internal comment?”) and then had it confirmed by a colleague.

No big deal. But it helps if you use programs correctly and don’t post to the client (publicly) internal comments which amount to “I’m going to ignore you”.

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