A controversial developer circumvented one of Mastodon's primary tools for blocking bad actors, all so that his servers could connect to Threads.

Authorized Fetch (also referred to as Secure Mode in Mastodon) was recently circumvented by a stupidly easy solution: just sign your fetch requests with some other domain name.

  • AdaEnglish
    1•6 months ago

    Privacy and being free of (in-context) harassment aren’t the same thing.

    They’re related. Often, the ability to limit your audience is about making it non trivial for harassers to access your content rather than impossible.

    If the goal is privacy so that people who aren’t in the community don’t know that you’re in the community

    That’s not the goal. The goal is to make a community that lets vulnerable folk communicate whilst keeping the harassment to a manageable level and making the sensitive content non trivial to access for random trolls and harassers.

    It’s not about stopping dedicated individuals, because they can’t be stopped in this sort of environment for all the reasons you point out. It’s about minimising harassment from the random drive by bigots

    • @PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caEnglish
      1•6 months ago

      Hmmm I think I understand the intent. I’ll have to think on it some more.

      My gut tells me that protecting people from drive-by bigotry is antithetical to content/community discovery. And what is a social network without the ability to find new communities to join or new content to see?

      Perhaps something like reddit where they can raise the bar for commenting/posting until you’ve built up karma within the community? That’s not a privacy thing though.

      What would this look like to you, and how does it relate to privacy? I’ve got my own biases that affect how I’m looking at the problem, so I’d be interested in getting another perspective.