- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
Most of the interesting data mining happens at the client, not the server.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
At the server level, nothing. What they're not getting though is the tracker data from all the _other_ places that the users of that instance go to. It really is refreshing to pull up uBlock, and see... zero. Just nothing at all that needs to be blocked.
Nothing, really, except that there's less data to mine. And, of course, if it's not part of the base software, they have to do all the coding themselves. And to what end? If they run ads, users will bail to another server, because they can.
They could also show ads in some fashion I suppose. Only thing you could do is move to another server - but at least you can do something other than leave the whole platform.
Comments
- No ads
- No data mining
- No opaque algorithm that can not be tuned by the user. Okay, Mastodon has only one "algorithm" (aka reverse chronological order) but there is nothing stopping us from developing clients (user-agents) that filter the timeline according to what we think it's important. [0]
- Who cares about "all the users"? The important thing is that the you can connect, follow and interact with a large-enough group of interesting people. Even if the whole network has "only" 8M people, my timeline on Mastodon has certainly become more interesting than the twitter one.
[0] https://mastodon.communick.com/web/@raphael/1093815543157191...
What stops the owner of a mastodon server from performing "data mining"?
Scale. Nobody will pay you for the deets on the 500 users on your instance unless you are 0.1-percenter invite-only.
What’s to stop them from data mining ever server they federate with?
Like, especially, a bad actor could run several large instances with no public relationship and so all kinds of correlation.
Most of the interesting data mining happens at the client, not the server.
- I can not put tracking cookies on other people's clients. Twitter puts tracking cookies, can collect location data, can get your contact list...
- If any instance starts manipulating messages from its users to add tracking redirections, people would immediately lose trust over it and drop it. With twitter, there is absolutely nothing you can do and people treat t.co as an inevitable necessity.
- Even if someone went on to analyze the data and tried to use in the messages to give people personalized ads in some custom client, what would be the incentive for people to stick to it? If the publisher wants to have a business model where they want to share ad revenue with the users, they might as well go with something like Brave.
I’m thinking of stuff much more insidious than ad targeting - things like de-anonymizing
Then you do threat modeling in the same way as you would with email.
At the server level, nothing. What they're not getting though is the tracker data from all the _other_ places that the users of that instance go to. It really is refreshing to pull up uBlock, and see... zero. Just nothing at all that needs to be blocked.
Nothing, really, except that there's less data to mine. And, of course, if it's not part of the base software, they have to do all the coding themselves. And to what end? If they run ads, users will bail to another server, because they can.
They could also show ads in some fashion I suppose. Only thing you could do is move to another server - but at least you can do something other than leave the whole platform.
Thanks for sharing that @rglullis