slwr @entreprecariat@post.lurk.org

"Il problema sta nel salario, nella condizione salariata, nel fatto che siamo abituati a pensare che se vogliamo vivere dobbiamo lavorare perché dobbiamo guadagnarci il salario. Ma questa è una superstizione, non è vero"

Today I met Silvio (@entreprecariat) IRL. In the name of federation!

It is clear the researchers did not know the net culture they researched, which turned out to be a huge disadvantage to them.

Their research is based around constructing a data set of 'sensitive' and 'inappropriate' posts. Ostensibly to be able to automagically do content moderation (hmmmmmm...). To identify what is 'inappropriate' they filter out posts that contain a 'CW' or that in the toot's json are marked Sensitive:True (see for example: https://post.lurk.org/@rra/102858640595640073.json).

The big error they make is to take 'Content Warning' and 'Sensitive' labels for granted as the only use. If your on the fedi for just one day however, you know the CW has a much richer culture around it than just flagging 'inappropriate' or 'sensitive'.

Instead of 'CW', the button may has well been labled, 'Spoiler Alert', 'Click-And-Reveal Joke', ' Summary', 'I'm sorry for posting such a wall of text button' etc etc. You can see the effect of this in the word clouds they add to their article. A CW is not at all a measure for the 'appropriateness' of a post.

It is such a shortcoming in their conclusion that could have easily been avoided by actually engaging the communities you study. But that means talking to people which is: 1 hard, 2 not "AI"

3/3

About the #fediverse scrape (https://sunbeam.city/@puffinus_puffinus/103473239171088670).

There is very little you can do about something like that happening to your toots. This is what 'public' posting means: your messages will get read by someone you don't agree with, in contexts that are different than originally intended, using means you dislike.

It is currently trivially easy to scrape the entire fediverse like the researchers did. So it will happen again.

If you are worried about your messages: first of all, don't put on-line what you don't want a random stranger to read. Your audience is always bigger than you imagine.

Second make more use of 'unlisted' and 'followers only' posting modes. The scrape made use of public timelines (http://<instance>/api/v1/timelines/public?local=true) and using these two visibility modes guards against that. This is easily circumvented by a follower bot though. Which is one of the reasons why some folks choose to manually approve their followers.

This stuff is pretty difficult to figure out and I do not at all wish to suggest it is your own fault if your data got scraped. It isn't. (Question is, did we as #mastoadmin do enough to inform new users about the meaning and utility of these settings?)

So how about the researchers?

1/?

Spam politics: who's responsible for missed emails that go into spam?

- the sender: being not blacklisted is their responsibility
- the recipient: the spam filter is their responsibility

@vortok One of my bittersweet realisations after spending time on the alt-web is that social media can actually be an educational, solidarity-building, and even healthy experience, but ad-driven/engagement-driven platforms have ruined it and somehow made a version of social media that alienates people instead of connecting them. And now this version has become the monoculture so everyone thinks social media is bad.

Social media isn't bad. Social media is good. This medium has so much potential

Thankful for all the people met here in 2019, and for joining post.lurk.org 🙏
May the #fediverse grow even stronger in 2020.

1996: la rivoluzione sessuale del post-umano.
Blue/Derive. La seconda rivoluzione sessuale. Supplemento a Blue n° 63, maggio 1996 / Supplemento a DeriveApprodi n° 9/10, febbraio 1996. https://radicalbiblio.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/blue-derive/