Photographers and artists rejoice—just like in the official iOS and Android apps, pictures are no longer cropped to 16:9 on the web version of Mastodon. Link previews have also gotten a face lift, and will now show both the article date and author when available.
@Gargron Hoping we can address the child sexual abuse content issue that Washington Post recently revealed.
That was a highly misleading article. Mastodon isn't a centralised service, it's thousands of independent sites.
It's like the world wide web, you wouldn't hold Tim Berners Lee responsible because there are shady websites. All he did was invent the technology that lets anyone create a website.
If one server decides to do something terrible/illegal, the other servers block it and tell other servers to block it. That's why you cannot see bad servers from your server.
@feditips @Gargron Thank you for this, Fedi.Tips, but it does seem like there should be more ways to in the federation to catch or block this type of material - it should be like Gab. Stuff like that on the www gets pushed to the dark web at least. We are at a moment when we have an opportunity to truly be a non-corporate option for many people. Dorsey, Musk and Zuck are moving to "don't remove, just don't amplify" approaches which seem somewhat similar.
"Stuff like that on the www gets pushed to the dark web at least."
There's no such thing as the dark web, there's just the web.
Anyone can create a website and put anything they want on it. The way to deal with nasty content is to block the site and report it to the authorities, who will hopefully take it offline.
Unfortunately if a site is hosted in a country where that content is legal (which is the case in Japan), then the only option remaining is blocking it.
Musk and Zuckerberg run centralised sites, there is only one server, everyone has to use that. So Musk and Zuckerberg have complete technical control over content.
There is no centralised service here, each server is totally independent and no one has control over it except its owner and the authorities in the country where it is hosted.
@feditips@mstdn.social @bok_bok_ba_gok@mas.to
Essentially, the article is like blaming zuckerberg that facebook users can still visit mastodon instances hosting csam
It's like
Well what is he supposed to do about it?
Well what are we supposed to do about it?
The CSAM is not on our servers, is it?
It would be like blaming Gmail for content on Yahoo Mail servers.
The two are both on the email network, but neither of them has any control over what the other does.
@feditips@mstdn.social
@bok_bok_ba_gok@mas.to
@Gargron@mastodon.social There are large swathes of the internet that aren't indexed by traditional search engines, and/or are only accessible via Tor. That's the dark web.
Many Tor hidden services aren't even indexed by Tor Browser; you have to already know the address.
@BarrenPlanet @Gargron @bok_bok_ba_gok
That's not a "dark web", that's any website with a section that requires a login.
Websites have had such sections since the beginning of the web. Most business sites have them for internal discussions, for example.
As I said, if something nasty is going on then the authorities should be informed, but in the specific cases cited by the article the hosting is in countries where the content is legal, so all that the rest of us can do is to block them.
@BarrenPlanet @Gargron @bok_bok_ba_gok
This is how the web has always worked, because it's how the world has always worked.
Different countries will always have different laws, so you will always see different content allowed on sites that are hosted in different countries.
This is true of all media including books, newspapers, television, films etc. Different countries have different restrictions. The only response you can do to foreign media is to restrict what you import.