Today I stumbled on a practical example of the problems creates by the 'public not public' doublethink that some well-meaning but muddleheaded activists apply to public fediverse posts.
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Back in 2022, The Register quoted a comment by "Open Source Initiative (OSI) veteran Simon Phipps";
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/githubs_copilot_opinion/
... which he'd made on his Mastodon account; @webmink
However, as with many other fediverse accounts;
"Old posts are auto-deleted."
So Simon's post isn't there anymore, and I can't check that the author of the Register article is quoting a post Simon actually made, or just making it up.
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That's ok though, became usually when anything linked on the web has since been deleted (or altered), you can find the a copy on the WayBack Machine.
Except that because of the doublethink that fediverse posts published on the open web are 'public not public', Simon's post isn't archived, even though the Register article referencing it is;
This is bad enough when trying to peer review a journalist's work. Imagine the same thing with a scientist or academic.
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@strypey
It's a pity they linked to the intended-to-be -ephemeral post instead of the article it linked
https://meshedinsights.com/2022/07/04/ai-code-is-like-public-domain-code/
I assume they prefer not to give away link karma.
@webmink
> I assume they prefer not to give away link karma
That's a very uncharitable assumption. It's just as reasonable to presume they linked to the URL where you made the most quotable comment.
It happened to be on your microblog, but it was published on the open web, just as it would have been if it was on your blog. Why should they assume the one is any more ephemeral and subject to linkrot than the other?
@strypey this is a good find. There should be good ways to improve this. Other than that, there's no consensus on how to treat the information that circles the fediverse. The extent to which it is public, accessible, licensed, spread about, retained, archived, ephemeral.. etcetera.
It's a Wild West in this regard, and it makes the fediverse vulnerable to malign influences in times it should offer safe refuge instead. I would not advise anyone "Come to fediverse, here you are safe". You are not.
It's all trade-offs, and to be safe from one thing means being unsafe from another and vice versa.
The wild West was such a dichotomy. Safe from many things people risked in Europe, but quite dangerous from many things that were resolved already in Europe.
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Yes, totally. The thing is, it is all unclear. But it might have been designed from the very start to take more of these concerns into consideration. This is an area of interest and focus for me, in my participation at https://coding.social where I elaborate on a universal soluton development methodology called Social experience design. The mission is to reimagine social, and envision a peopleverse.
And then evolve from there on a path towards realization of that dream. 😊
@smallcircles
> it might have been designed from the very start to take more of these concerns into consideration
Ae. The problem is a whole lot of grafting privacy features onto a system designed for the broadcast of public messages. Then evangelists promoting that system as a privacy solution, meaning that it doesn't DataFarm network members.
Then that creating an assumption that it's a system designed for private messaging. Which is never was and still isn't the best solution for.