Mastodon Live Feed is gone
This is more of a rant (not sure if this comm is appropriate for it).
I’ve been watching Lemmy’s ongoing discussion regarding PieFed. It turns out Mastodon got similar problems, too.
The largest Fediverse instance already shadowbanned people, e.g:
This profile has been hidden by the moderators of mastodon.social.
If you didn’t find (and save) a profile before it poof’d, it’d be pretty much unreachable.
It’s been a while since I’ve been using the Web solely for consumption of public content (esp. long texts). I ceased posting altogether (with this post breaking 2mo of silence) for reasons beyond the current scope. My source of content are firehoses (e.g. Lemmy /all sorted by “New comments”, Mastodon Live Feed), partly due to the chaotic nature (it pleases me as ND) alongside my beliefs (Chaos Magick, noise as gnosis), partly due to how it’s the closest to a true discovery algorithm…
Today, I opened Mastodon only to be faced with a missing Live feed:
This feed has been disabled by your server administrators.
Yes, public feeds are noisy, spammy, pornographic. But it should be up to the user to decide what they wanna see: I muted +3k spam accounts by myself as I doomscrolled the “Live feed” daily.
Then out of naiveté/maliciousness/both, some ppl love to parrot the classic ancap line:
Just do your server!
I mean, it’s that trivial, amirite? As if the source of the problem wouldn’t be replaced by CloudFlare (2nd Biggest Internet Cancer, only losing the topmost rank to the Ruler of the Tumors, the Online Advertisement), AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc, Mastohost, or regional ISPs if you use a PC (doing your ISP, too? Also do your own ICANN and IANA, do your own ASNs and BGPs, everyone knows how it’s so easy-peasy /s).
(As a sidenote, radio communication is truly lovely: no one’s able to stop transceivers… well, except for ITU and their bureaus requiring operators “a loicense” for people to vibrate a quantum fabric of spacetime continuum that predates us hominids: after all, how’d the “Wise Ones” get to knock at ham operator’s doors to seize “dangerous” Baofengs after suddenly becoming unlawful due to “Security”?)
Yes, mastodon.social (nevermind the “social” TLD) could be simply ditched, problem is how it’s home for most Fediverse accounts me and others would like to discover and read/watch; problem is how it’s “model” for other instances, pretty much the Fediverse as a whole. I wouldn’t be surprised if this “trend” went viral: imagine no Lemmy feed other than your following list (didn’t know the random, SEO-lacking, lone profile out there, shouting at the void things you’d deem interesting to your tastes? Don’t worry, you won’t!)
For me and unknown others who also lurk the global chatter, mastodon.social became indistinguishable from mainstream, lacking live global feeds. Meanwhile, people used to shout at the void will be pushed even further…
…But hey, we’re safer now 😌 /s