Elad has programmed a holiday gift for DU -- (limited) Mastodon embedding is now available

[EarlG]

15. Well... shit

I feel like this might end up as a short lived experiment then, if this is what’s going to happen on Mastodon.

The problem is that we can’t just blanket-allow embedding from every Mastodon server (this is to do with security on DU) so we have to pick and choose which servers we allow to embed. This gives the appearance of preferring or “boosting” those servers.

Obviously I don’t want to boost servers which are known for welcoming/promoting bigotry.

But I simply do not have the time or energy to be constantly worrying about the various moderation policies of Mastodon servers. I can’t field complaints all day about something someone said or did on a Mastodon server somewhere — even if that content has not been posted on DU — as if I’m responsible for it. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

The thing about Twitter embedding is that the focus is on the individual. Is there all kinds of bigotry all over Twitter? Yes, but you’re okay to embed tweets on DU as long as you’re not promoting that specific bigoted content on DU.

But now with Mastodon, it seems we might have to worry about the “middle-man” — it’s not good enough to say “don’t embed that bigoted post,” now we have to say “even if the post itself isn’t bigoted, don’t embed posts from that bigoted server.”

I suspect it would take a significant amount of effort to keep on top of which servers are acceptable and which aren’t, so we might just have to stop embedding altogether.

The good news is that even if embedding does have to go away, at least just regular links to Mastodon posts now also work on DU (previously they would break). So at least that’s been fixed…

Edited to add: I did a bit of googling into whether journa.host is bigoted and not much came up. I found that one tweet you referenced and read the replies, and honestly I could barely parse out what had actually happened. It seems somebody posted something allegedly transphobic from the NYT, someone complained about it and got banned, there was an uproar…

Does this mean we should not embed posts from journa.host? I don’t know… but the bottom line is that DU is more than enough for me to worry about without having to keep up with fights over other people’s moderating decisions. I hope that makes sense…