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

[EarlG]

19. Very interesting, thanks

For the record, the reason we started this mini-project in the first place was because previously, our software was breaking links to Mastodon posts due to the "@" symbol in the links, and we needed to fix that. Once we fixed that issue, we thought it would be cool to allow embedding of Mastodon posts just as we allow embedding of Twitter and YouTube content. Then we ran into the second issue, which is that there's no "top-level" domain to approve, which complicates things from a security perspective. Therefore we chose to start by allowing embeds for just a handful of servers which we understood to be popular with mainstream journalists.

But this has now taken us down the fediverse rabbit hole where things are a bit more complicated than I first realized.

To be completely clear, DU does not software-block links to any site, anywhere. You can post a link to Stormfront or an incel Reddit just as you can post a link to the Guardian or Mother Jones. BUT, if you're posting a link to an extremely dubious source, context is all-important. While it may not always produce the desired results 100% of the time -- depending on your point of view -- the combination of DU's rules, self-selecting member group, and peer-based moderating system is a pretty powerful deterrent. So if you're going to post something way outside the mainstream of DU, then you'd better be extremely clear about why you're doing it (and even then, Juries are not particularly tolerant of links to highly bigoted sources, no matter what the context.)

In other words, the choice to keep or remove content on DU remains, for the most part, in the hands of the membership at large. Whereas the choice to completely block links to other sources would be a top-down, admin-level decision. That's what Mastodon admins are getting themselves into, and I don't really envy them for it.

Take Fox News for example. Obviously most DU members do not watch Fox News or read the Fox News website. But sometimes, somebody will want to link to something over there for other DUers to point and laugh at (OMG, look at this appalling Sean Hannity op-ed!). Or on very rare occasions, Fox News might even produce a legitimate news story that is actually worth linking to (!).

If you choose to post something from Fox News, we leave it up to you to decide how you want to contextualize it, and we leave it up to your peers to decide whether your choice is appropriate. What we do NOT do is decide for everybody that links to Fox News are verboten, and just block the site at a software level.

But it seems that that is how the fediverse operates. If DU was a Mastodon server and Fox News was a Mastodon server, you can bet that I'd be inundated with requests to defederate from Fox News, and if I didn't I'd probably be accused of being a Fox News lover or right-winger or some such. Each Mastodon admin is on the hook to decide which sources they should connect to and which they should block. As someone who has been a forum admin for twenty-plus years, that adds a whole new nightmarish level of moderation that I'm glad I don't have to consider.

Although it seems that by just making DU Mastodon-adjacent, I now DO have to consider it

Again to be clear, you can link to literally any Mastodon post on any server -- DU's software does not prevent that. And if I could, I would simply allow embedding of posts from all Mastodon servers, just as I allow embedding of all tweets or all YouTube videos. But since I can't do that for technical reasons, I'm left with a situation where I have to pick and choose which servers I allow embedding to. And it seems that even my initial selection of six seemingly-innocent servers popular with journalists has potentially caused a problem.

That's why I'm saying that I might have to prevent Mastodon embedding altogether. If I can't allow embedding from all servers, I should probably disallow embedding from all servers, otherwise there's an appearance of favoring certain servers by allowing them to be embedded. And that's the part I'm never going to be able to keep up with -- figuring out which servers are or are not "acceptable" at any given moment.

So anyway -- thanks again, I'm glad you can see where I'm coming from, and your posts have given me plenty of food for thought.