What do people think of this? nostr:note13k0wh965nntau3jdx8d3ls96uus2zk778z4w6dyg9r8ptt94e6hsj94y3r It seems that Mastodon is designed to share user posts, including private DMs, with anyone who asks for them. Someone with an AI background pulled in a bunch of posts and analyzed them, including labeling the content.
These folks, Maven, followed the ActivityPub spec and the terms of service. They downloaded publicly accessible data using Mastodon servers and services as designed. They then analyzed that data and ran an algorithm to add labels, similar to how every fediverse server does. The difference here is that Maven used machine learning to add some labels, whereas others add labels such as timestamps when the local server downloads the data without using newer machine learning tech.
Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google also do this; they crawl the fediverse, use AI and machine learning to label content, and display it in different contexts.
The tags that Maven adds are pretty innocent. They are just adding hashtag-like labels for discoverability.
Furthermore, many people are upset that Maven is leaking people's DMs. This is like living in a house where you refuse to have a front door or curtains on your windows and then getting very upset when somebody wanders in and sits down in your living room or looks in from across the street. The fediverse, by design, has no privacy. DMs are public! It says right there in Mastodon that these aren’t private. Nor are Bluesky's DMs, by the way. There is no end-to-end encryption in the fediverse yet. Evan Prodromou is actually working on this, likely adapting the MLS standard, which is great but doesn’t exist yet.
So my question is this: Why does the fediverse rely on unwritten and undocumented norms that are not mentioned in either the specs or terms of service? And why are people constantly surprised when others don't follow these hidden social conventions?
