I thought the fediverse was a way to give back the power to the users. This doesn’t seem great. I don’t want mastodon to be famous because it’s useful to companies but because it’s useful to people.
I don’t know the details but hopefully they do something similar to firefox https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/22/firefox-87-trims-http-referrers-by-default-to-protect-user-privacy/
Read the article. It is a configurable thing and each mastodon server admin has to activate it in order to send a referer.
I read the article but I’m worried about the implementation which you won’t be able to choose and while you can change server realistically not many people will even know this happened.
I hope the focus is privacy and people and this change dowsn’t have people in mind.
That doesn’t sound good? They are privacy invasive.
Unfortunatly its a cost we must accept since the justification makes it worth it.
Unfortunatly its a cost we must accept since the justification makes it worth it.
That’s for the user to decide. The devs should not presume to make it on the users’ behalf.
It’s the instance admins’ decision whether they want it or not.
Talk to your admins or move to another instance if you disagree with them
I’m not personally affected since I don’t use Mastodon. That doesn’t make it a good idea.
I guess it depends on what you want. If you want to be totally anonymous on the internet, then it’s a bad idea. If you want people to use Mastodon, then it’s probably an OK one, since the way people use microblogging is to follow famous people, and famous people aren’t using Mastodon unless there’s evidence that there’s an audience there for them to play to.
FWIW they should be configurable in your browser, either directly or with a plug-in.
The post makes a pretty reasonable argument as to why it’s a good idea.
Yeah, browser vendors think the same thing, since they are part of the commercial web. Anyway, at minimum, sending referer should be opt-in rather than opt-out.
Great!
Turning that on is probably a GDPR violation for those in Europe.
ETA: Don’t shoot the messenger. I won’t be suing.
Mastodon is federated and there are thousands of sites. Even if they all opted-in, their statistics will be fragmented.
Surely this alone defeats the benefits for bloggers and other content hosters.
Good for mastodon admins that want the feature to be enabled, I guess, but I don’t see why anyone would do that.
