#quotetweets — Public Fediverse posts

@Stefan Bohacek Another thing where Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte truly shine, by the way.

First of all, Hubzilla distinguishes between a "contact" (someone has sent you a connection request) and an "approved contact" (either you've confirmed the connection request, thus creating what's a mutual follower/followed connection on Mastodon, or you've requested a connection request, and it has been confirmed). It's much like on Facebook. This distinction also exists in permissions: You can give certain permissions to contacts or only to approved contacts.

On (streams) and Forte, the concept of a non-approved contact doesn't exist; unless the connection request is confirmed, it doesn't count as a contact, and it doesn't have the privileges of a contact. This means that nobody can acquire certain permissions simply by following you.

Next, even if someone is a contact of yours, doesn't mean that they're always permitted to send you their posts. You can configure your channel in such a way that you can only allow certain contacts of yours to send you posts. I've actually done that.

Also, on all three, being notified when someone who isn't a contact mentions you is off by default and has to be activated manually. Even then, it only works if their post that mentions you makes it onto the server that you're on. This isn't even a case of "they mention you, your channel receives the message, but you aren't notified". This is a case of "they mention you, but your channel outright rejects the message, and if no other channel on your server accepts it, the whole server rejects it".

This means the whole attack vector does not work, especially not against neatly configured channels. By default, you won't see any non-contact mention you out of the blue. And even if someone requests a connection, and you approve it and thereby establish a full, mutual connection, that doesn't mean that you have to endure what they post.

Oh, by the way: Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte understand Mastodon's "followers only" as "public" because it doesn't come with limited permissions, because Mastodon doesn't have a permissions system. And al three have had quote-posts since their inception. This gives you the power to fight back by quote-posting the offending post in a DM to the admin of the offender's home instance. And on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, the quote in a quote-post is not a reference by link; it's a dumb copy of the original, inserted into the quoting post with a link to the original post and to the original poster, that cannot be altered by the original poster after the fact in any way.

Lastly, you can raise the shields even further, namely against harassment by DM. You don't have to accept DMs from non-contacts. You don't even have to accept DMs from all your contacts. You can literally cherry-pick those contacts from whom you want to receive DMs.

CC: @Mastodon Migration

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