Here's my take on pingbacks:

1. The sheer amount of "public" data on the internet allows people to have "public" whispernetwork conversations with the expectation that the problematic person is unlikely to notice.

2. People are unclear about what a "public" toot is. Unlisted? Still public.

3. Because of #1 and #2, pingbacks set up the most vulernable users so that problematic people will get a *notification* of people linking to a problematic website.

This will lead to more online harassment

Additionally, pingbacks themselves become a vector for abuse. Nazis discussing your latest post about mastodon content warnings helping trans folks avoid transphobic triggers? Yeah, you're going to see every comment they make.

Turn pingback off on your blog, you say? Unfortunately I want to leave them on so I have some idea when I get linked on a shitty site and need to lock my social media down. I just don't need to see every comment people make when linking to a page. That would be hell.

For every new software feature you want to add, think, "How would a group of persistent, tech savvy people use this feature to harass someone."

Maybe that means you decide not to implement it. Maybe that means you work on something else that would support people who get the majority of harassment.

@sphakos funny, I can't think of a web tech that can't be abused this way

@Efi @sphakos there was a good amount of mastodon features that were discussed and eventually shelved bc it would be used for abuse. many *nice* features, in an ideal world :c

@MightyPork
@Efi @sphakos

This duality is something I'm struggling with on Aardwolf design. In particular, I want an "aspects" system that lets people present different sides of themselves to different people. To really be useful for some vulnerable classes of people, it needs to be possible to unlink your aspects so that they can't be trivially revealed as the same person. Think alts with single sign on and a unified timeline. (1/2)