Hey @ fediforum when I clicked on the link you just sent me in the email you just sent about your un-workshop on "Growing the Open Social Web" my ...

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Hey @fediforum when I clicked on the link you just sent me in the email you just sent about your un-workshop on "Growing the Open Social Web" my email client warned me that it was a tracking link.

As I said last year,

"The "Open Social Web" is a term surveillance capitalism companies and their friends have been using since at least 2008 either as a synonym for "the Fediverse" or "the fediverses". FediForum used to be about "the Fediverse", and I'm not quite sure when they changed their focus."

Thanks for providing such a great example of the surveillance capitalism-friendly nature of so many supporters of the "Open Social Web"!

By contrast, a long-standing #fediverse value is the critique of openness. I don't know how many of you were here in 2020, but that's when the outstanding Seven Theses On The Fediverse And The Becoming Of Floss was published, and it's got an excellent section on that. Please read it!

@general

#fediverse #openSocialWeb #FediForum

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@jdp23@neuromatch.social said in Hey @fediforum when I clicked on the link you just sent me in the email you just sent about your un-workshop on "Growing the Open Social Web" my email client warned me that it was a tracking link.:
> Thanks for providing such a great example of the surveillance capitalism-friendly nature of so many supporters of the “Open Social Web”!

Why would you assume malice?

Email tracking links are shoved in everything, especially when you use a third party MTA like SendGrid or Mailgun.

Ironically, using one is all but required because of the state of spam in email.

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@julian I'm not assuming malice. I'm letting them know that they're sent me a link my email cient warned me about. It's quite possible they just didn't bother to disable the tracking link- from looking at the headers, they seem to be using CampaignMail Lite and it's not clear to me from a quick look what the default is.

And no it's not actually the case it is "all but required" to have links like "veapdq.clicks.mlsend.com/ty/cl" instead of a straightforward link to the fediforum page on the fediforum.

Links like that are for tracking, period, the end.

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@jdp23@neuromatch.social I mean, using an MTA is required, not the tracking link.

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@julian@activitypub.space @jdp23 According to mastodon.social/@fediforum/115 they apparently had it disabled. Maybe “not tracking” is a paid feature at Campaign Mail? I don't know much about that whole ecosystem.

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