I would like to point out that would you like a business which is focused on selling your data and serving targeted adverts to you, as well as causing depression due to posts that’s unrelated to Roblox being promoted on Roblox? I’m aware Roblox has an account here, but again, the majority of Roblox players do not know what these services are doing, which in this case is serving targeted content and ofc that could be a valid argument against Mastodon, since we don’t know how these servers could be handling data as well.
Meanwhile, Mastodon doesn’t have any sort of targeted advertising or posts whatsoever, there is no algorithm. I’m pretty sure this would be a platform that would be fine to promote onto the Roblox player base.
Considering that both platforms have official Roblox accounts, they clearly pass the relevant ‘brand safety’ tests.
This is the case with any platform, especially Twitter and Discord, which expressly permit pornographic content (albeit behind an age gate). From my anecdotal experience, TikTok has more robust controls to prevent under 18’s from accessing inappropriate content or setting unwise settings, when compared with other platforms.
ByteDance, while based in China, operates TikTok (in Western countries) as a legally separate entity and claims (key word) that data is not shared with Chinese servers. There have been notable exceptions to this, but the company claims these were violations of its procedures, and were individual situations. From my understanding, the only security concerns about TikTok (aside from general privacy and data protection concerns, which apply to all platforms) are those in sensitive positions, such as Journalists, or who work with government assets.
TikTok does not (or rather, should not) have access to biometrics information on any client, as this is abstracted via user-agent APIs.
This is also the case with Twitter and Google (YouTube). Additionally, Meta et al. is accountable to regulators as demonstrated numerous times, including through fines issued to it by European data watchdogs.
There is more of a business case for supporting TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms before and over Mastodon. Especially considering the cost of adding other platforms is effectively nil, due to the infrastructure already existing, whereas adding Mastodon support would require better regulatory infrastructure.
Just reading the rest of this post, and this is on purpose. It has no algorithms to keep you doomscrolling for hours.
Just to get this clear, there are servers such as Https://rblx.live which I’ve just found about which are owned by a notable person, and they live in the United Kingdom.
The official Mastodon server is located in Germany and contains a contact address.
Mstdn.social and masto.ai is located in the Netherlands.
Fosstodon is located in the United Kingdom.
A lot of these are in countries that have strict data protection rules.
The only issue is that the platform you mentioned, being located in Germany, having many data protection rules would need to be somehow translated into where Roblox is located, the US. This leads to many issues later on, including policies in other strict countries. This becomes a mess for Roblox.
Additionally, it isn’t an officially recognized platform, at least by Roblox. People can see it as this vague company based in Germany. So, unless Roblox sees an issue with Twitter, Roblox will not address it.
I support freedom in general and the decentralization and FOSS of mastodon provides this, adding mastodon as a social url, for me would be a highly enjoyable feature, roblox doesn’t need to keep up that much with the a billion decentralized instances there may be, it’s not that hard to just check and add a few things.
I even go as far as thanking the OP for suggesting such a thing although it’s unlikely to be done.
I don’t really care much about Mastodon since Twitter imo is pretty much “new boss, same as old boss”, however I do think Roblox needs to expand upon social links and moderate users that link to NSFW material.
admittedly, yes, the server is pretty inactive. however, I feel like Vivaldi, FOSStodon and others are off-topic to Roblox and have no real reason to be added other than “their popular”
Considering how these are general purpose servers, I wouldn’t consider them as off topic (fosstodon is focused around open source software, which could also include games) especially because social links aren’t only for descriptions for games, it’s for profiles as well, albeit the majority of people using Mastodon in the Roblox space seems to be developers right now.
After looking at the servers more, I think that yeah, I guess they could work, still skeptical about floss.social and fosstodon.org, but eh, whatever, if Roblox adds them that’ll be cool.
The best idea here is to use ActivityPub directly to check if the domain is a mastodon server. ActivityPub is a protocol from W3C that the fediverse uses.
If thats a little too finnicky, they can also just use the list shown on joinmastodon.com to check for mastodon servers, which is actually available using this API: https://api.joinmastodon.org/servers. I feel like Roblox would want to curate that though.
I think the way you suggested is the best way to go, would also allow support for Misskey and Akkoma based servers (e.g. I’m now on lethallava.land personally and I’ve seen some developers on these forums on lea.pet and wolfdo.gg).
Not sure whether it’s even worth considering the joinmastodon API now.
Two of the biggest servers that I know Roblox developers are on: tech.lgbt (Elttob, railworks) and mastodon.gamedev.place (boatbomber, Lunya) aren’t listed there at all. I think tech.lgbt might be because it runs on glitch-soc, not sure if any glitch.soc servers were ever listed there.
