Unless there's some actual technical reason why this a bad idea, I don't buy the "ethical" hand-wringing here. It sounds like just another case of not liking specific social media companies and wanting the defaults to conform to those personal dislikes.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
119 points (91.6% liked)
Fediverse
27123 readers
226 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's exactly this. Bluesky has its problems but there is a massive overreaction from the fediverse crowd that it makes it hard for me to sympathise with them even if I agree on the principle.
EDIT: JSYK, the Bridgy Fed developer is working towards making the bridge opt-in! https://tech.lgbt/@ShadowJonathan/111925391727699558
is working towards making the bridge opt-in
That kinda sucks. We need more openly accessible information without everyone erecting their little walled gardens. :'(
I think the fediverse, and that includes Lemmy, have this warped idea of what Bluesky is and what ActivityPub/the fediverse actually is. They think ActivityPub is the de-facto protocol for microblogging, when it has glaring issues that Bluesky wanted to solve with Atproto (the queer.af debacle is a great example of this, imagine if you've got an account on queer.af and you want to move your data to a new instance). If you're a Linux guy, you might have seen parallels between ActivityPub/Mastodon vs. Atproto/Bluesky and X11 vs. Wayland.
In its current design, ATProto doesn't really solve the queer.af problem. Hosting your own Bluesky server (currently only available for the sandbox network) on a domain that disappears later will have your account disappear just the same.
Nostr sort of fixes this (when a relay goes down, the stuff you posted on it disappears but your account will still work) and ATProto has some provisions for decentralised accounts, but in its current iteration, these provisions aren't activated (yet).
Of course, there are many federating protocols. Matrix and XMPP for chat and SMTP for email seem to be the popular non-ActivityPub ones. However, in terms of federated microblogging, I would argue that ActivityPub is the de facto standard at the moment. Bluesky may have a couple of million users for ATProto (mostly on one server), but then Threads brings just as massive a user base to ActivityPub. Flipboard is also bringing in a susprisingly large amount of users, and Gitlab will soon implement ActivityPub for federated project management.
I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don't want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don't have the moderation capacity to deal with that.
There's a solution for this, of course: you can whitelist servers you trust, perhaps based on lists signed off on by smaller projects. If you fear the influence of Threads and Bluesky, you can set up your little inner circle with the tools already available today.
I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don’t want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don’t have the moderation capacity to deal with that.
And I mean, I don't necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.
But it's also a bit weird insofar that if AP ever gets big, that's a problem we'll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways. Or at least have a plan how to handle it that goes beyond DEFEDERATE EVERYTHING™️. We need to accept that either there's a certain baseline obscurity always baked in that also means at any point it could be that the world at large swings to using a different federation protocol and then we're the weird pariah on a weird non-standard protocol. Or it gets mainstream acceptance and then Threads will be just one problem in an ocean of corporate federation.
Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation. It's a problem that eventually needs solving anyways, so might as well get in front of it and have a solution for when or if large corporate instances and their masses of users end up dumping data into AP.
And I mean, I don’t necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.
I completely agree. "Public to everyone, but not for certain people described by a vague grouping" just doesn't work. And I think tight-knit communities consisting of a few servers can be a wonderful thing! And to be honest, there are a lot of servers in the Fediverse that many people would not want federating with their comfortable community anyway.
if AP ever gets big, that’s a problem we’ll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways
That's the problem, with Threads joining the Fediverse, it just became a problem we have to deal with now. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be to ban them from every server, which works, as long as Threads is the only "bad" player here. We can't go into outrage mode every time a company joins. I follow Jerry (the admin of the wider Jerryverse) and I feel for him and his moderation team (if there are any beside him) every time stuff like this crops up.
Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation.
I agree. I'm very happy with Mastodon's "silence" feature, where users can opt to follow posts from other servers, but those servers won't be advertised or featured in any standard timelines. I hope other services, like Lemmy, add the feature as well in time. It brings the power of federation to the internet without being overrun by massive servers. Perhaps these policies can be even more restrictive (i.e. also hide boosts and replies by default) but so far, silencing servers seems to do exactly what I would hope it to do. It still allows for moderation issues to crop up, but (re)sharing problematic content can easily be dealt with by moderation teams in the form of blocking individual accounts or warning/banning users that repost problematic posts.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I don't get the problem. It's just syncing public information back and forth. I mean, the information is fully public for anyone to access. If you mind who accesses it, you shouldn't make it public.
In ActivityPub, you have the freedom to defederate.
This bridge doesn't allow you to do so, I can understand why people have issues with it.
So/so.
You only have the option if it's your instance that you're having defederated. You cannot prevent anyone from:
- Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
- Simply using a web-scraper and a bot to post your stuff on another instance.
The second part is basically what is happening here.
Importantly, I feel people misunderstand on a fundamental level what it means to post things openly on the internet. Your only way to prevent this is simply to not post to a site that people can access freely and without a process through which you are vetting them for whether you trust them. As in: Just like IRL when you decide whether to tell things to friends or acquaintences or well, not.
But, on the web, you not only cannot prevent someone taking your public data and copying it over to wherever they so desire, you don't even know since they could be posting it in a place that you in turn have no access to so you cannot see it there.
There are differences:
-
Copying data through a protocol that purports to be integrated with the network frames that copying as a part of that network. If it was acquired through a bridge that does not respect federation then it is dishonestly coopting the legitimacy of the fediverse. Screenshots or copy-pastes won't have the same appearance of integration and will be intuitively understood by the reader as being lifted from another context. This happens all the time and we're very familiar with it. If copying data were all this was about, this solution should be sufficient.
-
It brings fediverse users into direct contact with non-federated networks in a way that they have not consented to. The ability to post directly back & forth exposes people to the kinds of discussions that we had previously moderated out of our networks. Defederation is an important tool for limiting the access bad actors have to our discussions, and accepting a situation where we can no longer defederate neuters that tool.
This isn't just about "information wants to be free". This is about keeping the door closed to the bigots, and forcing them to come onto our territory if they want to talk to us, so we can kick them out the moment they show their asses.
EDIT:
Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
This is exactly part of the problem with a bridge that doesn't rely on federation. With threads, we could just defederate and forget about it. With a bridge like this, we're playing whackamole with every anonymous instance that bluesky spins up, which they can do easily faster than we can detect them.
If this open source system is told to pack its bags and leave, then yes, they can do it more covertly, but if they do that then they're doing shady shit, and that can be exposed as the shady shit that it is. The point of protesting this is saying that we won't allow this kind of entryism to openly exist on the network.
You can't defederate from the bridge because it's not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!
Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.
Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Defederate from the bridge, then?
Unless it's parsing the HTML of your frontend, but you can probably block the user agent in that case.
On the one hand, the ability to share is implied in the platform and the publication settings of the software you're using.
On the other hand, copyright still applies. You need to pass a minimum threshold of originality (which can be quite hard for Tweet-length content) but creative works in any form are copyrighted, and are subject to intellectual property laws.
Now, I don't think any lawyer will recommend you to sue someone reposting your social media posts. However, the ideals of the Fediverse are in direct conflict with laws and regulations around the world, from intellectual property laws to privacy laws.
If you post a coptrightable original work, you decide who's allowed to reproduce that work. You don't have the legal right to repost stuff you found online, no matter how common that may be on social media; you're not allowed to reproduce a work unless you provide permission.
This is why Facebook and Twitter have those "you give us the unrevocable right to reproduce your works" lines in their terms of service. The Fediverse lacks such terms, because it's not one single server. Like with many other problems, the Fediverse overlooks and ignores the real legal conundrums by pretending it doesn't exist.
In my opinion, the standard controls on services like Mastodon should be sufficient: you decide whether you share a post with a server, with the tagged people, or with everyone. The default, the latter option, should be expected to include bridges and all other kinds of online services. However, I can't think of a legal basis for this.
The best I can think of is the fact ActivityPub is a push-based protocol, so your server is the one uploading content to the bridge. However, this type of technical implementation detail isn't accepted as a legal defence in other cases (imagine hacking becoming legal for any request/response protocol!).
load more comments
(18 replies)
Should federation between servers be opt-in?
Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?
This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it's more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.
Lemmy used to use whitelist based federation for a while. I don't think it would've taken off if it wasn't to the switch to blacklist based federation.
There are some annoying issues with bridges like these; for example, you can still find ten or twenty copies of outdated profiles for every major Twitter user out there now that Twitter shut down most bridge bots.
On the other hand, I don't really get the anger this is causing. People are upset that the Fediverse is federating. They also assert that Bluesky doesn't federate (it currently doesn't, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it's clear that it now does.
Most Fediverse solutions have blocking options for bridges like these. I don't know if there are servers that can block bots outright, but it's certainly a possibility. These bridges are the Fediverse working as intended, and people pondering on the consequences should probably move to a server with limited federation options.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
mastodon users continuing to show why mastodon will never reach mass appeal.
complaining about a tool that makes posts based on an open protocol that allows them to be shared across networks is bonkers.
this is probably the best tool that we'll have that will make social media actually fun to use again since twitter ruined it and segregated every service. if it gets ruined by going to an explicit opt-in service because of the loud minority, i'm gonna be so sad.
Exactly, the gatekeeping here is really present.
We can make a bridge to different protocols?? Pretty Cool
This concern is made even more ridiculous by the fact bsky.app already offers login gating for any user who wishes to use it, and I believe it blocks RSS as well. It's just such a funny practice. like? who hurt you ??
view more: next ›