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Tear Down Walls, and Build Bridges
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Fediverse
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This insane isolationism from the vocal minority will kill ActivityPub. The fact that the author is now backing down and switching to an opt-in system is infuriating. Makes want to fork the project and host a copy of the bridge that’s opt-out.
Yeah it's all "We hate walled gardens" and then a minute later "DO NOT TOUCH MY GARDEN WALLS!!!!1!!".
And it's always the same utopian idea that you can somehow both be relevant and big enough to have "enough" activity to be a fun space where to spend free time for discussion and avoid any and all corporate interest in the technology. Instead of trying to get ahead of it and figuring out how to handle of this so that when it inevitably happens you got a clue what to do about it. As if defederating from Threads would even stop Threads from both copying content to them and - if they wanted to - copying their content here. Ridiculous, if they wanted to, they could and they would. That they don't even want to is the far more interesting bit, really.
And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can't demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.
While I disagree with some of the positions in this specific instance. They do have their right to express their opinion on the nature and direction of the fediverse. Reducing everything to the individual experience is focusing on technical features but not on the collective and social aspects.
There are also tons of people who can't really help but using the same corporate metrics: growth, reach, users count, adoption. Not everyone agrees on these as objectives to pursue, and it makes sense to be vocal about the general direction from that perspective (because it goes way beyond my personal narrow experience).
That said, I can't stand those who use excuses like "privacy" or "there are bad actors", as their main motivations, because these are also largely individual problems. On the other hand, opposing to keep separated a corporate, for profit, social media from the fediverse is a whole different matter.
The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn't have a cohesive nature/direction. It's made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You'll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn't have hard boundaries so you can't possible measure it all.
Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.
I disagree, it is a set of multiple entities but there is a common denominator. For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.
I think it's not pointless nor wrong to discuss these shared values (de facto values, beyond the technical fact I can spin up an AP software) and how certain parties do not share them and therefore should not be part of the fediverse in principle.
None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse. The fediverse existed long before ActivityPub was even proposed. Free software, ad free, non commercial, not run by big corporations are all just coincidence because its a grassroots effort. Even now, there's multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.
Even if you take those as given, none of those dictate any shared values. Bridgy-fed itself meets all of those requirements but clearly holds differing values. Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.
I'm in favor of groups maintaining shared values and enforcing policies based on them. But those policies can never apply to an entire network made up of distinct projects, servers, and people all with different ideas about how it should work.
They are de-facto values of the fediverse today. It depends what you mean by "requirements". Technically, you can join the fediverse in many ways, but the fediverse is not just a bunch of servers talking to each other, it's also a community of people. This community rejects some members for different reasons.
But those companies are very different, aren't they? Mozilla and Flipboard are participating within the fediverse, they are not plugging in their things, and their business models are not the same as Meta, and it is compatible with the values mentioned (well, Mozilla is a no-profit, in theory?). Wordpress is on the other hand very much aligned with the values of the fediverse. It is not the same as Meta and Bsky, both with the Silicon Valley DNA in them and all that it entails.
And this is exactly where I disagree. Are they part of the fediverse? I wouldn't say so. They are completely isolated islands, that happen to use protocols that are similar to those used from the fediverse (software). They are not part of the fediverse if by that we mean the set of communities that populate it at all.
I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community and their values, in other words, it's a social subject. Personally, I can't care less if tomorrow anybody starts using AP and can (technically) interoperate with Lemmy or Mastodon etc., I would definitely push for the rejection of - say - Facebook (like the literal facebook) or Reddit, or Twitter etc.
I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you're right. This is our disagreement. You're using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that's co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn't make sense to talk about it as a single organization.
I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we're having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can't shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don't listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you're using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.
I'm happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.
I guess you are projecting a bit.
The Fediverse is now more than 10M people, it's bigger than countries. And lots of people here (myself included, and even the developers of the ActivityPub standards) hope to grow it even more. We can not possibly expect to have a single "community" that is so uniform in cultural values. It would be incredibly boring.
on the other hand, they don't have to right to spam an independent creators github repository with threats.
Of course not, that's idiotic behavior, but obviously not what I was referring to
The idea is that the network should not be owned and controlled by a corporation, not that no corporation should ever participate in it.
Besides, how "corporate" is a startup with a few dozen developers working on a fully open source project?
Honestly I see the fediverse as a massive opportunity for corporations.
If you're Google, why not host a Google corporate instance where everything is authenticated as your own content, under your own URL, but you can still reshare outside content? You'll never have the issues of unwanted or controversial content appearing with your brand. There's no chance of a parody account pretending to be your customer service, and you won't have to pay a protection fee for an authentic checkmark.
This is 10x more important for governments to do, as right now I can't view official political discourse from my own government without giving my data to a private company.
No, we talking about Bluesky.
He's moved on to Nostr. Also, Bluesky is open source and their work can be forked by anyone. You might disagree about whether it makes sense to work on another different protocol instead of trying to improve the ActivityPub ecosystem, but let's please not get into mud-slinging and this stupid tribal mentality.
"Foam mouthed Threads opponents"
Threads is quite blatantly just going to throw it's weight around. It's not in good faith. They're already not going to properly implement ActivityPub (which they apparently would do, according to pro-Threads federation people), and so certain content will appear different on Threads and AP. And of course threads is massive already as if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.
Smaller services and services which aren't megacorps are fine. Honestly, BlueSky federation seems like a good thing to me. But we'll have to see about that.
My point is there's a line between "federate to get more exposure and connections" and "federate to get EEE'd". Threads crosses that line. BlueSky I don't know about. They're very different scenarios.
Mastodon and many others do not “properly” implement ActivityPub and have a ton of their own extensions and implementations
But do they ignore existing implementations of a feature when they want to add that feature? And make it crappier when federated?
Threads has implemented both ActivityPub implementations of quote posting: it uses the Misskey quote posting system, and also implemented fep-e232 (which is a better version of quote posting, but not implemented by any major platform), so that they are already immediately compatible with platforms that use the FEP version.
Mastodon ignores the current implementations of quote posting, and wants to do their own new implementation so that they can add granular control.
I kinda get all the Threads worries and the fact that some people might not be comfortable with Meta collecting their data for advertising. But this is just insane. It just makes me think people are just irrationally angry at everything, and they like being that, instead of informing themselves about what everything does.
the funniest thing is when they accuse bluesky of being a transphobic network when it's literally one of the most pro trans networks around.
It’s naivety all around. You can’t have a completely open anything. These libertarian-esk principals don’t exist in regular society for good reasons.
Wouldn't you get defederated fast too?
That’s exactly the point. Isolationists instances can always defederate bridges if they don’t like them. This outrage is them imposing their will on the rest of the fediverse.
Framing it as isolationists is ludicrous.
I love the idea of an Internet without borders, but there needs to be some shared values. That's what the ActivityPub protocol provides a platform for. To suggest that everything we do or post should be free is ridiculous. If the communities of BlueSky and Nostfr want to access our content, why don't they switch to ActivityPub and problem solved?
As a point, say that I write a poem and put it on my mastodon and then bridgey scrapes it and copies it. How do we get that taken down? A picture of my kid? A picture of someone else's kid?
There's absolutely no issues with ActivityPub growing, it can encompass the whole internet for all I care, but that needs to come with the protections, provisions and failsafes that the ActivityPub protocol offers. Bridgey doesn't do that, so again I say… If BlueSky and Nostfr want to pivot to ActivityPub, they're more than welcome, but the Internet I'm trying to build isn't about profiting off of small people without a voice and that's what Bridgey and this isolationism rhetoric tries to do.
Bridgy doesn’t scrape anything. It works the same as any other ActivityPub instance, the only difference is that it converts some JSON from one format to another.
It also converts edit and deletion events, so in your scenario it would relay that you want your poem or photo deleted.
This isn’t a web scrapper that reposts content like all the bots reposting Reddit threads to Lemmy. This is a protocol translator between federated networks that speak different languages.
Crickets
Small wonder. A tangent, but I'm also of the opinion that someone shouldn't put their child's photo (or any information) on the internet if they don't want to distribute it in the first place.
Does it purge on request?
Not entirely sure what you mean by that. It deletes posts in the same way that any other ActivityPub server does, by federating the deletion request.
It’s up to the receiving servers to handle that request and delete the post. You can easily have an ActivityPub native server that doesn’t honor those requests.
I found the bridgy website a bit confusing, but people who areupset should read through to get a better idea of what it actually does.
Initially I thought it was just scraping and reposting too, but I find what the dev is working towards is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
The largest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) has 360k MAU. This means that one can crawl all of its activities with less than 5 requests per second, every day.
Even with rate limits, the Fediverse is still so small that I could crawl the top 10 mastodon instances in less than a day.
From my desktop PC.
On my shitty DSL.
Anyone thinking that bullying one developer into a well-meaning project will be enough to keep their "secret clubs" away from malicious actors are in for a sad realization.
It doesn't scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That's how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.
ActivityPub doesn’t guarantee your post gets taken down on other instances after you delete it. Federation with another site isn’t more a less trustworthy just because it uses AP proper or a bridge.
I think that everyone being on the same protocol is better for compatibility and UX but I think bridges can have their place for those who choose to use them until then.
There will always be bad actors, but when everything is working properly…
FTFY. That's what would actually happen, and you and me both know it. 😛
😂
That's ridiculous. ActivityPub is a standard to allow communication between different systems. What you are saying is that people should only be allowed to speak English if they want to be part of the British Empire and be subjects to the crown.
Yeah, no amount of bending the knee will ever be enough for censorious extremists.