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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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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.
I'm saying that if you want Rust application, install Rust.
No user cares about the language an application is written in, only about its features.
Also, should Python developers not be allowed to use Rust libraries through bindings? What a weird and broken analogy.
To be honest, I don't know enough about either Rust or Python to continue with this analogy 😂
I'm confused by your and the parents comments
You can create an ActivityPub server with any server software you like, you can even ask GPT to make a skeleton flask app for an activity pub site and it will. I think there's just an overlap in fediverse secs and that fans.
ActivityPub is just a standard for how users can interact with a server, and how that server pushes data to other servers. What that data is is entirely up to the developers, it just needs to be roughly social media shaped.