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
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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.
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EDIT: JSYK, the Bridgy Fed developer is working towards making the bridge opt-in!
Thank you for this!
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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