Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:00:09 JST Jonathan Kamens

   Look, let's say somebody forked Mastodon, added support for ads and an engagement-driven feed algorithm, and fired up a production instance.
   As soon as people started signing up there, content from other servers would start showing up there and vice versa.
   That's what the Bluesky bridge is.
   You _already_ don't have opt-in control over where your content goes. Anyone can federate.
   The Fediverse _already_ uses opt-out as its primary consent mechanism.
   1/2

   • clacke likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:00:07 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     P.S. To be clear, I am sympathetic to people's concerns about the impact of federation with Bluesky on them personally and on the Fediverse in general. I get it.
     But framing it as a new consent issue is just wrong. Federation isn't consent-based.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:00:08 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     "I don't want to be on a Nazi Mastodon server!" Great, then you can not sign up on a Nazi Mastodon server and block them or ask your server admin to do it if they haven't already.
     "I don't want to be on Bluesky!" Great, then you can not sign up on Bluesky and block them or ask your server admin to do it if they haven't already.
     All this is already happening, every day, in the Fediverse.
     2/2

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:01:11 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     • Grrrr, Darth Moose Shark

     @grrrr_shark He may be responding badly, but even if he had responded with more empathy the net result would have been the same, and I think people would still have been angry.
     But all this is kind of beside my point, which is that the complaints about consent, specifically, are misplaced.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:01:12 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     • Grrrr, Darth Moose Shark

     @grrrr_shark 🤷 There is no meaningful mechanism for someone to get the "consent" of the entire Fediverse for federating a new server. The way it works is, you federate, and then people decide to block you if they don't want you.
     If he had posted "Hey, do people think I should do this?" and listened, there would have been no way to aggregate the feedback into a meaningful consensus.
     Then whatever he subsequently decided to do, the people who disagreed would still be angry.

   • Embed this notice
     Grrrr, Darth Moose Shark (grrrr_shark@supervolcano.angryshark.eu)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:01:14 JST Grrrr, Darth Moose Shark

     in reply to

     @jik this is true, but it is also the case that this guy does not seem to understand the principle of "just because you can doesn't mean you should".

     It's not a technical issue - it's a social one. Advertising "I am actively connecting everyone to the firehose yay" and then not understanding when people are upset about not just that but his attitude in doing so is the deeper problem IMHO.

   • Embed this notice
     Reina :v_lesbian: (reina@eepy.moe)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:01:47 JST Reina :v_lesbian:

     in reply to

     @jik@federate.social With authorized fetch on, any server who wants access to my posts need to request them from my instance and if we block them, they can't access it. But that's not the case when it's being redistributed to bluesky

   • Embed this notice
     Reina :v_lesbian: (reina@eepy.moe)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:01:48 JST Reina :v_lesbian:

     in reply to

     @jik@federate.social This is not entirely true because of Authorized Fetch. By spreading my posts from your instance to another service, I am no longer in control over those posts in any way. I can't block individual instances on there for instance.
     
     What they're doing is a violation of the GDPR. They are a data broker who doesn't ask for consent. When I signed up on this instance, I consented to my posts federating with other instances, but I didn't consent to those instances abusing my posts. They still have to adhere to the GDPR and if they don't, they are violating my rights.
     
     I don't generally like arguing from legality, but I think the GDPR is good, so in this case it made sense.

     Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:10:20 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     • DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

     @djsundog Are you saying that if I report a Bluesky bridged post on my server and tell my server to forward the report to the other server, it won't be forwarded through the bridge? And vice versa?
     Is that problem unique to Bluesky? Is accepting reports from other servers a requirement for federation?
     What if I'm a server admin and I just decide to ignore reports from other servers, as I am sure some do? Am I then unable to federate? Or do people just block me when they realize that's happening?

   • Embed this notice
     DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:10:21 JST DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

     in reply to

     @jik the difference being the in-band signalling and moderation tooling that one fediverse server affords when interacting with another fediverse server versus the out-of-band signalling required to know what's happening across an opaque protocol bridge. it's not the same thing at all.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:13:04 JST Jonathan Kamens

     • Tokyo Outsider (337ppm)

     @tokyo_0 I'm not really sure why you say this isn't really federation. It looks like federation to me.
     I am not sure federation is defined by norms. Different servers in the Fediverse already have extraordinarily different norms. That's why lots of servers block lots of other servers.
     I think people forget sometimes that their experience is meditated by their admins blocking a shit-ton of servers.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Tuesday, 13-Feb-2024 23:15:07 JST Jonathan Kamens

     • DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
     • Tokyo Outsider (337ppm)

     @tokyo_0 @djsundog I don't understand how you can separate the question of consent from the question of federation, so I don't know how to respond to the point you are making here. From my point of view they _are_ the same conversation. You can't take consent away from people when they didn't have it in the first place.

   • Embed this notice
     DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 17:25:43 JST DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

     in reply to

     @jik I'm saying opt out is always taking away consent. I'm saying social software projects concentrating on the technical rather than the social is what drove many of us to come and build the fediverse into what it is today. I'm saying this is not hard to understand because it is clear cut: if you are taking data created by someone who is not you and are doing things with it that are not expected by the creator you are a bad actor.

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 17:25:45 JST Jonathan Kamens

     in reply to

     • DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

     @djsundog Please correct me if I'm wrong. I think the argument you're making is that true federation requires the possibility of meta-communication like complaints, so a connection that doesn't support that isn't really federation, it's something new and different.
     And if it's new and different then people in the Fediverse in fact have not consented to it already, so making it opt-out is taking away their consent.
     This makes a lot of sense to me. Am I hearing you correctly?

     Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology)'s status on Sunday, 18-Feb-2024 17:25:46 JST DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab

     in reply to

     @jik yes, if a fedi admin regularly ignores reports that another admin believes should be addressed it is likely that the report-ignoring admin will find their instance defederated from those instances that are looking for a better moderation stance from their peers. that's how it works. but, in order for that to work, the peering arrangement needs to be visible.