Erin Kissane
It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."
Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…
(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)
Erin Kissane
Another POV I like a lot from Robert Gehl, who did a whole blog post:
Erin Kissane
Last thing before I re-submerge—I think big emotional/instinctive reactions are so interesting and worthy of examination and usually point to meaningful low-level structural problems or disjunctures even when they seem to be about something else. (By low-level here I mean lower than protocol. Social contract stuff.)
@CyberneticForests's look at similar things here is really interesting
Erin Kissane
I think this formulation matches my own sense of why some things feel weird and others don't, and I'm really interested in pinning down what it is about some implementations that produce that impression.
(I think obviously it's more than one thing.)
Evan Prodromou
I think one big difference is that the intrinsic permission in AP is that I want people who follow me* to be able to read and react to what I make. That's the bargain I make when I post on an AP-enabled service; it works like a social network.
We all make concessions for bulk redistribution with tools like relays because they help connect people together. They extend sociality.
If that data is bulk extracted without providing value, that's a problem.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@kissane Given that the entire protocol copies things from server to server on purpose, the periodic freakouts about new services doing exactly that while others are applauded for "implementing the protocol" (which copies things by default) is so mystifying to me.
Evan Prodromou
@fraying @kissane oh, absolutely. I would like us to have just a wee bit more tolerance of even slightly different implementations.
Derek Powazek 🐐
@evan @kissane I get that, but the line can be blurry, from the vantage of a user, where it’s hard to tell the difference between an extractor and someone merely participating - especially when these boundaries are more social than technical, and not really written down anywhere.
Evan Prodromou
dynamic
I've also been wondering about how cultural norms around RSS interact with support for RSS on various Fedi platforms. Normally RSS is for public blogs, so no big deal, right? But I know I used to use a desktop RSS client to view locked Livejournal posts so where does it leave us if someone takes an RSS feed from a nominally non-federated platform, perhaps with authentication, and views it on a Fedi server?
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