Somebody put up a site saying
It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.
There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content “without consent”. Trouble is, there’s no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I…
- Put it on a website visible to the public?
- Send it to other peoples’ computers to do the same with?
- Search for it later?
- Display it next to advertisements?
- Display it on a service I charge people a fee to use?
- Keep it after your computer asks mine to delete it?
Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn’t transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren’t even aware of Mastodon’s new opt-in/out search features?
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.
I’ll refrain from writing the uncharitable version of my reaction to the idea that the Fediverse should be some small, close-knit community forever and instead say that people who want small, close-knit communities based on ActivityPub are free to create them. Mastodon and other major server software supports allowlist-only federation.
People using servers with open federation should expect that their posts will reach an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb, and that it will behave differently from vanilla Mastodon.
Meanwhile here I am just tooting with folks in my small part of the community blissfully unaware of
MASTODON
☣️ ToXiCiTy ☢️
Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?
> Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?
Oh the usual: makes a batter headline.
I guess I’m spreading toxicity by replying to a post from a Mastodon app…? Or something?
BLAME IT ON FACEBOOL THREADS
If you don’t want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don’t care about intent are a bad idea
I absolutely agree with everything in this post, I’m am just now learning about this but I’m really disappointed to hear that this happened.
I have looked past a lot of the toxic behavior of certain segment of neurotic individuals on the fediverse because I believe in the idea of protocols instead of platforms and user ownership of their data.
But add this to another example of zealots for privacy and “stopping harassment” being bigger bullies than the people they are supposedly against
There’s quite a bit to unpack in this article, even if some of it is only mentioned.
It’s a saddening read. There are issues with Fediverse culture and surrounding technical discussion at wide, but also with interactions between law and new technologies like ActivityPub—and that’s on top of the law, on it’s own, already doing a horrible job way too often, in my opinion. None of this is news, but it always hurts a little to be reminded so.
I’ve been thinking about trying to get into mastodon, to form my own opinion on several topics it intersects with. I’m a little uncomfortable with how popular it is compared to other fediverse software, considering how poorly they seem to integrate. I hoped some time on mastodon would dispell this feeling, or at least give me insights I could work with. To be honest, every day it gets a little harder to justify that idea.
But that’s just a personal thing. Maybe I’m simply not fit for micro-blogging. Really, I don’t care which software is the most popular, I literally just wish they’d integrate better. Despite my misgivings, I’m grateful for the positive impact mastodon has made in the social/tech circles, changing how many people see social media and their relationship with it.
The us-versus-them mentality is unreal. The only valid them, to me, is proprietary closed platforms. We should strive for more decentralized networks that shift control over user experience back to its users, because we need and deserve safer, healthier social networks. This is not it. I can only hope culture will improve, because I’m not sure how you’d tackle a problem on this scale.
And if mastodon can’t fix itself? Screw it, and keep an eye on what comes next.
It’s not a competition, we’re in a team effort to build a part of the internet that can resist enshittification inevitable in closed platforms; so long as the platform is open, I’ll keep my mind open as well. If my lemmy instance decides to migrate to Sublinks, that’s fine. Worst case, I’ll migrate elsewhere. Assuming Bluesky turns out OK as a company, even atproto taking the lead over ActivityPub might be fine. Hell, some of the original AP creators are still experimenting with new ideas.
I fully agree with the point that too many people act like the fediverse, or their specific brand of it, is more open-minded and kinder than what they’re trying to replace. I hope it’s possible to make that true, one day.
P.S. Sorry, brevity is the soul of wit, and I’m an idiot. This ended up as an outlet for issues that have been frustrating me for a while.
I still haven’t run into problems on mastodon. Maybe I’m not using it right lol.
But I’ve not run into any jerks frequently enough to notice. The feed is easy to curate, so I don’t have to deal with political shit since I just don’t scroll through the “all” equivalent feed unless I’m really bored. Even then, I’ve seen less toxicity the entire time I’ve been on mastodon (a couple of years, irc?) than I would in a week of Twitter or a single day on reddit.
I’m sure it’s there, don’t get me wrong. I’m just thinking it’s an exaggerated perception based on how people use it rather than being indicative of the user base as a whole. Shit, on my author account, the whole writing and book community is wholesome as fuck. Supportive, friendly, helpful. It’s fucking awesome.
As an end-user, you won’t be the subject of this kind of controversy. Run a service that attempts to make a profit using federated content or that provides very different discoverability features from Mastodon and it becomes very likely.
