It should be pretty obvious that a decentralized network that many use specifically to not be connected to centralized networks houses mostly people who do not wish to have their posts bridged to B...
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.
In its current design, ATProto doesn’t really solve the queer.af problem. Hosting your own Bluesky server (currently only available for the sandbox network) on a domain that disappears later will have your account disappear just the same.
Nostr sort of fixes this (when a relay goes down, the stuff you posted on it disappears but your account will still work) and ATProto has some provisions for decentralised accounts, but in its current iteration, these provisions aren’t activated (yet).
Of course, there are many federating protocols. Matrix and XMPP for chat and SMTP for email seem to be the popular non-ActivityPub ones. However, in terms of federated microblogging, I would argue that ActivityPub is the de facto standard at the moment. Bluesky may have a couple of million users for ATProto (mostly on one server), but then Threads brings just as massive a user base to ActivityPub. Flipboard is also bringing in a susprisingly large amount of users, and Gitlab will soon implement ActivityPub for federated project management.
I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don’t want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don’t have the moderation capacity to deal with that.
There’s a solution for this, of course: you can whitelist servers you trust, perhaps based on lists signed off on by smaller projects. If you fear the influence of Threads and Bluesky, you can set up your little inner circle with the tools already available today.
I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don’t want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don’t have the moderation capacity to deal with that.
And I mean, I don’t necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.
But it’s also a bit weird insofar that if AP ever gets big, that’s a problem we’ll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways. Or at least have a plan how to handle it that goes beyond DEFEDERATE EVERYTHING™️. We need to accept that either there’s a certain baseline obscurity always baked in that also means at any point it could be that the world at large swings to using a different federation protocol and then we’re the weird pariah on a weird non-standard protocol. Or it gets mainstream acceptance and then Threads will be just one problem in an ocean of corporate federation.
Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation. It’s a problem that eventually needs solving anyways, so might as well get in front of it and have a solution for when or if large corporate instances and their masses of users end up dumping data into AP.
And I mean, I don’t necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.
I completely agree. “Public to everyone, but not for certain people described by a vague grouping” just doesn’t work. And I think tight-knit communities consisting of a few servers can be a wonderful thing! And to be honest, there are a lot of servers in the Fediverse that many people would not want federating with their comfortable community anyway.
if AP ever gets big, that’s a problem we’ll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways
That’s the problem, with Threads joining the Fediverse, it just became a problem we have to deal with now. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be to ban them from every server, which works, as long as Threads is the only “bad” player here. We can’t go into outrage mode every time a company joins. I follow Jerry (the admin of the wider Jerryverse) and I feel for him and his moderation team (if there are any beside him) every time stuff like this crops up.
Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation.
I agree. I’m very happy with Mastodon’s “silence” feature, where users can opt to follow posts from other servers, but those servers won’t be advertised or featured in any standard timelines. I hope other services, like Lemmy, add the feature as well in time. It brings the power of federation to the internet without being overrun by massive servers. Perhaps these policies can be even more restrictive (i.e. also hide boosts and replies by default) but so far, silencing servers seems to do exactly what I would hope it to do. It still allows for moderation issues to crop up, but (re)sharing problematic content can easily be dealt with by moderation teams in the form of blocking individual accounts or warning/banning users that repost problematic posts.
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.
In its current design, ATProto doesn’t really solve the queer.af problem. Hosting your own Bluesky server (currently only available for the sandbox network) on a domain that disappears later will have your account disappear just the same.
Nostr sort of fixes this (when a relay goes down, the stuff you posted on it disappears but your account will still work) and ATProto has some provisions for decentralised accounts, but in its current iteration, these provisions aren’t activated (yet).
Of course, there are many federating protocols. Matrix and XMPP for chat and SMTP for email seem to be the popular non-ActivityPub ones. However, in terms of federated microblogging, I would argue that ActivityPub is the de facto standard at the moment. Bluesky may have a couple of million users for ATProto (mostly on one server), but then Threads brings just as massive a user base to ActivityPub. Flipboard is also bringing in a susprisingly large amount of users, and Gitlab will soon implement ActivityPub for federated project management.
I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don’t want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don’t have the moderation capacity to deal with that.
There’s a solution for this, of course: you can whitelist servers you trust, perhaps based on lists signed off on by smaller projects. If you fear the influence of Threads and Bluesky, you can set up your little inner circle with the tools already available today.
And I mean, I don’t necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.
But it’s also a bit weird insofar that if AP ever gets big, that’s a problem we’ll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways. Or at least have a plan how to handle it that goes beyond DEFEDERATE EVERYTHING™️. We need to accept that either there’s a certain baseline obscurity always baked in that also means at any point it could be that the world at large swings to using a different federation protocol and then we’re the weird pariah on a weird non-standard protocol. Or it gets mainstream acceptance and then Threads will be just one problem in an ocean of corporate federation.
Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation. It’s a problem that eventually needs solving anyways, so might as well get in front of it and have a solution for when or if large corporate instances and their masses of users end up dumping data into AP.
I completely agree. “Public to everyone, but not for certain people described by a vague grouping” just doesn’t work. And I think tight-knit communities consisting of a few servers can be a wonderful thing! And to be honest, there are a lot of servers in the Fediverse that many people would not want federating with their comfortable community anyway.
That’s the problem, with Threads joining the Fediverse, it just became a problem we have to deal with now. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be to ban them from every server, which works, as long as Threads is the only “bad” player here. We can’t go into outrage mode every time a company joins. I follow Jerry (the admin of the wider Jerryverse) and I feel for him and his moderation team (if there are any beside him) every time stuff like this crops up.
I agree. I’m very happy with Mastodon’s “silence” feature, where users can opt to follow posts from other servers, but those servers won’t be advertised or featured in any standard timelines. I hope other services, like Lemmy, add the feature as well in time. It brings the power of federation to the internet without being overrun by massive servers. Perhaps these policies can be even more restrictive (i.e. also hide boosts and replies by default) but so far, silencing servers seems to do exactly what I would hope it to do. It still allows for moderation issues to crop up, but (re)sharing problematic content can easily be dealt with by moderation teams in the form of blocking individual accounts or warning/banning users that repost problematic posts.