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.
Reading through that thread, it highlights why I object to blue-sky stuff being posted in Fediverse areas like they’re one in the same and have the same values. The fact that someone is stealing content to prop up blue-sky is egregious. That this is being defended is baffling.
Calling it “stealing content” is loaded terminology. You’re posting content on an open protocol whose very purpose is to broadcast it far and wide.
Yeah, I’d argue that using such loaded terminology to imply incorrect things is the real moral violation here
The reality is that a bunch of the content creators are here rather than on a centralised billionaire/VC backed platform. Surely if those content creators wanted their content on BlueSky they would post there. I know for example that I personally declined invitations, so why would I want my toots and Lemmy posts there?
I’m not a fan of Bluesky, but to call it “centralized billionaire backed platform” makes no sense anymore. They are opening for federation already, and Jack Dorsey is now just shilling Bitcoin on Nostr.
My choice of present continuous was deliberate.
You signed up for federation when you joined lemmy and mastodon. Your posts federating to other servers should not be a surprise.
To ActivityPub services. BlueSky doesn’t support the protocol
So if/when they do this is a non issue, right? Or have they confirmed they won’t ever be supporting activitypub?
BlueSky employs a competing protocol
I’m posting on a protocol whose purpose is to post content to other platforms that use the same protocol.
Your posts are awfully public, given that goal. I mean, anybody can freely access them and use programs to copy them for any use they desire.
Isn’t this the same logic used to justify using our posts to train large language models?
What’s wrong with the logic used to justify using public data to train large language models?
No. There is a difference in context and intent.
Bottom line is, if people are concerned of having their conversation and content distributed out of their intended audiences, we’ll all have to move to a fully encrypted network, where every message can only be decoded by the intended recipients. Getting upset because other people are not agreeing to your expectations of privacy is pointless.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that platforms you’re not a member don’t host content you create in order to make it look at though their platform is more popular and vibrant than it is, thus generating revenue of which you’re not going to get a share of.
their platform
Can we please get out of this tribal mindset? The thing about decentralized systems is that it lets everyone where they want to be without being forced into a walled garden. Why should I care about the platform that other people are using, if I can reach them just the same?
Who cares if Bluesky or Nostr become more popular than ActivityPub? As long as the “platform” is open source and not actively working to hold its users as hostages, we should praise and hope they get to grow as large as possible. We should be fighting against the big corporations, not the small independent developers. There are almost 3 billion people using Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/TikTok. They are the ones that we should be actively engaging and trying to win them over to our side.
Where exactly does a “platform” end? Is it only lemmy.tf, or all Lemmy instances? Either way Mastodon or Peertube can hardly be considered to be the same platform as Lemmy. Activitypub is a protocol and definitely not a platform. Or would you consider threads.net part of your “platform” once it implements Activitypub?
Assuming you hold rights to your content in the legal system you’d be claiming the damages in, you are of course free to file a lawsuit.
And also by the bots we use to copy reddit content here, I presume? 😛
I’m actually not a fan of copying Reddit content over to here either. I’m at least consistent that in my thought processes.
Fair enough.
I don’t even truly know where I stand if I had to personally decide it. I guess i’m one of those filthy Neutrals, I have no strong opinion either way. 😑
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.
Defederate from the bridge, then?
Unless it’s parsing the HTML of your frontend, but you can probably block the user agent in that case.
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
You can’t defederate from the bridge because it’s not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block
brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.
Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.
Instance can block bridge domain and it will not be federated
I was referring to the
Put the text #nobridge in your profile bio, refresh your profile on your user page, and Bridgy Fed will stop bridging your account. Or feel free to send me a request privately.
https://fed.brid.gy/docs#opt-out
Seems like defederation is not enough in this case, as it’s not mentioned as a way to opt-out.
On the one hand, the ability to share is implied in the platform and the publication settings of the software you’re using.
On the other hand, copyright still applies. You need to pass a minimum threshold of originality (which can be quite hard for Tweet-length content) but creative works in any form are copyrighted, and are subject to intellectual property laws.
Now, I don’t think any lawyer will recommend you to sue someone reposting your social media posts. However, the ideals of the Fediverse are in direct conflict with laws and regulations around the world, from intellectual property laws to privacy laws.
If you post a coptrightable original work, you decide who’s allowed to reproduce that work. You don’t have the legal right to repost stuff you found online, no matter how common that may be on social media; you’re not allowed to reproduce a work unless you provide permission.
This is why Facebook and Twitter have those “you give us the unrevocable right to reproduce your works” lines in their terms of service. The Fediverse lacks such terms, because it’s not one single server. Like with many other problems, the Fediverse overlooks and ignores the real legal conundrums by pretending it doesn’t exist.
In my opinion, the standard controls on services like Mastodon should be sufficient: you decide whether you share a post with a server, with the tagged people, or with everyone. The default, the latter option, should be expected to include bridges and all other kinds of online services. However, I can’t think of a legal basis for this.
The best I can think of is the fact ActivityPub is a push-based protocol, so your server is the one uploading content to the bridge. However, this type of technical implementation detail isn’t accepted as a legal defence in other cases (imagine hacking becoming legal for any request/response protocol!).
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available? There’s a reason that social media companies include clauses in their EULA that posting content gives them (and only them unless otherwise noted) the right to reproduce that content.
It does indeed outside of the united IP holders of america.
In the free world, you can record any tv or radio program that is freely available for your personal consumption.
Welcome to the actual land of the free.
Edit: answering another comment of yours. You can absolutely repost the twitter, reddit and whatnot post of anyone. It is paywalled stuff that you are not allowed to share.
How is reposting content to another social media platform with over a million users “personal consumption”?
Thats not what I said. I was answering to this:
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available?
The answer to that is yes, at least if you‘re not living in a corpo hellscape.
Assuming the comments pass the originality threshold, you’re actually not allowed to just copy someone else’s work and repost it. Copyright still applies to written work, and the EULA of most platforms only provide the service you’re posting to with the right to reproduction. By default, you’re not allowed to reproduce copyrighted works, which would be any piece of original (enough) writing.
Practically, though, no court is going to care. The law may be on the side of the copyright holder, but actually suing reposter will take a lot of money and the damages you can collect will be absolutely minimal.
Thanks for elaborating. The obvious flaw in this logic is that even the most original thing brings both the platform and the writer the visibility. Assuming you‘re knowledgeable and technically correct, this would always be unenforceable because it is the whole purpose of the platform to retweet, cite and repost.
I‘m not too knowledgeable in IP law or the local US court proceedings but where I live, your EULA/TOS become null and void if you put the customer at a disadvantage. Having this damocles sword dangling above their heads would most likely not hold in court (retweet = visibility but technically against TOS)
I agree that enforcing this will be basically impossible, but I can imagine someone with more money than sense going after reposts ending up successful because they may be in the right, legally speaking. In the same way torrenting has had companies calculate damages by multiplying a fine with the number of people the content was shared with, Fediverse servers may rack up quite a fine if such a lawsuit ever succeeds.
The lines about reproducing works in EULA/TOS don’t exist to provide any (dis)advantage to the user, they’re basically legally required for the software to operate. Otherwise, websites like Facebook wouldn’t be allowed to share the image you posted with anyone but you. I don’t think anyone will object to the right for Facebook to show your friends the pictures you’ve shared with them, so I don’t think they’ll be struck by not complying with the law, either. If anything, Fediverse servers need a line like that, with an addition that any servers federating with the user’s server may also reproduce the work.
As for a sword of Damocles in the Fediverse: any EU-based Fediverse server (and there are many!) hosted by a company or organisation is in a lot of trouble if any data protection agency ever bothers to look into them. I don’t know any Fediverse server that has the capabilities to be GDPR-compliant. For servers hosted as a hobby by individuals, I don’t think this is a problem (there are legal exemptions for personal stuff) but the copyright thing is only a minor risk compared to the data privacy issues.
Often, Fediverse enthusiasts choose to ignore the laws that make their dreams very hard to achieve, but I can imagine a Threads/Tumblr lawsuit having devastating effects for the Fediverse at large, and nobody seems to care. I know the law is complicated and boring and I’m no lawyer myself, but the wishful thinking that legal issues will never crop up that I often see in open source communities can be a real risk. I’m reminded of Napster blatantly ignoring copyright on the internet because they wanted to bring new and exciting tech to the world; great aspirations, but how long will they last?
Copyright has fair use provisions, and one could argue that a bridge that lets you public content on a different network is no different than providing a VCR-to-DVD service.
Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷
That’s is not the right analogy. No one is making the bridge and saying “I can take the content from person A on Lemmy and sell it on Bluesky”. they are just saying “Here is a copy of what Person A posted on Lemmy”.
In terms of copyright, why is it okay from someone on a different Mastodon server to relay content from a Lemmy server and even redistribute it (through, e.g, RSS readers), but it’s not okay for a bridge to redistribute it to a Bluesky server?
Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.
For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.
Lemmy’s federation model is that all posts and comments get replicated across all instances. If an instance goes down, the copied content still will live in my instance. It’s not just caching.
Yes.
False equivalence.
Okay, well try this one:
Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your “publicly available” argument, right?
Allowing public broadcast once doesn’t void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.
Again, false equivalence, and I don’t think you understood what @Crackhappy meant when they said it.
You are trying to equate the concept of whether you can do something with whether a civil lawsuit would rule that you are liable for damages for it.
Of course you can copy something someone uploaded to the internet. They made it publicly available, it’s trivial to copy. Disney or so might take you to court for it, and here we get to the crux of the matter: Assuming you were to post all your posts here under an “all rights reserved” license and the instance you’re doing that on confirm you in writing that they’ll comply with orders for data in case you need it for a lawsuit, you’d absolutely be able to go after someone creating a bridge copying your data to Threads in a civil lawsuit.
Are you going to do that over any comment you post here? Probably not, plus, honestly, good luck showing that you have been materially damaged by the copy.
But again, false equivalence. You can trivially copy anything on the web. Whether you are liable for it is a wholly different thing nobody was talking about.
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.
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!
Thank you for this!
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.
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.
We can make a bridge to different protocols?? Pretty Cool
This concern is made even more ridiculous by the fact bsky.app already offers login gating for any user who wishes to use it, and I believe it blocks RSS as well. It’s just such a funny practice. like? who hurt you ??
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.
How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one “mega-instance” effectively breaks that functionality. That’s not good from a UX perspective.
I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn’t have any luck. I guess I’m doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?
it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.
Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.
That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the “login with reddit” functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).
Doesn’t that mean we’d have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?
I love this idea in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.
Lemmy used to use whitelist based federation for a while. I don’t think it would’ve taken off if it wasn’t to the switch to blacklist based federation.
There are some annoying issues with bridges like these; for example, you can still find ten or twenty copies of outdated profiles for every major Twitter user out there now that Twitter shut down most bridge bots.
On the other hand, I don’t really get the anger this is causing. People are upset that the Fediverse is federating. They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
Most Fediverse solutions have blocking options for bridges like these. I don’t know if there are servers that can block bots outright, but it’s certainly a possibility. These bridges are the Fediverse working as intended, and people pondering on the consequences should probably move to a server with limited federation options.
They also assert that Bluesky doesn’t federate (it currently doesn’t, but the protocol is designed for federation!) when it’s clear that it now does.
I’m not surprised about the skepticism there though. These are just promises, and we all know that a for-profit entity will happily sacrifice any promies if it means they make more money that way. Also depending on how exactly that federation will work it might be practically useless as well.
Scepticism is welcome, especially for companies founded by billionaires, but I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that federation will be killed off. They started out with no federation at all, then moved on to federating with the sandbox, and I’m quite certain they’ll open up real federation in time. There’s surprisingly little development power behind Bluesky, though, and its recent surge in popularity will no doubt have slowed down nice-to-haves like federation.
The AT Protocol is designed very differently from ActivityPub, making it quite difficult to federate and join the network as a small player, unless you’re only providing content. Following users requires a significantly more beefy server than you would on ActivityPub. On the other hand, ATProto solves a lot of problems Mastodon has (no two servers showing the same list of replies, for one). This leads to a situation where feeding content (and thus producing value) becomes attractive, but consuming content (and thus taking eyes away from the main server) becomes more of a challenge, presumably one left to either bridges like these, based around ActivityPub-based servers like Mastodon.
I think it’s very difficult for a company to take Bluesky’s network, set up their own server, and out-compete them. There’s only one category of company that I would expect to be capable of this, and that’s “billionaires looking to revolutionise things”, which is exactly what Bluesky is all about. It’s possible that Threads will try to integrate with Bluesky, but I don’t think that would take away anything from BS. In fact, I think it would only drive up BlueSky’s value to see Facebook invest in another company’s technology like that.
All of the above makes me quite confident that the Bluesky team will be able to deliver on their promises, in time. They’re not federation-first, and I don’t think they ever claimed to be, but that doesn’t make them anti-federation per se. I do have my doubts about some of the weird cryptocurrency/web3 stuff sprinkled into the protocol, but for now none of that seems to play a central role.
