X creates a mastodon instance. Not one that bridges to X or federates X to the fediverse, but a native Mastodon instance. Do we have the same complaints about "consent" with them becoming part of the fediverse?
Is it the company that is objectionable, or the fact that it's not a native fediverse app that is the problem?
@jerry I haven't seen anyone else bring this up explicitly, so I guess I gotta speak my mind. In my eyes, the biggest issue is the unofficial nature of bridging. If I don't want to talk to bluesky, and I block bluesky, nothing happens. I have to block the bridge.
But a bridge can be created trivially now that the software has been created. So I could block both the bridge and bluesky and another bridge could open bluesky back up. So even if I clearly don't consent to interacting with a third party, an opt out bridge still violates my consent by default.
When blocking is the officially supplied method to withdraw consent, any method which bypasses blocking is unacceptable, and could even be considered malicious. If bluesky supported activitypub themselves, I'd have no issue, as I could use the tools built into activity pub to withdraw consent.
As for the #nobridge profile, this is unacceptable for several reasons.
1: profiles tend to have character limits, limiting the accessibility of this method.
2: standardization: if a bridge can require any arbitrary tag, arbitrarily many bridges leads to ridiculous profiles (which would be likely, as one might want to block a bridge only to specific third parties). Imagine a year from now when everyone's profile contains #nofacebookbridge#noredditbridge#nobirdbridge etc
Culminating in 3: as stated earlier, we have an official, built in way to handle this issue already and that's blocking and activitypub. Where blocklists go where they're supposed to be and keeping track of this mess is easy and supported
If a site wants to interact with the fediverse, it should use activitypub, as it contains all the tools necessary for doing so in the manner in which everyone who created a federated account intended for their content to be used.
@jerry I think it's a bit of both. And it's also about red flags.
If somebody sets up and independent fedi instance, the potential "splash damage" is rather small.
If somebody sets up an instance and says "freeze-peach" in the moderation rules, that's a red flag.
If somebody sets up a proxy between the rest of fedi and a currently-defederated "freeze-peech" instance, that's a serious red flag and clear disregard for decisions already made by fedi regarding that instance. Borders on malicious.
@jerry the way I see the BS bridge thing is: a lot of people on here made a conscious decision to be on here and to opt-out of corporate platforms, for many different reasons (sanity, safety, etc).
Creating an opt-out bridge between here and corporate platforms (BS to me is a corporate platform until clearly proven otherwise) is like setting up a proxy between the rest of fedi and a known, defederated freeze-peach instance.
It completely disregards decisions made by a lot of people on here.
@jerry and the argument given for it by the guy behind it — "opt-in would mean fewer users" — only adds another serious red flag to an already very 1951 May Day Parade in Moscow looking situation…
@jerry Do you mean Musk? I would domain block immediately. Zero tolerance for nazis. I'd prefer if my instance did it so that they saw nothing rather than just me view filtering results.
@jerry
FWIW my thought is bridging is an issue, putting fediverse content into other ecosystems. If they have a Mastodon instance (or other fedi type), that doesn’t do that, and you can choose to interact or not individually, whatever your feelings on the company in question. Naturally I would prefer that only “those with good intent” enter my space, be that personal or online 🙂
If X opens a Mastodon server on the Fediverse, at the end of the day, it's still people posting stuff, just like the people on my instance, or your instance. They have the right to be heard, until they, as an individual, prove they shouldn't be heard.
To me, it sounds arrogant that I would require that I "consent" to allow "THOSE people" to talk to me on the same network because I don't like the server they chose to post messages from.
If someone needs to give me consent before I can even try to talk to them, I wouldn't want to talk to them.
My concern with X is just that I don't believe they can, or would be willing to, moderate appropriately. I would need to be careful and perhaps put on some limits. Any server can have the same problem. It's merely that the size of X is much greater, but the problem is not unique.
No class or group of people need my permission to talk to others, or hear others. We are talking about censoring people. Innocent people.
@jerry I would look at a native Xitter ActivityPub instance the same way I look at every instance: do they moderate their users consistent with the values of the mastodon community or not? There are dozens of ActivityPub instances which are suspended by nearly every mastodon instance due to unmoderated racism or something similar.
I would expect that a Xitter ActivityPub instance would exhibit similar lack of moderation and would be defederated within a week.
As for people seeing my posts, if I post something publicly, that means publicly. I am under no illusion that its distribution can be effectively restricted.
It's almost like people forgot you can copy and paste.
We desperately need to have the big conversation about what this place is. It's no longer a bunch of eccentric clubhouses on tentative speaking terms with each other.
@wjmaggos@jerry It's never going to be one thing, people need to learn how to manage complexity and differences better. Twitter wasn't one thing either, which is why "Black twitter" existed and various other twitter subcultures as well. This is for at least two reasons, we're talking social media here and the social/human culture and communities part exists whether people realize and acknowledge it or not. The second reason is that social media, by it's very nature of us choosing who to follow provides an individually tailor/chosen community/feed experience for each user. People seem to have an incredibly hard time understanding this for some reason (that I still haven't entirely figured out but I suspect is about mistaking our subjectivity for objectivity).
@fifilamoura@wjmaggos@jerry I miss this point (explicitly or implied) from most discussions and comparisons about fediverse. if there's anything that is built into fediverse it's the way it is decentralized. people shouting what fedi is too often forget how it is slightly different for each fedizen. there's no one fedi, no one place. it's everything from single user instances, across over small and mid sized communities with strict rules, to dysfunctional behemoths like mastodon.social
but don't we have a general understanding about what a website is now? we are in the AOL to WWW days of this medium and we're just kinda giving potential users a very confused message about why it's worth it.
you can do crazy shit in a browser but the core of it back then was that everything text or PR could now reach everyone freely via the browser. what is that idea for the fedi? I argue it's the public together deciding what gets attention, not the money people.
@0xSim Do you have the same concern with Medium, Flipboard, and the other for-profit entities that have Mastodon instances or other presences on the fediverse?
@jerry Yup. In a way, I want to have a social network that - as much as possible - stays untainted by corporations and capitalism. I despise the idea that Meta, Bluesky, Medium, etc. make money off of my data, under the pretense that if it can be publicly accessed, it's free for them to take and monetize.
@jerry Sometimes I think people really like to break the balls with extreme fanaticism about these matters. In the kingdom of freedom we are going to restrict everything we don't like. I don't like threads or X does not enable me to impose anything on others. Isn't it enough to be able to block each person what they don't like?
@jerry just like threads, it's not the consent issue it's the issue that as an instance they've already violated the "terms or federation" for most instances and the appropriate action is to defed and block
@mensrea that's not the complaint, though. The complaint is that people do not consent to seeing posts from certain other instances and/or having their posts being seen on those other instances.
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