@gordon
Make fun if you like but it shows that #federation doesn't have what it takes to #decentralise power and operate with consent of individuals.
We're still beholden to server owners.
It's the same problem that opt-in consent laws have begun to push back against, and it matters here even more where the whole point of #fedi is supposed to be preventing those kinds of abuse.
This is why I say the #fediverse is a lifeboat and #p2p will be the shore.
@dsalo Except I don't see the overreach? Anyone could expose AP streams over RSS, or make Matrix replies post as comments on AP. Maybe someone else is using unsecured HTTP 1 as their transport as they read this exchange.
If I've missed something I'd be happy to look. I spent some time yesterday going through a bunch of comments looking for what point of governance people thought it breaks. I found nothing.
@dsalo Most of the comments were absolute drivel being completely wrong in GDPR mansplaining. A lot of it was conspiracy theories about Bluesky. Some of it was just vanilla NIMBYism. A few compared bridging protocols to rape, which is a totally normal thing to say.
If this is using federation differently from how federation was designed to be used, I haven't seen that case being made.
@robin My understanding of fediverse-style federation is that it involves deliberate choice -- indeed, that where the protocol is causing difficulties, it's precisely where choice is becoming too cumbersome to reasonably cope with, or where choice toggles don't exist but should.
I can absolutely maximize my available choices by running my own instance.
The Bluesky bridge as proposed isn't a choice, it's a gotcha.
@dsalo@robin it’s the same as any other server instance, so I don’t think badges are an answer.
MicroDotBlog users post and reply from their blog. Friendica is another software that has been interoperable since 2018. These are also “bridges” that natively use the ActivityPub protocol.
Socially it is absolutely not. Size/scale, ownership model (and actual ownership), and moderation model matter.
For good or ill, there's also a mental model of fedi boundaries at issue here. Agree with it or not, understanding it seems wise.
I don't like mega-apocalyptic pronouncements, but: if the fedi keeps hiding behind "technically the same" -- "technically" anything really -- I think it is liable to end up in a death spiral.
If every server instance has to go through mass uproar to connect to ActivityPub as it was designed, then another protocol will end up being adopted instead.
I totally understand the sociotechnical tension. These boundaries aren’t governed in any sense right now. There are loose consortia of server admins that block together as is supported by their tools.
Servers and services that expose fedi content beyond what its users understand to be usual-for-the-fedi are seeing the protests.
Is user understanding technically insufficient? Sure. But their social model seems pretty coherent to me, and my contention is that where the technology contradicts it, the technology has been designed wrong.
The passive voice you used is interesting. Who will adopt a putative new protocol?
@dsalo@boris I think that's where I disagree: I don't think that it's "Servers and services that expose fedi content beyond what its users understand to be usual-for-the-fedi are seeing the protests." I think it's just because it's Bluesky.
The problem isn't technical at all and I don't see it being improved by increasing technical understanding. The problem is in part people's social understanding of federation that seems to be largely imaginary.
I also disagree with “Servers and services that expose fedi content beyond what its users understand to be usual-for-the-fedi are seeing the protests.“, but I don’t think its just about Bluesky. The same ppl mad about Bluesky are the one’s who get mad about search, quote posts, etc.
The problem is in part people’s social understanding of federation that seems to be largely imaginary.
I sorta agree with this, but I think it’s more that these ppl are ignoring federation. They don’t care how federation works as long as it gives them exactly the features they want and nothing else. And when they find servers doing something they don’t like, they get upset because they have no tools to stop it.
@0x1C3B00DA@dsalo@boris You might be right and I think you could be on to something with "ignoring federation". I've had a few cursed discussions over the past months about the level of control that people want to have when they post on social — they basically want DRM over all their posts.
More than once I tried to point out "what you want is basically a server to talk with your friends" but no, they insist it's still social.
@dsalo@boris Everything that people accuse Bluesky of doing (all of which is, as far as I can tell, imaginary) is something that any federated server can do. If people have a mental model whereby just by being here they are protected from those things, then they have the wrong mental model for fedi. The only reason the fedi isn't being stripmined for data or captured by corporate interests is because it's too small (and clunky) to matter. But someone could do that almost overnight.
@dsalo@boris Pretty much all the existing bridges to non-Bluesky things have happened without anyone complaining. Someone mentions Bluesky and all of a sudden it's open season to harass someone. This isn't new, it's a pattern. This place is in-groupy beyond what I think is healthy. Happy people don't get aggressive at the simple mention of elsewhere. More than anything else, it feels like imagining an evil out-group to justify putting up with the experience.
@robin@boris Hm, I've definitely seen other things shouted down -- fedi search engines and similar consentless scraping is a big one, Threads federation another. Again, the issue was feeling too exposed without a way to control the level of exposure.
I don't actually think it's "just Bluesky," though I myself do have some Bluesky-specific reasons for distrust -- I don't trust Dorsey as far as I could throw his billions; for me he is a taint on Bluesky, even if he's there in name only.
@robin@boris This isn't (for me, anyway) a reflection on people who are hanging out on Bluesky. It's definitely guardedness toward its leadership/ownership, and concern for how poorly Bluesky seems to be handling the inevitable trashfires that attend its popularity.
My sense for now is that Bluesky will be the next X (I do not mean Twitter; I mean X), and that sooner rather than later.
@dsalo@boris I don't have a dog in this fight other than that I want a substrate for social that is usable by billions of people and that is architecturally better suited to capture-resistance, collective CoMo, and some forms of extensibility I think are valuable. At this stage, Bluesky is better on all counts. It doesn't mean it'll stay that way. What I don't get is people claiming to care strongly about these things - enough to yell at strangers - but operating on hearsay.
@dsalo@boris I've seen other things screamed at but nothing at this level of visceral hatred. (Perhaps for Threads, but, like, they do actual genocides.) Maybe I just missed some of the other stuff.
Dorsey certainly seems to be an idiot. At least he shut down his Bluesky account so there's that.
In fact, this has been done multiple times. There was some software release recently that did that in reverse (RSS Parot I think?). For some reason, ppl complaining about their consent didn’t have a problem with bridging that content without permission.
How many fedi users understand that? Know what RSS is? If it were explained to them, how might they react?
How many fedi users understand the basics of how federation works? Not many, based on the outrage of a bridge using the same federation protocol as their own server.
That too comes down to mental model of fedi sociality, I think, though.
Yes and I think a lot of these ppl complaining about bridging have an incorrect mental model of the fediverse. It was never a private haven, unless they are using allow-list federation. They have a view of the fediverse with very discrete and defined boundaries, but the fediverse is nebulous and crosses server/protocol/mediatype/etc boundaries
@0x1C3B00DA@robin I don't think their view is wrong except technically, is the thing.
I reject the supremacy of code and standards over social norms. A social norm is not incorrect merely because the tech doesn't work that way or the standard doesn't spell it out.
Again, this may be an intractable difference between us, and if it is, I do not believe what I currently think of as the fedi will survive.
I reject the supremacy of code and standards over social norms. A social norm is not incorrect merely because the tech doesn’t work that way or the standard doesn’t spell it out.
You can’t claim there is a social norm that applies to everyone on the fediverse. The fediverse is not a single social group. It is a distributed collection of ppl and bots.
I reject the supremacy of code and standards over social norms
Maybe you meant this abstractly, but this quote seems to imply that you think social norms hold weight in arguments about features on the fediverse. Specifically, that the idea of “requiring consent” to federate posts means bridges must be opt-in rather than opt-out.
What I’m trying to express is that there is no social norm that can apply to the fediverse because it is not a single group. Therefore, any argument that uses social norms to dictate features on the fediverse, as a whole, are wrong. I am extremely in favor of ppl having the tools to control their own data and even build social groups where norms can be used to enforce things, but I don’t think that applies in this instance.
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