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.