Idk why not at this point. The #BridgyFed critics got like everything they wanted. Everything is pretty much #optin. And because of that it's difficult to follow from here the artists I follow at #Bluesky. :satsuki_sadge:
You could say "just ask each one of them to follow you then", but that's easy for you to say. I don't like looking like an unsolicited jerk asking if they want to hear the words of Jesus Christ or something. Which is how I see some of you here on fedi btw. Damn evangelists. No different from techbros or FOSSbros
Now I do think the early stages should be opt-in like a beta as it is right now to iron out the bugs (and there are plenty) before being available fully to the public. But I have a feeling this is never gonna go #optout as it should've been because of the harshness of those ignorant IANALs who do not really understand the #GDPR and other #privacy laws... :reisensweat:
After a long thought, and 20 years of experience with them on social media: after all this talk about federation, opt-in, opt-out and all that, I came to the conclusion that being connected with Americans on social media should be opt-in by default.
Einstellungen
> Öffentliches Profil
> Datenschutz und Reichweite (Tab)
> Öffentliche Beiträge in die Suchergebnisse einbeziehen (aktivieren)
Fiel mir gerade nochmal wegen eines "weiß nicht mehr wer"-Posts ein. Es haben immer noch sehr wenige aktiviert, scheint mir. Vielleicht Absicht, vielleicht aber auch wegen des (guten) Opt-Ins und der langen Wartezeit für diese Option nicht überall im Blick.
Since most users wouldn't understand what ActivityPub / Fediverse is, it is likely there will be far less than 40% or 30% (guesstimate) of their userbase who will appear in the Fediverse network.
It will highly depend on how they will explain the benefits of enabling ActivityPub in their accounts.
The latest drama is that Automattic is about to sign a deal with OpenAI to train AI on WordPress.com and Tumblr content.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that OpenAI probably already had crawled most if not all of WP and Tumbler.
Automattic also allows users to opt out and that fueled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Just the day before (or it feels like it) Google signed a deal with Reddit to get all the data to train their AI.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that Google of all corps probably already had crawled most if not all of Reddit. The $60M Google paid is a convenience fee to get a nice db bump instead of having to scrap and clean up all that text.
Reddit doesn't let user to Opt Out.
Last week (or it feels like it) one guy wanted to bridge public toots from Mastodon to bluesky.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that people could read those toots just using a different client or a browser. All the bridge did was bring toots to a different audience and allowed them to engage with those toots.
The bride also allows people to opt out and that rekindled the Opt Out/Consent discussion that started a bit earlier. I’ll get to it later.
Some time last year a guy built a Fediverse search engine because discovery between instances is terrible.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. Everyone also conveniently forgot to even mention that most toots are indexed by big search engines anyway but because they rank low they just rarely surface in the results.
The search engine also allowed people to opt out and that kinda started the Opt Out/Consent discussion. I’ll get to it in a bit.
Some time later a completely unrelated thing happened. Discord decided that they won’t let people hotlink images uploaded to Discord.
Everyone’s got very angry about it. But also this time people didn’t forget to mention that you shouldn’t use discord for anything you don’t want to lose. Thing like lore, documentation and basically anything that can be useful 5 minutes after it was said better be somewhere else. The reason is Discord servers are private in the sense that you have to use a specific piece of software with an account to access it. Anything posted there is not accessible outside, including through a search engine.
While all this was going on quite a few people in seemingly unrelated fashion were expressing dissatisfaction with interactions they were having on Mastodon. Specifically they were angry about certain types of replies they were getting. The replies were not threatening or insulting but they were not welcome in a way that I’m having trouble articulating. The most common case I saw is someone would post something open-ended or state a problem they have and they would get a bunch of suggestions how to possibly solve it or people sharing their experience either affirming the problem or otherwise.
Some people got very angry about this. They also conveniently forgot to even notice that this is a non-standard arrangement and they want to Opt Out of the more common case provided by the platform.
So finally we’re at the Opt Out. There’s a lot of different takes but the main thrust is that things should be Opt In instead of the other way around. And I agree. Where I don’t agree is that you all Opt In when you post stuff publicly on the internet. Once you do you set your thing free into the world. You resign control over it. You do not expect to opt in to every single read on your blog. If you want to control who access what you write you don’t post it on the internet in public, you send it in private. Consequently you do not retroactively revoke access. You all know that internet never forgets. You can’t unpublished things on the internet. It was already copied, screenshotted, and archived. And you didn’t know what happens to it unless you’re told.
We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.
Emphasis mine
This is not the tech industry’s most egregious lack of understanding of consent in recent years. That dishonor belongs to LegalFling: A blockchain app for sexual consent.
However, this is still pretty stupid, and the result of an insidious trend that doesn’t get questioned enough in software engineering circles. So I’m asking that my readers shout this from the fucking rooftops.
Opt-Out Is NOT Consent
Opt-out is “our lawyers told us to make this an option to cover our ass, but we don’t want you to actually do it”.
Opt-out is “if you missed the memo, we assume we have your consent”.
The default state of any decision regarding user data should be opted out. Users should instead be required to opt in for your decision to take effect, and they must not be coerced into doing so.
If consent is not explicitly given by an informed user, you haven’t received consent at all, and to pretend otherwise is unethical.
Your users don’t fucking care about opt-out. We care about opt-in.
“But Soatok, That’ll Hurt Our Revenue”
If you have to make money doing unethical things, or by following dubious practices that don’t actually respect other users’ autonomy, then you should go out of business.
End of.
What Automattic Should Do
If Automattic wants to make things right, they must do two things and could do a third thing (but I’m not holding my breath):
First, nuke the existing opt-out mechanism and replace it with an opt-in mechanism. If nobody checks it, then don’t include their data in the sale to Midjourney or OpenAI.
Second, they should make the permission for third-parties more granular. Some of us don’t care about third parties, but do NOT want “AI” companies using their data to enable plagiarism.
Third, if you want to go the extra mile, add support for a plugin that uses Nightshade on all hosted media in all WordPress.com plans, including free plans, to increase your users’ protection against LLM scrapists.
This is my open challenge to Automattic leadership to do better.
This Issue is Bigger than Automattic
The tech industry has gotten very bad at respecting users’ consent lately. Your options are no longer “Yes” and “No” anymore. Instead it’s “Yes” or “Maybe Later”, without a “Never” option.
ugh not even @signalapp is safe from the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now” pic.twitter.com/sW4Ss2pqMb
It does keep going. I’m going to skip a few, but check it out.> the unstoppable deprecation of consent in favour of “not now”, episode 18 pic.twitter.com/CRdfujOBZt
Yes, even Linux is affected.Even worse, you can rarely uninstall the crapware that nags you with these consent dialogs.
This needs to stop. It’s a toxic mentality and it cultivates a culture that doesn’t respect humanity. (Which is kind of funny to write as a furry blogger.)
If you work in the tech industry, scream very loudly about properly implementing human-respecting consent controls into your software.
Just because it’s widespread doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. Push back against it. Your less privileged, less technical neighbors deserve better.
@thenexusofprivacy it's additional work to implement an allow-list for federation, although not much more than instituting a deny-list. What's easier is accepting content from everywhere, but I can definitely see how indiscriminately accepting content from just anywhere is a recipe for potential abuse.
I'd like NodeBB to support both, although it might not be available during alpha phase.
The funniest take on this whole #optin fedi bridge nonsense is that all the "pro-bridge" people are supposedly tech bros and that said "bros" are not understanding the tech.
I can't imagine a group of devs further removed from SV values than #foss devs building fedi infra for absolutely no pay.
#FediBlock snarfed.org and brid.gy for bridging fediverse folks to Bluesky against their will (and in likely contravention of GDPR in the EU) with typical Silicon Valley techbro sense of entitlement:
“[O]pt in results in far fewer users, and users are critical for a bridge to be useful.”¹
PS. I just suspended (domain blocked) both snarfed.org and brid.gy from my personal fediverse instance and saw that there was already one account from one and eleven accounts on the other so my account was apparently already being bridged without my consent.
Those links are now severed and they never should have existed without my knowledge or approval to begin with.
Salut Mastodon! J'ai besoin d'aide: j'ai organisé un événement avec inscription (donc j'ai des adresses mails), et je souhaiterais proposer aux participants de s'inscrire sur une mailing list pour être tenus au courant des prochaines actions.
Et pour faire simple, je voudrais un moyen qu'ils confirment via un simple lien dans le mail (sans qu'ils aient à le retaper - ou bien prérempli avec le mail d'origine).
Est-ce que tu aurais ça sous la main? #GDPR#optin#mailing
More "Are you absolutely sure you want to do that thing you chose to do, that I think you shouldn't be doing?" bullshit.
So now anything we choose to download is scanned and shared and compared against an index somewhere of downloads that are considered "safe" and "acceptable"? And anything not "acceptable" to the machine must be characterised with suspicion, as a dangerous threat?
After a week or so on Threads I can say it: @Gargron, please never introduce the quote toot or however it is called now. I like it for the jokes but it is not worth it
@julia wouldn't it he better if :activitypub: clients were to properly handle #hashtags and if #discoverability wasn't useless because making it a hidden #OptIn setting means noone I know ever activated it successfully...
I think :mastodon: and other implementations should just have an option to display the # instead...
Sadly using hashtags is a necessarx evil because #FullTextSearch - even one's own posts - DOES NOT WORK!!!
the funniest thing about Apple is the last version of MacOS features "video reactions" where if your camera sees you do a thumbs up or heart symbol with your hands, stuff happens behind you like fireworks in ANY video app you are using BY DEFAULT.
A friend was in an online therapy session, describing his trauma so the therapist asked if he was alright and he did a thumbs up and then HUGE FIREWORKS BEHIND HIS HEAD.
It's so bad that online therapy sessions now start with a warning dialog!
For everyone who posts stupid shit, the latest version of #mastodon with #OptIn#search, will hopefully allow you to search and see if you,ve posted the same stupid shit already! Helpful!
I just saw someone unironically point to Vivaldi’s privacy policy as a counter-point to the proposed privacy-preserving metrics for Fedora.
Vivaldi generates a unique ID for you and sends it to their servers along with a geolocation derived from your IP, browser version, CPU architecture, screen resolution, and time since the last ping—every 24 hours.
For Fedora, aggregate metrics would be aggregated on-device, each data point disassociated from one another, and no unique ID generated.