https://wedistribute.org/2024/02/tear-down-walls-not-bridges/
A libre networking project that's designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.
Bridgy Fed made a splash earlier this week by announcing its latest progress in connecting the Fediverse to Bluesky and Nostr. Sadly, not everyone was welcoming.
This insane isolationism from the vocal minority will kill ActivityPub. The fact that the author is now backing down and switching to an opt-in system is infuriating. Makes want to fork the project and host a copy of the bridge that’s opt-out.
It’s just embarrassing. This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
Yeah it's all "We hate walled gardens" and then a minute later "DO NOT TOUCH MY GARDEN WALLS!!!!1!!".
And it's always the same utopian idea that you can somehow both be relevant and big enough to have "enough" activity to be a fun space where to spend free time for discussion and avoid any and all corporate interest in the technology. Instead of trying to get ahead of it and figuring out how to handle of this so that when it inevitably happens you got a clue what to do about it. As if defederating from Threads would even stop Threads from both copying content to them and - if they wanted to - copying their content here. Ridiculous, if they wanted to, they could and they would. That they don't even want to is the far more interesting bit, really.
The whole idea in the first place was to NOT be corporate
The idea is that the network should not be owned and controlled by a corporation, not that no corporation should ever participate in it.
Besides, how "corporate" is a startup with a few dozen developers working on a fully open source project?
Honestly I see the fediverse as a massive opportunity for corporations.
If you're Google, why not host a Google corporate instance where everything is authenticated as your own content, under your own URL, but you can still reshare outside content? You'll never have the issues of unwanted or controversial content appearing with your brand. There's no chance of a parody account pretending to be your customer service, and you won't have to pay a protection fee for an authentic checkmark.
This is 10x more important for governments to do, as right now I can't view official political discourse from my own government without giving my data to a private company.
We’re talking about Meta
No, we talking about Bluesky.
Dorsey’s baby
He's moved on to Nostr. Also, Bluesky is open source and their work can be forked by anyone. You might disagree about whether it makes sense to work on another different protocol instead of trying to improve the ActivityPub ecosystem, but let's please not get into mud-slinging and this stupid tribal mentality.
a lot of people want nothing to do with it.
And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can't demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.
While I disagree with some of the positions in this specific instance. They do have their right to express their opinion on the nature and direction of the fediverse. Reducing everything to the individual experience is focusing on technical features but not on the collective and social aspects.
There are also tons of people who can't really help but using the same corporate metrics: growth, reach, users count, adoption. Not everyone agrees on these as objectives to pursue, and it makes sense to be vocal about the general direction from that perspective (because it goes way beyond my personal narrow experience).
That said, I can't stand those who use excuses like "privacy" or "there are bad actors", as their main motivations, because these are also largely individual problems. On the other hand, opposing to keep separated a corporate, for profit, social media from the fediverse is a whole different matter.
the nature and direction of the fediverse
The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn't have a cohesive nature/direction. It's made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You'll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn't have hard boundaries so you can't possible measure it all.
Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.
I disagree, it is a set of multiple entities but there is a common denominator. For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.
I think it's not pointless nor wrong to discuss these shared values (de facto values, beyond the technical fact I can spin up an AP software) and how certain parties do not share them and therefore should not be part of the fediverse in principle.
For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.
None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse. The fediverse existed long before ActivityPub was even proposed. Free software, ad free, non commercial, not run by big corporations are all just coincidence because its a grassroots effort. Even now, there's multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.
Even if you take those as given, none of those dictate any shared values. Bridgy-fed itself meets all of those requirements but clearly holds differing values. Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.
I'm in favor of groups maintaining shared values and enforcing policies based on them. But those policies can never apply to an entire network made up of distinct projects, servers, and people all with different ideas about how it should work.
They do have their right to express their opinion on the nature and direction of the fediverse.
on the other hand, they don't have to right to spam an independent creators github repository with threats.
"Foam mouthed Threads opponents"
Threads is quite blatantly just going to throw it's weight around. It's not in good faith. They're already not going to properly implement ActivityPub (which they apparently would do, according to pro-Threads federation people), and so certain content will appear different on Threads and AP. And of course threads is massive already as if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.
Smaller services and services which aren't megacorps are fine. Honestly, BlueSky federation seems like a good thing to me. But we'll have to see about that.
My point is there's a line between "federate to get more exposure and connections" and "federate to get EEE'd". Threads crosses that line. BlueSky I don't know about. They're very different scenarios.
Mastodon and many others do not “properly” implement ActivityPub and have a ton of their own extensions and implementations
But do they ignore existing implementations of a feature when they want to add that feature? And make it crappier when federated?
Threads has implemented both ActivityPub implementations of quote posting: it uses the Misskey quote posting system, and also implemented fep-e232 (which is a better version of quote posting, but not implemented by any major platform), so that they are already immediately compatible with platforms that use the FEP version.
Mastodon ignores the current implementations of quote posting, and wants to do their own new implementation so that they can add granular control.
I kinda get all the Threads worries and the fact that some people might not be comfortable with Meta collecting their data for advertising. But this is just insane. It just makes me think people are just irrationally angry at everything, and they like being that, instead of informing themselves about what everything does.
the funniest thing is when they accuse bluesky of being a transphobic network when it's literally one of the most pro trans networks around.
It’s naivety all around. You can’t have a completely open anything. These libertarian-esk principals don’t exist in regular society for good reasons.
Makes want to fork the project and host a copy of the bridge that’s opt-out.
Wouldn't you get defederated fast too?
That’s exactly the point. Isolationists instances can always defederate bridges if they don’t like them. This outrage is them imposing their will on the rest of the fediverse.
Framing it as isolationists is ludicrous.
I love the idea of an Internet without borders, but there needs to be some shared values. That's what the ActivityPub protocol provides a platform for. To suggest that everything we do or post should be free is ridiculous. If the communities of BlueSky and Nostfr want to access our content, why don't they switch to ActivityPub and problem solved?
As a point, say that I write a poem and put it on my mastodon and then bridgey scrapes it and copies it. How do we get that taken down? A picture of my kid? A picture of someone else's kid?
There's absolutely no issues with ActivityPub growing, it can encompass the whole internet for all I care, but that needs to come with the protections, provisions and failsafes that the ActivityPub protocol offers. Bridgey doesn't do that, so again I say… If BlueSky and Nostfr want to pivot to ActivityPub, they're more than welcome, but the Internet I'm trying to build isn't about profiting off of small people without a voice and that's what Bridgey and this isolationism rhetoric tries to do.
Bridgy doesn’t scrape anything. It works the same as any other ActivityPub instance, the only difference is that it converts some JSON from one format to another.
It also converts edit and deletion events, so in your scenario it would relay that you want your poem or photo deleted.
This isn’t a web scrapper that reposts content like all the bots reposting Reddit threads to Lemmy. This is a protocol translator between federated networks that speak different languages.
Crickets
Small wonder. A tangent, but I'm also of the opinion that someone shouldn't put their child's photo (or any information) on the internet if they don't want to distribute it in the first place.
I found the bridgy website a bit confusing, but people who areupset should read through to get a better idea of what it actually does.
Initially I thought it was just scraping and reposting too, but I find what the dev is working towards is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.
Not entirely sure what you mean by that. It deletes posts in the same way that any other ActivityPub server does, by federating the deletion request.
It’s up to the receiving servers to handle that request and delete the post. You can easily have an ActivityPub native server that doesn’t honor those requests.
It doesn't scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That's how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.
The largest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) has 360k MAU. This means that one can crawl all of its activities with less than 5 requests per second, every day.
Even with rate limits, the Fediverse is still so small that I could crawl the top 10 mastodon instances in less than a day.
From my desktop PC.
On my shitty DSL.
Anyone thinking that bullying one developer into a well-meaning project will be enough to keep their "secret clubs" away from malicious actors are in for a sad realization.
ActivityPub doesn’t guarantee your post gets taken down on other instances after you delete it. Federation with another site isn’t more a less trustworthy just because it uses AP proper or a bridge.
I think that everyone being on the same protocol is better for compatibility and UX but I think bridges can have their place for those who choose to use them until then.
why don’t they switch to ActivityPub and
problem solvedimmediately get defederated
FTFY. That's what would actually happen, and you and me both know it. 😛
That’s what the ActivityPub protocol provides a platform for.
That's ridiculous. ActivityPub is a standard to allow communication between different systems. What you are saying is that people should only be allowed to speak English if they want to be part of the British Empire and be subjects to the crown.
No user cares about the language an application is written in, only about its features.
Also, should Python developers not be allowed to use Rust libraries through bindings? What a weird and broken analogy.
To be honest, I don't know enough about either Rust or Python to continue with this analogy 😂
I'm confused by your and the parents comments
You can create an ActivityPub server with any server software you like, you can even ask GPT to make a skeleton flask app for an activity pub site and it will. I think there's just an overlap in fediverse secs and that fans.
ActivityPub is just a standard for how users can interact with a server, and how that server pushes data to other servers. What that data is is entirely up to the developers, it just needs to be roughly social media shaped.
basically just a bunch of the loud minority on mastodon ruining it for everyone else like always
Mastodon really does seem to rally around braindead takes and misinformation. The culture over there can be hard to stomach sometimes.
I like the little niche I fit into on mastodon, but the Explore tab is as grumpy as Twitter ever was.
It's a lot like Twitter in that once you follow some good people and get your feed curated you shouldn't look at anything else.
You're absolutely right and I definitely shouldn't be making broad statements like that. Another thing I've found is that if you can stomach the effort (or do this from the get go), it's a good idea to put all your academic or professional accounts into a single list. It's nice to check into a slightly smarter feed from time to time.
put all your academic or professional accounts into a single list. It's nice to check into a slightly smarter feed from time to time.
I've not tried out Mastodon yet, but am interested, and find this comment intriguing. Am I to understand that you can create custom feeds with a subset of the accounts you follow? Sounds like a good feature.
Yes but if you want to do just want anything more advanced than putting users in a list you're out of luck.
I understand blocking this bridge, but if admins do that, they should block other bridges too, like bird.makeup
bird.makeup is not a bridge in the proper sense, it only brings content from Twitter to the Fediverse, not the other way around.
It's a crawler that ports things from one platform to another without consent from the user. If either of them are unethical and should be blocked, then both should be blocked.
Bridgy Fed isn't a crawler, though. It doesn't scrape anything, index anything, or store anything. It's simply a translation layer.
it's not up to the admins of the destination instances to block it, but of the ones that have their content being drained.
You could argue then that Twitter has the right to block crawlers, which it does. But it was exactly this crackdown and wall-building that made a good portion of us to leave Twitter/Reddit and came to the Fediverse: to defend an open web.