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.

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[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Makes want to fork the project and host a copy of the bridge that’s opt-out.

Wouldn't you get defederated fast too?

[–] Corvid@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Corvid@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Hominine@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does it purge on request?

[–] Corvid@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] SineNomineAnonymous@lemmy.ml -1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I keep seeing this argument but like.... no. It doesn't scrap stuff, it merely facilitates scrapping. Come on, can we stop pretending for a second.

"I didn't kill him, the bullet, gravity and velocity did."

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

You know that it is comically easy to scrape stuff off of the fediverse, right?

I'd wager the vast majority of instances aren't utilizing any meaningful rate limits, and even if there are rate limits, just distribute your scraping across several instances.

Or just set up your own new instance and subscribe to literally everything you can find. You don't even have to scrape, it gets pushed to you!

If you are worried about scraping, use Facebook. Facebook has teams of people who combat bot/scraper activity.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] SineNomineAnonymous@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

You know that it is comically easy to scrape stuff off of the fediverse, right?

Yes, so why would you argue in favour of making it even easier? Do you see why people aren't too hot on that?

If you are worried about scraping, use Facebook. Facebook has teams of people who combat bot/scraper activity.

I don't use Facebook for philosophical reasons and that's why I've picked the Fediverse as a whole. I find it amazing we still need to re-explain that all the time.

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago

There will always be bad actors, but when everything is working properly…

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

why don’t they switch to ActivityPub and ~~problem solved~~ immediately get defederated

FTFY. That's what would actually happen, and you and me both know it. 😛

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 2 points 9 months ago

😂

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm saying that if you want Rust application, install Rust.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 9 months ago

To be honest, I don't know enough about either Rust or Python to continue with this analogy 😂

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 6 points 9 months ago

Yeah, no amount of bending the knee will ever be enough for censorious extremists.