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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[–] 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.