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.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Anything remotely useful to connect to other people gets shouted down rather quickly and irrationally.
Look at the foam-mouthed Threads opponents.
It’s just embarrassing. This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
There is simply no reality where everyone decides to switch to Mastodon. Instead, if Bluesky grows, I can see people move away from it.
I get the feeling the vocal people don’t actually want ActivityPub-based social media to be adopted by anyone (or just desperately need a hobby outside of complaint generation)
Opponents should use an instance that blocks the bridge if they’re concerned. But nobody should pretend ActivityPub is a private protocol.
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.
"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
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Instead, if Bluesky grows, I can see people move away from it.
When has that ever worked?
This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
The whole idea in the first place was to NOT be corporate. It's pretty understandable that when those corporations come knocking pretending to be nice, a lot of people want nothing to do with it.
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.
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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.
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Instead, if Bluesky grows, I can see people move away from it.
When has that ever worked?
Major grammatical error this morning for me -- I've since edited my post. I meant that people will move away from ActivityPub-based software. If someone's friends all adopt another platform, why stay on one that you aren't getting connections, especially that's hostile to letting you connect to the platforms your friends do use?
The whole idea in the first place was to NOT be corporate. It’s pretty understandable that when those corporations come knocking pretending to be nice, a lot of people want nothing to do with it.
The company behind a service becomes nearly irrelevant when federation comes into play. In theory, you defederate from servers who are bad actors.
But at the end of the day, people want to use social media to connect to people. The whole point of federated social media was to get out of walled gardens, yet here we are, building a walled garden.
The whole point of federated social media was to get out of walled gardens, yet here we are, building a walled garden.
To an extent yes, but I think it's pretty easy to see why people are building their own closed communities on the Fediverse. That was the whole "selling point" of it at the beginning. "Not happy with Twitter? Just spin up your own fedi instance where you have your own rules and you can control who joins and who doesn't".
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.
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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.
Does it purge on request?
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.
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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.
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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. 😛
😂
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.
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Yeah, no amount of bending the knee will ever be enough for censorious extremists.
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.
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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.
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