consequence of the terminally-online brain rot

Disagree. Its a consequence of corporations loudly proclaiming their support for groups when it cost nothing (think Black History Month here in the US). Corporations like to use a lot of empty marketing talk about societal issues when they can get away with it and ppl have decided to fight that by pushing companies to actually takes stands. Also, corporations here in the US have much larger voices than individual (and again this is because of the corporations’ own actions), so some ppl see it as a way they can actually have an influence on their govt.

Thank you for the detailed explanation. It matches what I’ve heard from others while having this same debate. Now allow me to explain my side.

I have consented to functionality in which my posts are distributed to other instances within the Fediverse. It’s widely advertised and clearly explained that is how things function. I can readily find which implementations are part of the fediverse

This is the part I think is wrong and the cause of all of this. You can not find which implementations are part of the fediverse. No tracker that you can use has an up-to-date and accurate listing of implementations. New ones come online every day as some random developer builds something new. The fediverse doesn’t have clear boundaries and I think the advertising that you mentioned does a disservice by implying it does. The fediverse is similar to the web; they’re both based on open protocols and can be guided but not controlled, because anybody can build something on those protocols.

One response to this fuzziness has been to demand most features be opt-in. The reason I don’t think this is tenable is because you have to have a hard boundary to determine what should be opt-in and what is ok to be opt-out. Your heuristic was native ActivityPub implementation. I don’t think this scales (I feel like you’re going to say this is a technological argument and therefore invalid, but it’s also a social argument. Ppl don’t want to use something that they have to constantly maintain. Constantly adding new servers/users to an allowlist is a chore that would drive ppl away. See google+ circles). It doesn’t scale because like I said above new implementations pop up every day and these implementations are starting to branch away from the static archetypes we’re used to (Twitter-like, Facebook-like, Reddit-like, etc). And some of them are existing projects that add AP support.

For instance, Hubzilla/Friendica has been bridging AP content for years. Do all of those instances require opt-in because they use a different protocol in addition to AP? There have also been bridges that translate RSS feeds to AP actor for years. Did the owners of those RSS feeds opt-in and should they have been required to?

What I’m trying to say is I think you’re right that you can never keep up with the boundaries of the fediverse and where your posts end up. And I don’t think there’s an easy delineation for what should be opt-out vs opt-in. So instead we should be demanding that implementations add controls to our posts. Thinks like ACLs and OCAPs would allow you to control who can see your posts and interact with them and not care about new bridges/instances/whatever. Which is why I think the argument over opt-out vs opt-in is a distraction that will only keep the fediverse in this quasi-privacy space where you’re dependent on yelling down any actor who is doing something with yours posts you don’t like.

I said the two things are different, you said how does that make asking for consent for the two things different, and my response was that for one of them it already works that way without your consent. That is a clear difference. Yes, I’m talking about the technology to explain the difference, because it’s a concrete fact. Your argument that a bridge should be opt-in requires an abstract boundary that some instances are are allowed to federate on an opt-out basis and others are not.

You don’t build trust in users by using practices like opt-out, which is again, the only argument I am trying to make.

The instance you’re on uses opt-out practices. You didn’t consent to your post federating to kbin.social and yet here we are. If you don’t trust the bridge, fine, block it. Every tool on the fediverse that you already use to deal with its inherently opt-out nature is available for you to use with this bridge.

in terms of giving one’s consent, exactly how the two are different?

Because in the second case, the user is choosing to post on a network where any other server can request their posts. A bridge is just an instance that understands more than one protocol. There’s no difference in it and any other server requesting your posts. That’s how the network works.

I think there’s a huge difference in scraping your content to churn out a for-profit “AI” and federating your public posts on a federated network.

I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community

I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you’re right. This is our disagreement. You’re using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that’s co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn’t make sense to talk about it as a single organization.

I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we’re having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can’t shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don’t listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you’re using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.

I’m happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Web 1.0 means no interactivity outside of forms (client to server request<-> response cycle). Web 2.0 was the label used when sites started gaining interactivity, using Javascript.

Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox

Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization

This is from the Mozilla release. The second quote does say “Firefox Organization” and not “Firefox”, but it seems clear they are planning on integrating AI into Firefox.

But, I’ve reread @NotSteve_'s comment and they were saying the funding earned from AI could be put into Firefox, not AI itself. NotSteve wasn’t claiming that putting AI into Firefox would bring in more funding, only that AI could be a separate source of revenue. So my question is moot.

how will putting AI in Firefox get them funding?

Again, both of those are older, more established instances so its more likely they are already aware of any given user.

And a lemmy user probably isn’t the best test for this, because of how lemmy works. If anybody on the instances follows a lemmy community, all posts and comments in that community will make it to the instance. Which means lemmy users are probably spread around the fediverse more than users of other software.

If your instance is already aware of that user, you don’t need the domain. Mastodon.social is the oldest mastodon instance and probably the biggest, so it is aware of a large majority of the fediverse.

If you know the person’s twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don’t realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @[email protected].

Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won’t show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don’t know why implementations won’t fix it.)

Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn’t know that.

Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they’re not familiar with decentralization, they don’t understand what that means. It’s especially weird that they can’t directly join mastodon on the site called “joinmastodon” but have to go to another site.

Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won’t know why.

If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there’s a lot of snags here.

Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior

Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don’t have to send a follow request and the other community doesn’t have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It’s all optional.

There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?

There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.

it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible… Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.

The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.

The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

I’ve seen ppl saying they don’t want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There’s also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they’re still filed on various projects’ trackers.

I think it’s higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don’t think we’re gonna convince each other so I’m gonna bow out here.

requires no extensions in the spec

That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.

no changes in the server side

But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.

easily prototyped/tested

Every fediverse platform already supports following Actors. That’s part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.