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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basically just a bunch of the loud minority on mastodon ruining it for everyone else like always
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Of course not, that’s idiotic behavior, but obviously not what I was referring to
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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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.
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“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.
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.
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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.
I’m saying that if you want Rust application, install Rust.
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.
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.
