Gregory's ServerIn my commentary about mastodon and bluesky today, I didn't say all that much about my thoughts on the core issues of privacy and consent. That's what most people actually want to fight about. For people who are worried about that, anybody who isn't immediately on their side is the enemy. I'm used to that specific internet dynamic, so I'm not that bothered by it.
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 Instead, my musings from the peanut gallery are driven by something else that is bothering me as I observe people's evolving relationship with The Fediverse™. To me, one of the fundamental things to understand about the concept of decentralization and federation is that nobody is "in charge". There's no central authority to appeal to. In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want? I keep feeling like I'm missing something. But it seems clear to me that fighting with every other individual in the whole world until you carve out the specific level of visibility that you are comfortable with is a solution that doesn't scale very well. More importantly though. I thought the whole point of the fediverse as a concept was that each of us can chose a platform that gives us the tools we want so that we're *not* beholden to the choices that other people make. What's wild about the bluesky bridge thing is that it seems to be trying to follow all of the rules. It's using the same ActivityPub protocol as everyone else. It has a name and the author is trying to make sure it respects everybody else's moderation settings. You can block it or defederate from it. But very few people who I've seen talking about it seem to be placated by that. They're still mad for some reason. As I was puzzling through that, I landed on what I think is a core issue. People do not feel that the tools necessary to protect themselves *are in their hands*. They're still operating as if they have to ask other people to do the right thing. (Or yell at them as the case may be). Is that a failure of the way mastodon is set up? Have we not gone far enough with "you get to decide how your presence on the internet works"? If you don't want your content to be bridged to bluesky without your consent, you shouldn't have to fight with anybody except the admin on your local mastodon instance. You can yell at them all you want. I have fewer judgments about that. Many people have yelled at the bridge guy telling him to make his tool opt-in by default. He shouldn't have to do that. You can make your own instance opt-out by default. Why is that not a preferable solution? That's not rhetorical. I'm really open to the possibility that I'm missing something. It seems like people who have more concerns about privacy and safety have the ability to organize their mastodon instance so it is locked down by default. And they can open up selectively. Yes, it puts more onus on you to make decisions rather than depending on other people to do the right thing. But again, I guess I thought that was the tradeoff people were making intentionally. @polotek amazing thread. I really appreciate your thoughts and viewpoint. Given me lots to think about. Thanks!  @polotek brilliant thread, thank you. I’ve been thinking similar things but in a vague and inarticulate way, I haven’t been able to put words to it.  @polotek This is all extremely insightful. Thank you for summing it up. A part of the problem I see, in addition to what you've said, is that while the point it activitypub is federation, mastodon is the most public face of it, and mastodon *feels* small and cozy. The idea of getting bigger I think bothers some people. "Don't take away my little cafe." Understandable! But imo, not accurate.  @polotek how much time is each of us supposed to spend keeping track of what tools and domains we should opt out of, just to maintain the existing state of our networks? How much room in our bio is for us, and how much is for randos to dictate by making us opt out of their crap? What about users who don't speak English or don't happen to see the announcement of these opt-out services as they pop up? If we're not supposed to raise a stink about it, missing announcements is much more likely. @redoak I'm not telling you what to do about it. Raise as much stink as you want. But I'm not sure why that feels like less work than just turning off open federation. @polotek sure, better tools is the best long term answer to a lot of the issues being raised by the bluesky bridge. But it's not unreasonable to respond unkindly to someone you've never met showing up and announcing they're going to violate your community norms and expectations just because technically they can.   @polotek This is the unity of means and ends in action. People are shaped by how they have had to act in the past. We’ve never had a social network that works this way before. It’s profoundly different, and it’s going to take time to learn and adapt to—in part because people have to exercise those new possibilities to internalize them. @tillshadeisgone I'm not sure you have this right. What you're choosing is a world where you have to yell at every individual who ever tries to federate from outside of mastodon. There's nothing special about this one guy. Somebody else could try the same thing tomorrow. And the day after that. And you don't have control over any of them.  @polotek @tillshadeisgone You're right about that. The ideal solution would be if instance API users had to do delegated authentication via OAuth2. Then anyone could build whatever they wanted, but data would only move around with consent. From there you could elaborate to blocklists, sensible defaults, etc.  @polotek The thing is, with Mastodon software, tools for controlling federation choices (both individually and at the instance level) are very limited in Mastodon. Allow-list federation at the instance level is strongly discouraged by Mastodon and cumbersome to manage; it doesn't exist at the individual level. Anything policy based, which is what you really need to make it scalable, isn't even a concept. Which is a problem! But it's hard to resolve at the individual level ... Other fediverse microblogging platforms all have blockers to broader adoption -- functionality isn't fully there yet, horrible UI, not a lot of support from hosting companies, etc. And with most of them, support for controlling federation choices isn't much better. So things are trapped in this weird suboptimal state; and most microblogging resources go to Mastodon, so it's been hard to break out of the cycle. And there's historically a LOT of resistance in the fediverse to consent-based federation. @anildash talks about how consent's a key often-unstated value in the fediverse, and that's true, but in practice it's also very intermittent. And many (most?) high-profile fediverse "influencers" are in the camp that's actively hostile to consent. So incremental change is hard.  @polotek @tillshadeisgone I keep saying this in context after context but the only way you stop people like the dipshit who wanted to opt everyone into his nonsense, as well as trash like Richard Spencer is to intimidate, drive them out of the commons, and make sure the others understand that if they attempt to enclose our commons (including feeding it into their analytics or AI crap) they will have a very miserable day. @polotek @tillshadeisgone I say this as someone who helped organize a work place, people with power over others will never willingly let go (and copying data into Jack's garbage site is power over) and you fight power with power. @polotek @tillshadeisgone and no, I'm not a particularly fun person or great at parties. @emma @tillshadeisgone Emma you really just took this random guy who wanted to mess with some tech and put him in the same sentence as Richard Spencer. He doesn't have any "power" except for the power to run a server. Same as you and me. @polotek @tillshadeisgone yes, I did that, and I stand by that. @emma @tillshadeisgone understood. It's gonna be great sharing an internet with you. I feel safer already. @polotek @tillshadeisgone An angle I'd like you to think about is how you should respond when someone tells you they're hurting. You could tell them they aren't really & that they need to toughen up, or you could tell them that it's for their own good, or any number of responses. Even if you don't personally understand or relate to someone's situation, I think it's best to say 'I hear you' or show some empathy. People are really afraid of brigading from this. @sbszine @tillshadeisgone how do you think the bridge guy is doing today? You think he might be hurting at all? I mean people are equating him with Richard Spencer today.  @polotek Well, reductively, turning off open federation is an unpleasant solution because Mastodon has deprioritized that mode of operation since the beginning, for ideological reasons, and so it's considerably more difficult to vet potential new instances to federate with than it is to vet a request for a new user account, for instance @polotek If you're looking for a serious answer: a) because I don't control any instance nor have the skills run my own, and b) because I don't want to have to play whack-a-mole everytime some techbro wants to pipe my stuff into an advertising server. No, I CAN'T just make my instance opt out. @sbszine these are all reasonable assumptions. They are false. But I understand why you think you have these limitations. That still doesn't explain why you think the right alternative is to yell at other random private citizens every time they misstep when trying to participate. That's not a world I wanna live in either. Maybe this whole fediverse thing was a mistake?  @polotek @polotek The people complaining about the bridge keep referencing safety, but the safety is purely encoded in social conventions. Even right now without the bridge, if you block an instance your post can end up on that instance and the people there can reply and discuss it and you won't see any of it. That's fine for protecting yourself from seeing bad things but it doesn't protect you from swatting for instance.  @poswald yes, but only if the server allows anonymous GETs of content. Because only the ID is passed around in a boost, if server A has authorized fetch enabled, then it will not return a usable Note to server N @polotek yeah idk, I saw a lot of the behavior you’re talking about today. But I agree, it’s just a protocol and no one is abusing it. This is one of the ways it’s supposed to work. People just can’t behave I guess?  @voltagex please don't just drop other people's words into my mentions without context. If you wanna say something, please say it. @polotek my read, for what it's worth 1) it's a form of enforcing social norms. There's definitely a larger conversation about who in the fediverse sees themselves as custodians of those norms, and what they are - but I think it's more of a social rebuke 2) this isn't the first, second or third time something like this has happened - where a new fediverse tool is announced with creator's expecting others to do additional work to opt out. I think there's an element of exasperation at play too @tessiselated @polotek looks like i missed the "who to be mad at in the Fediverse today" thread 😅 > They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Which is doubly funny because the entire point of fediverse is that it gives people choices. Instead of yelling at him, don't...use it? It's not like twitter where you're forced to use whatever twitter imposes on you whether you like it or not. |
What I'm realizing is that I don't wanna talk about that though. Not because I don't care. I do. But there are much smarter people who have spent way more time on those issues. It's a deep and gnarly topic. So I don't have anything to say about it that is smarter than what is already being said by people who are actually *working* on the issues.