 It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect." Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map⦠(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.) 21 comments
 @kissane Given that the entire protocol copies things from server to server on purpose, the periodic freakouts about new services doing exactly that while others are applauded for "implementing the protocol" (which copies things by default) is so mystifying to me. @kissane (I know, humans are complicated and trust is hard in distributed systems, etc.) @fraying I think whenever I get confused by this stuff I get *really interested* because it's usually a sign that there are cultural norms being obscured by technical capacities. And of course I love that shit.   @kissane in a discussion last week[1], someone explained a related vibe as "I used to create works, now I produce points in a corpus" and I've been thinking about that a lot as an efficient encapsulation of the current moment. Among other things thoughts, I'm not aware of any protocol, or implementation, or legal supplement to a protocol, that has terminology or other mechanisms to capture that vibe. [1] Maybe it was @CyberneticForests ? @luis_in_brief @CyberneticForests <whispervoice>I think protocols largely try to exclude vibes but they get through anyway, just in weird/uncanny ways</whispervoice> @kissane @CyberneticForests definitely agreed, though Fedi protocol more than most actively *includes* a loooooot of mid-20teens vibes (no QT, hostile to search, migrating names but not posts, etc.). How explicitly/implicitly those vibes are encoded varies a lot, though, which is of course the slippage you're (correctly!) so intrigued by. Just published some of those thoughts from the CC panel today! ""This transition from βa thing I sharedβ to a data point to a dataset, and then to data infrastructure, has been a sour pill for those of us who shared our work online without foreseeing the future of AI models for labor displacement, surveillance, or other unsavory forms of automation." It's here: https://www.techpolicy.press/context-consent-and-control-the-three-cs-of-data-participation-in-the-age-of-ai/ I think this formulation matches my own sense of why some things feel weird and others don't, and I'm really interested in pinning down what it is about some implementations that produce that impression. (I think obviously it's more than one thing.) tx @noracodes fo permission to include this, tagging her here instead of above to reduce unintentional reply-bombing  @kissane for me it is indeed the lack of linkbacks, the content is presented as being part of that platform, not part of a group of sites sharing a platform @anniegreens Thank you! The person representing Maven here said that the lack of linkbacks is unintentional, which makes me wonder about the effects of encountering half-built things. (We've seen this a few times just in the past few months.) This is not a defense, just to be clear, just an open question. @kissane Yes, this is true. The last one was Content Nation, IIRC, and that person was attacked pretty harshly here. The project was still very much in development, but it wasn't apparent while perusing the site at the time. Another POV I like a lot from Robert Gehl, who did a whole blog post: |
Gregory's Server
@kissane I think about this a lot, especially given that each public post on mastodon is presented as an RSS feed (eg https://void.holdings/@christa.rss). it's a great question. my posts even acts differently than I expect within mastodon! what are the ethics around reading RSS feeds?