That was quit the mess. Ryan Barrett is a smart guy and seems quite nice, but it was very ill-advised to unilaterally decide to build an opt-out bridge. In general, if users one platform A want their stuff to be on platform B, they'll find a way to make that happen. If someone else takes it upon themselves to copy everything from A to B, people understandably get pretty bent about it.
If it had been an opt-in system, the response would probably have been far different.
I'm surprised that the tool in question is Bridgy Fed. Bridgy Fed has existed for a long time and is a very useful tool. Its alternative, Bridgy, has also been used to bridge between closed social networks and the open IndieWeb.
Why are Fediverse people only angry about it now? It's an open protocol. If you want privacy, don't publish something for the entire world to see. That's just basic common sense. At the very least, use Mastodon's privacy controls. The Fediverse is not special here, it doesn't get to destroy the open Web for everyone else.
In general, people on the Fediverse want to be able to make local moderation decisions; the way that extends to other federated sites is by not federating with them. Most Fediverse sites will not federate with sites that have bad or nonexistent moderation (or simply incompatible moderation policies). Bluesky's architecture basically means that it is one big unmoderated site. The normal reaction of Fediverse admins is then to block it.
As a controversy, it's been blown out of proportion. It's just Fediverse admins setting the moderation policies for their own sites, as always.
Well first not everyone on the fediverse is opposed to the bridge. I agree that public is public. But there are concerns about moderation being incompatible, it’s normal to voice them.
As for the fediverse destroying the open web for everyone else, I think you’re hyperboling quite a bit, the fediverse has done mountains to make social media more open, probably more than everyone else.
Yeah you're right, I think I did overgeneralise there. I was meaning more of the culture of "Mastodon users"; Mastodon itself has done a lot to help the open Web too.
Though I think "voicing concerns" is a bit of an understatement. I feel really bad for the developer of Bridgy Fed, working on their passion project and just getting caught up in all this heat and harassment.
I'm one of the persons who blocks the bridge, not because of privacy concerns but because it bluesky, specifically. I do not like the idea of for-profit, vc-backed entities being given data, or any kind of decision. We all know exactly where that leads, a term has been coined, mountains have been wrtten about it and yet it still happens.
It's the same situation with Threads.
As for privacy I disagree with you. There's nothing because nothing has been discussed, but the technical feasability should never dictate what we want as a society. When a family member dies, even though the news is known you know how to behave, who to share that information with, what to say. Would you be okay with a company coring up to you and saying "hey we learned your mother died, would you like to tweet it ? It is free !"
I half agree that technical feasibility isn't everything. For example, I can murder someone with a knife. But it's not what we want as a society.
But it's not never. For example, I can see your post. So I can send a screenshot of your post to my friends to dicuss it. I can't see your hard drive contents. So I shouldn't hack into it and send a screenshot of your hard drive to my friends to discuss it.
So technical feasibility influences what is reasonable to do as a society. It's not "feasible = reasonable", or else murder would be reasonable, but it definitely does influence it.
And in this case, I believe what the Fediverse people commenting in the GitHub issue want to be unreasonable. It is unreasonable to publish something publicly, on a federated network, where privacy controls exist (but are not being used), and then claim to have an expectation of privacy in a public space, especially when such bridges provide utility and benefit to others that just can't happen if it's opt-in.
It is reasonable to block it. It is unreasonable to expect everyone else to restrain themselves from using public data in the spirit of the open Internet. It is especially unreasonable to harass non-profit bridge developers in this case. That's not a social solution, just harassment.
Note about copyright: that's not a path one should go down, because it'll make the Fediverse illegal as a whole. It's probably fair use, anyway.
Note about AT protocol: yes it's designed by a for-profit, but it's good. Just because something is for-profit and VC-backed does not mean it will enshittify; take Element for example. It solves a lot of issues that people were having with Mastodon such as global full text search and a global feed. I would use it if it only had more relays to spread out the control.
Nah. Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual. Yes, the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network. It's technically possible, yes. It's still a dick thing to do and it pissed people off.
And again, it wasn't about Bluesky in particular. If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.
In general, "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it there". It wasn't the bridge creator's decision to make.
Public = consent for the public to see it. That includes the public on Bluesky. It was consensual. And the ruckus was in fact about Bluesky in particular. That's why the same project already supported other protocols without a big ruckus.
In general, "I want my stuff on Bluesky but don't want to deal with cross-posting to multiple different platforms and keeping up with responses on all of them"
And, "I want my stuff on whatever platform people want to read it on without having to individually approve each one" (which is quite literally the entire point of public posts on Mastodon).
OH - and it wasn't the bridge creator's decision anyway; it was the decision of people on Bluesky to follow you that would trigger your posts to be federated, so...
It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.
Similarly, I don't want my blog posts used to train LLMs. I know they're likely to be since they're published right there on the Internet for anyone to see and read. But my intent was for other humans to see and read them, not for someone to feed them into a regurgitator. There aren't technical means that let me allow humans to read my stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it, and someone could make the (bad) case that if I didn't want my work to be used to train an LLM, I shouldn't have made it public. Maybe. However, I reserve the right to think someone's an ass for doing it.
Well, no technical hurdles kept the person from copying data out of the network people meant to post it to. It's probably not illegal. It's not a nice thing to do, though.
> "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it there"
How about "If I wanted my stuff on the your Mastodon server, I would have put it there"?
"If I wanted my Mastodon content on your RSS feed, I would have put it there".
How about "If I wanted my stuff on the Internet, a publicly available internet, I would have put it there".
This tribalism around network/brands/protocols is beyond stupid. The thing that is killing Twitter is its closedness and the assumption that the means of communication is what matters. It's not. Let open protocols be open.
If people want privacy, then they should use a secure communication protocol and not a social media network.
>If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.
exactly like they did with usenet without any issue?
Mastodon is an odd sort of network, there's more blocking than I expected and it somehow seems as if blocking is an intrinsic part of the design. In Mastodon, blocking looks like a choice one makes for whatever reasons, not an unloved measure needed for fighting abuse.
As if the design doesn't tell users "you can follow people in the fediverse" but rather "your ability to follow people in the fediverse is limited by you and three other parties and the software isn't among the three".
So… if the mastodonish idea of consent doesn't extend to all of the fediverse, what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people? If the poster's/follower's/would-be follower's consent isn't taken for granted in one case and isn't taken for granted in the other, what makes the two cases different? There obviously is a technical difference, but what is the difference wrt. consent?
> what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people?
Absolutely nothing! Fediverse admins block unmoderated sites all the time, for being unmoderated. Bluesky is just, effectively, one unmoderated instance that everyone will block by default.
> If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.
Except that's not what the bridge does, at all. It only follows you on someone's behalf when someone on Bluesky specifically requests to follow you through the bridge.
And Fediverse admins will block that bridge, just like they would any other site with bad/nonexistent moderation, and will advise each other to block it. That's just how moderation works in the Fediverse. I guess it's sad that, unlike the admin of an instance with bad moderation, the bridge operator can't do anything to fix the problem, but in the end, that's their problem.