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by rakoo 848 days ago
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 !"

1 comments

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.