Somebody put up a site saying
It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.
There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content “without consent”. Trouble is, there’s no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I…
- Put it on a website visible to the public?
- Send it to other peoples’ computers to do the same with?
- Search for it later?
- Display it next to advertisements?
- Display it on a service I charge people a fee to use?
- Keep it after your computer asks mine to delete it?
Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn’t transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren’t even aware of Mastodon’s new opt-in/out search features?
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they’d used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust – which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you’re on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.
I’ll refrain from writing the uncharitable version of my reaction to the idea that the Fediverse should be some small, close-knit community forever and instead say that people who want small, close-knit communities based on ActivityPub are free to create them. Mastodon and other major server software supports allowlist-only federation.
People using servers with open federation should expect that their posts will reach an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb, and that it will behave differently from vanilla Mastodon.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via [email], without any further communication, may I…
Isn’t the answer just the same if you consider it as email? I mean ActivityPub is basically just email but with “social media” features. Surely lawyers already have answers to the question when it comes to email.
If I send an email to the whole world, what is anyone allowed to do with it?
In some ways, I feel like ActivityPub is just public. It’s not reasonable to be able to enforce any license, so it may as well just be considered public domain. But IANAL.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.
On the other hand, if someone takes photos I’ve shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they’re definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.
Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren’t based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.
It’s almost like those websites that say “when you upload your content we can do what we want with it” did that for a good reason: to avoid all this complexity and possible lawsuit.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright.
Unless the image is already copyrighted, it takes publishing to provide a claim of copyright. Is email publishing? What if it’s a listserv with 300 recipients?
If I’m reading this comment right, it’s relying on a mistaken understanding of robots.txt. It is not an instruction to the server hosting it not to serve certain robots. It’s actually a request to any robot crawling the site to limit its own behavior. Compliance is 100% voluntary on the part of the robot.
The ability to deny certain requests from servers that self-report running a version of their software with known vulnerabilities would be useful.
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
What, exactly, is unsophisticated / un-machine-readable about
This post licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
?
There have been many attempts to add content licencing but some of the devs (lemmy devs) really dont like the idea.
Its already implemented on peertube and pixelfed but lemmy devs have so far refused to add it.
“Refused”, I mean there is an open issue for it. I don’t think most users want to think about licensing when posting their stuff either.
I absolutely agree with everything in this post, I’m am just now learning about this but I’m really disappointed to hear that this happened.
I have looked past a lot of the toxic behavior of certain segment of neurotic individuals on the fediverse because I believe in the idea of protocols instead of platforms and user ownership of their data.
But add this to another example of zealots for privacy and “stopping harassment” being bigger bullies than the people they are supposedly against
If you don’t want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don’t care about intent are a bad idea
Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
I have the same thoughts. I feel like when you post on the Fediverse, it’s just public. It’s like shouting something in the town square - it’s out there, anyone can hear it. If you’re not cool with that, maybe you shouldn’t use ActivityPub.
Not just ActivityPub, everything you upload publicly online is, well, public. One of the first things I learnt as a kid about the internet is that everything you put online stays online. You can’t expect to be able to upload things online for everyone to see but somehow still have full control over what those people do with it.
While I agree with you, I just want to mention that not necessarily all fediverse users have a formed opinion (at least at first) about open platforms, sharing content with other websites, and so on.
Some people just suffered from platforms like ex-Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. enshittifying, heard that other victims were trying to build something better, and (generously, might I add) decided to give it a chance.
That doesn’t excuse any horrible behavior they might’ve engaged in. But remember that just because someone is surprised and reacts negatively at how their content is handled on the fediverse, that doesn’t mean they were in the wrong to join.
Folks can jump into things without fully understanding them, and sometimes it’s nice to, circumstances allowing, take that as an opportunity to inform, rather than question “Why are you even here?”
Do we have the next “debacle” about public content being, surprisingly, public? Really? Has it been a week already? 😅
There’s quite a bit to unpack in this article, even if some of it is only mentioned.
It’s a saddening read. There are issues with Fediverse culture and surrounding technical discussion at wide, but also with interactions between law and new technologies like ActivityPub—and that’s on top of the law, on it’s own, already doing a horrible job way too often, in my opinion. None of this is news, but it always hurts a little to be reminded so.
I’ve been thinking about trying to get into mastodon, to form my own opinion on several topics it intersects with. I’m a little uncomfortable with how popular it is compared to other fediverse software, considering how poorly they seem to integrate. I hoped some time on mastodon would dispell this feeling, or at least give me insights I could work with. To be honest, every day it gets a little harder to justify that idea.
But that’s just a personal thing. Maybe I’m simply not fit for micro-blogging. Really, I don’t care which software is the most popular, I literally just wish they’d integrate better. Despite my misgivings, I’m grateful for the positive impact mastodon has made in the social/tech circles, changing how many people see social media and their relationship with it.
The us-versus-them mentality is unreal. The only valid them, to me, is proprietary closed platforms. We should strive for more decentralized networks that shift control over user experience back to its users, because we need and deserve safer, healthier social networks. This is not it. I can only hope culture will improve, because I’m not sure how you’d tackle a problem on this scale.
And if mastodon can’t fix itself? Screw it, and keep an eye on what comes next.
It’s not a competition, we’re in a team effort to build a part of the internet that can resist enshittification inevitable in closed platforms; so long as the platform is open, I’ll keep my mind open as well. If my lemmy instance decides to migrate to Sublinks, that’s fine. Worst case, I’ll migrate elsewhere. Assuming Bluesky turns out OK as a company, even atproto taking the lead over ActivityPub might be fine. Hell, some of the original AP creators are still experimenting with new ideas.
I fully agree with the point that too many people act like the fediverse, or their specific brand of it, is more open-minded and kinder than what they’re trying to replace. I hope it’s possible to make that true, one day.
P.S. Sorry, brevity is the soul of wit, and I’m an idiot. This ended up as an outlet for issues that have been frustrating me for a while.
An unfortunate part of the fediverse is that it attracts people who were too obnoxious for even the more annoying parts of Reddit/Twitter/etc. I’ve made plenty of attempts to “get into” Mastodon and can confidently say that’s a miserable experience across the board if you aren’t willing to do the work to curate your feed. Even if you do get a feed that is free of bad actors, conversations rarely veer off-course from Linux, programming, computers, tech, etc., at which point that’s fine, I guess, but it’s hardly diverse. Also, for all the complaining about “techbros” ruining the fediverse, it sure is full of them.
I have more faith in Bluesky currently. If they’re able to achieve their own kind of federation then I’ll gladly jump ship since their userbase is a lot friendlier and more diverse that Mastodon IMO.
I’ve made plenty of attempts to “get into” Mastodon and can confidently say that’s a miserable experience across the board if you aren’t willing to do the work to curate your feed.
I honestly feel like this is applicable to any social media, federated or not, and could arguably even be extended to socializing in general, in terms of choosing one’s friends wisely. Technological or otherwise, navigating society is neither easy nor smooth sailing.
Although this is by no means to dismiss your experience, only to chip in with my own across different social media and otherwise. Finding one’s place among others, curating/filtering one’s connections, has always felt like a struggle to me no matter where I’ve found myself.
That’s a shame, thank you for the input. I guess I could try Bluesky instead.
Not sure how up to date you are on Bluesky’s situation, but it might interest you to know they’ve recently started doing early-access federation. It’s… not ideal (opinion), but it’s moving along (fact).
