Unless there's some actual technical reason why this a bad idea, I don't buy the "ethical" hand-wringing here. It sounds like just another case of not liking specific social media companies and wanting the defaults to conform to those personal dislikes.

[–] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

It's exactly this. Bluesky has its problems but there is a massive overreaction from the fediverse crowd that it makes it hard for me to sympathise with them even if I agree on the principle.

EDIT: JSYK, the Bridgy Fed developer is working towards making the bridge opt-in! https://tech.lgbt/@ShadowJonathan/111925391727699558

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

is working towards making the bridge opt-in

That kinda sucks. We need more openly accessible information without everyone erecting their little walled gardens. :'(

[–] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think the fediverse, and that includes Lemmy, have this warped idea of what Bluesky is and what ActivityPub/the fediverse actually is. They think ActivityPub is the de-facto protocol for microblogging, when it has glaring issues that Bluesky wanted to solve with Atproto (the queer.af debacle is a great example of this, imagine if you've got an account on queer.af and you want to move your data to a new instance). If you're a Linux guy, you might have seen parallels between ActivityPub/Mastodon vs. Atproto/Bluesky and X11 vs. Wayland.

[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think the people mad about these massive networks joining the Fediverse want to shield their little social networks from the big bad internet. They don’t want the Fediverse or any part of it to succeed and become mainstream, because that brings in the toxic waste of opinions and trolls that the wider social media is known for, and their tiny servers don’t have the moderation capacity to deal with that.

And I mean, I don't necessarily disagree - but I find it wild that the very same group would then not also want their social network to be inaccessible from the outside, so that it cannot simply be scraped like this bridge does.

But it's also a bit weird insofar that if AP ever gets big, that's a problem we'll have to do deal with sooner rather than later anyways. Or at least have a plan how to handle it that goes beyond DEFEDERATE EVERYTHING™️. We need to accept that either there's a certain baseline obscurity always baked in that also means at any point it could be that the world at large swings to using a different federation protocol and then we're the weird pariah on a weird non-standard protocol. Or it gets mainstream acceptance and then Threads will be just one problem in an ocean of corporate federation.

Personally, I just go 🤷 in regards to the actual data-federation, and rather focus on moderation/administration tooling and automation. It's a problem that eventually needs solving anyways, so might as well get in front of it and have a solution for when or if large corporate instances and their masses of users end up dumping data into AP.

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[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 1 points 9 months ago

EDIT: JSYK, the Bridgy Fed developer is working towards making the bridge opt-in!

Thank you for this!

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 46 points 9 months ago (20 children)

I don't get the problem. It's just syncing public information back and forth. I mean, the information is fully public for anyone to access. If you mind who accesses it, you shouldn't make it public.

[–] Blaze@reddthat.com 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

In ActivityPub, you have the freedom to defederate.

This bridge doesn't allow you to do so, I can understand why people have issues with it.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So/so.

You only have the option if it's your instance that you're having defederated. You cannot prevent anyone from:

Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
Simply using a web-scraper and a bot to post your stuff on another instance.

The second part is basically what is happening here.

Importantly, I feel people misunderstand on a fundamental level what it means to post things openly on the internet. Your only way to prevent this is simply to not post to a site that people can access freely and without a process through which you are vetting them for whether you trust them. As in: Just like IRL when you decide whether to tell things to friends or acquaintences or well, not.

But, on the web, you not only cannot prevent someone taking your public data and copying it over to wherever they so desire, you don't even know since they could be posting it in a place that you in turn have no access to so you cannot see it there.

[–] Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

There are differences:

Copying data through a protocol that purports to be integrated with the network frames that copying as a part of that network. If it was acquired through a bridge that does not respect federation then it is dishonestly coopting the legitimacy of the fediverse. Screenshots or copy-pastes won't have the same appearance of integration and will be intuitively understood by the reader as being lifted from another context. This happens all the time and we're very familiar with it. If copying data were all this was about, this solution should be sufficient.
It brings fediverse users into direct contact with non-federated networks in a way that they have not consented to. The ability to post directly back & forth exposes people to the kinds of discussions that we had previously moderated out of our networks. Defederation is an important tool for limiting the access bad actors have to our discussions, and accepting a situation where we can no longer defederate neuters that tool.

This isn't just about "information wants to be free". This is about keeping the door closed to the bigots, and forcing them to come onto our territory if they want to talk to us, so we can kick them out the moment they show their asses.

EDIT:

Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.

This is exactly part of the problem with a bridge that doesn't rely on federation. With threads, we could just defederate and forget about it. With a bridge like this, we're playing whackamole with every anonymous instance that bluesky spins up, which they can do easily faster than we can detect them.

If this open source system is told to pack its bags and leave, then yes, they can do it more covertly, but if they do that then they're doing shady shit, and that can be exposed as the shady shit that it is. The point of protesting this is saying that we won't allow this kind of entryism to openly exist on the network.

[–] Fitik@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

@Blaze What do you mean by "doesn't allow you to do so"? Instance can block bridge domain and it will not be federated

How is it different from the rest of instances?

@Carighan

[–] Rayquaza01@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 months ago

You can't defederate from the bridge because it's not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!

Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.

Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 30 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Should federation between servers be opt-in?

Should Mastodon-compatible clients have posts private-by-default on the UI?

This argument against bridges is beyond stupid. If you are posting on a public network, it's more than reasonable to work with the expectation that your content will be visible outside of original channel.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How does it work exactly? From a quick look at the docs, it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy. Is that right? If so, that kind of mucks up the standard behavior of Lemmy. Lemmy allows both users and admins to block entire instances, so aggregating instances into one "mega-instance" effectively breaks that functionality. That's not good from a UX perspective.

I tried searching for some bridges instances but didn't have any luck. I guess I'm doing it wrong. Does anyone have a real example of something that works?

[–] rglullis@communick.news 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

it sounds like everything through the bridge would appear as coming from @web.brid.gy.

Because this is the only current deployment of the bridge. The code is open source, if you want to host/run/manage your own bridge, you can do it.

That was the same issue that I had with fediverser and alien.top. Everyone got so obsessed with the bots from alien.top and caused so much drama that no admin would be interested in using it for the "login with reddit" functionality. If there was a few more other instances running the software, it would have been incredibly more helpful to get people to move away from Reddit while helping bootstrap the niche communities here (which are until today completely lacking in content and not attractive at all for the masses).

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 9 months ago

Doesn't that mean we'd have a proliferation of duplicate content, if multiple bridges connect to the same external services?

I love this idea in theory, but I don't think it makes sense in the context of Lemmy. Maybe it makes more sense in Mastodon? Or maybe I just misunderstand something.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

mastodon users continuing to show why mastodon will never reach mass appeal.

complaining about a tool that makes posts based on an open protocol that allows them to be shared across networks is bonkers.

this is probably the best tool that we'll have that will make social media actually fun to use again since twitter ruined it and segregated every service. if it gets ruined by going to an explicit opt-in service because of the loud minority, i'm gonna be so sad.

[–] kawa@reddeet.com 3 points 9 months ago

Exactly, the gatekeeping here is really present.

[–] sag@lemm.ee 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

We can make a bridge to different protocols?? Pretty Cool

[–] wall_inhabiter@lemdro.id 11 points 9 months ago

This concern is made even more ridiculous by the fact bsky.app already offers login gating for any user who wishes to use it, and I believe it blocks RSS as well. It's just such a funny practice. like? who hurt you ??

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