Administered by:
As someone who did her PhD on consent I just want to flag a few things in the bsky bridge discussion. One: medical style disclosure based consent (terms and conditions, EULAs etc.) is totally inappropriate for this sort of situation and has been for decades. But it serves the needs of slow-moving legal requirements and companies that like people to forget they signed up to stuff (or were coerced into doing so for social or other reasons). See https://liedra.net/thesis for more details. (1/n)
Two: A community's normative expectations need to be taken into account, for example, that posts are only easily visible to a certain subsection of the fediverse. These expectations may (and often are) completely disconnected from the technical capabilities of the service (e.g. that posts are publicly available), and that's okay. We encounter these expectations of behaviour despite capabilities for different behaviour all the time in the real world. Social contracts regulate them.
Three: A normative expectation for mastodon is that posts stay on servers that share your server's norms. There are many and varied reasons for this, many of which are reasonable, some of which are perhaps a bit paranoid, but how reasonable or paranoid they are does not invalidate them as reasons for normative expectations of behaviour within the mastodon environment for their community. You don't have to like or agree with it, but you should respect it when interacting with the community.
Finally: So discussions about the technical capabilities (all posts are public), reasonableness of expectations (people are paranoid) and all of these other objections are moot if you are a responsible person developing tech that interacts with that community. Engage with the community, respect that community, and don't get mad if that community rejects your tech if you didn't do the legwork to discover the normative expectations of behaviour within that community. #bsky #bluesky
Addendum: yes the mastodon (and general fediverse) community is fairly fractured, with wildly different ideas about how the fediverse should operate and that's okay too. If that's going to be the case, make your thing opt-in. (See how the mastodon Search stuff was done for an example.)
(updated this post thanks to discussion with @dalias pointing out that it's more complicated than just mastodon)
@CatherineFlick thank you for this timely, insightful thread!
@CatherineFlick Someone over on BlueSky wrote something that I think really spoke to one of the disconnects. They said:
“…the biggest issue is that we keep talking about Masto as though its *is* a community. Which its not. It’s a platform, where communities can develop…”
Which is a REALLY good observation, I thought.
@Wraithe I don't think it's the biggest issue (because it's conflating the tech with the social again - people aren't talkign about masto the platform when they're complaining about the communities) but it's a way of looking at it that can be helpful yes :)
@CatherineFlick Oh good point. I wanted to preserve their quote, but I agree on it not being the “biggest” issue, but it’s a stumbling block that people trip over when talking about Mastodon.
@Wraithe Sure, bsky will have the same problems when they decentralise. (if)
@CatherineFlick THANK YOU!
I'm sick and tired of the techsplaining.
@CatherineFlick this reminds me of danah boyd's thesis on teen publics ~15 years ago “their idea of public is not about all people across all space and all time. They want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk.”
This is part of the original twitter illusion - that you were talking to the people who you follow, not those who follow you, and not the firehose feed. That created a good normative sense for the most part, but the illusion broke with search and reply notifications
@KevinMarks This quote from Danah Boyd's thesis reminds me about the discussion around how online social networks have changed from "replicated real world networks" whether they were on BBSes, listservs, forums or other modes which were topical or demographical in some sense to "public personas" maintained and monetized by third-party services. If only I can go find the source for that study now. @CatherineFlick
@CatherineFlick Where does that expectation come from? It's contrary to the whole promise of Mastodon and hasn't been true, ever. Mastodon has always interoperated (often imperfectly, of course) with other AP software like misskey, calkey or whatever it's called now, pixelfed, lemmy, and all the earlier things from before I was here, some even predating Mastodon. Usually you don't even know or care what software someone else's instance is running.
@dalias You're confusing technical capabilities with social expectations. They are two very different things.
@CatherineFlick But the social expectation *is* that you can interact with ppl on any of these, that it's not a platform controlled by one party.
@dalias And then so this is why defederation is a thing. It's one of the ways we regulate these expectations here. So if something (e.g. a bridge to a set of servers that don't share our behavioural norms) shows up then defederation is a reasonable response to that too.
@CatherineFlick Absolutely. The reasonable response here is to defederate if you only want to be federated with servers that share your norms.
@dalias Yep. And the consent discussion is (part of) the reasoning behind that.
@dalias @CatherineFlick this is where the discussion has confused me. As far as I can tell, AP works on an "opt out" basis (is defederation not "opting out"?) but the discussion seems to have been around "how dare this bridge work on an opt-out basis".
@dalias @CatherineFlick I am all for opt-ins (hello AI training sets), and would understand a lot of pushback of the "your opt out is not currently functional so fix it" kind (with optional stronger language), but I've not seen much of that. I am clearly missing something but not sure what.
@smilingdemon @dalias well it's more work in a whackamole type way to keep on top of things that passively scrape vs. people from asshole servers that abuse you
@CatherineFlick @dalias very true (although feels like a slightly separate argument, but I guess that is humans).
@smilingdemon @dalias Yeah, I mean there are lots of reasons, and some "work" more than others. Some people just don't like the idea at all, some worry about those who "miss the memo", some worry about whether there are quiet passive scrapers. These all come back to the complex issues of norms and expectations, and in some of them consent is a key issue and in others it's not (and is ideological etc.).
@CatherineFlick I don't think the actual expectation is "posts stay on Mastodon". I think it's something more like "posts stay on small to medium sized non-corporate instances became everyone is expected to defederate any instance launched by a giant corporation".
@dalias Yeah okay, so I took a bit of a short cut there - "posts stay on servers that largely conform to the ideals and behavioural expectations of the server I'm on". (I think your summary is conflating a few things here.) I don't think people expect their posts to be available to Gab etc. either - there's a more complex set of expectations going on here.
@CatherineFlick Yes, I think that's a much better characterization.
@dalias cheers, always good to be specific, and easy when limited by characters/time to take short cuts. :)
@CatherineFlick This seems to be the crux of things — pro-bridging folks seem focussed on the tech, and anti-people are talking about the culture. And all that means the two groups are somewhat talking past each other.
@michaelgemar Exactly! Well said.
@CatherineFlick
I think something like this would have got a lot different reaction. And would still have got plenty of people sign up.
"Hi guys,
I created a bridge to Blue Sky.
It allows you to follow BlueSky people and them to follow you.
If you think this is cool, just follow account YYYYY and it will be set up automatically for your account. Unfollow and we will deactivate it.
If you le but don't want a certain post to go across, just use this HASHTAG in the post.
For all the details see WEBSITE
Here a screenshot of how a bluesky follower will look on the fediverse"
@SuperMoosie I mean that would have been a much better start!