I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the “Mah privacy” crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.
I hated the backlash the bridgy dev received. His project was genuinely useful, helped to solve one of people’s most common criticisms of the fediverse. And after he was browbeat into giving it up, everything still got hoovered up by bots and fed into AI models anyway.
Yeah, the pitchfork crowd manages to shut down everyone who tries to do something genuinely good for the community, while leaving all the bad actors running wild in the background.
I mean, we always knew loud voices in the open source community were toxic as fuck - that's obvious enough from the Linux mailing list. Giving these people their own social network to ruin was wildly optimistic from the beginning. It's a wonder it hasn't gone worse.
It's amazing how computer nerds posting on the fucking fediverse can be so sceptical of seeing their content leave the platform they're currently on. Like that's not the whole goddamn point of posting here in the first place.
Also, Bridgy.fed rules. Anyone out there on Mastodon or Bluesky: Please opt in! :)
It’s amazing how computer nerds posting on the fucking fediverse can be so sceptical of seeing their content leave the platform they’re currently on. Like that’s not the whole goddamn point of posting here in the first place.
It was more about the unability to defederate if necessary (e.g. conspiracists or crypto bros becoming the majority users here), and the bridge not being opt-in at the beginning.
I understand those concerns, but I’m not sure if this really improved the security of mastodon, an inherently very insecure software, and it definitely deprived us of a useful tool. Defederation works at stopping spam, but I don’t think it really helps much when it comes to preventing people from seeing things you post. It stops a single server, but bad actors can just migrate to a new one, or spin up a new hostname.
Okay, let me create an account on mastodon.social and use it to scrape content from every other instance.
Better yet, let me create an account on “i-want-privacy-in-a-public-internet.example.com” and access the federated timeline directly, then I can go and push the content from everyone into this discovery service.
What are they going to do? Unless they go to the point of asking for physical evidence behind the person asking for accounts and/or only give invitations to people they already know, and *completely shut down their own servers to the outside world, they will never be able to avoid data leakage.
And if they do get to do any of this, then what is the point of using anything based on ActivityPub? They will be better off by just using any of the existing group chat servers like Discord (or Matrix/XMPP if they still care about FOSS.)
The point we were discussing was not data leakage, it was the inability to federate for a huge instance which would overflow the number of users, similar to the way people imagined what would happen if Threads federated, and Lemmy is suddenly overflown with people usually on Facebook.
It’s not a bad thing per se (anyone can make their own opinion), but not having even the option to defederate is the issue.
No, admins might think of defederation as a way to avoid interaction with larger instances, but in the case of the bridge it was mostly regular users crying “I don’t my content going in a place that I do not control”, with “lack of opt-in” and “this violates GDPR” being the main reasons cited to be against it.
With Threads is the same thing. The whole thing with users asking their admins to block threads is not because they were worried about Threads pushing too much to the smaller instances, but to block Threads from mining data from the Fediverse to their profit.
Yeah, lots of people were trying to point that out, those people were not the ones screaming at snarfed. It was the “mah privacy” crowd that was panicking at the thought of data being available and searchable in a server outside of their own.
I think what you are talking about is instances that may have a large population of marginalized groups, and the fear that someone is creating a database that could be used to easily seek them out and use it for trolling and such. Which I think is a very valid concern.
And as mentioned above, you have the crowd that wants to take an instance and give all their posts over to for-profit corporations like Threads and Bluesky, that should not even be called part of the fediverse IMHO.
I don’t know how you make a global search for the fediverse that avoids both of those issues though.