Tear Down Walls, and Build Bridges - eviltoast

Bridgy Fed made a splash earlier this week by announcing its latest progress in connecting the Fediverse to Bluesky and Nostr. Sadly, not everyone was welcoming.

  • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
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    9 months ago

    Framing it as isolationists is ludicrous.

    I love the idea of an Internet without borders, but there needs to be some shared values. That’s what the ActivityPub protocol provides a platform for. To suggest that everything we do or post should be free is ridiculous. If the communities of BlueSky and Nostfr want to access our content, why don’t they switch to ActivityPub and problem solved?

    As a point, say that I write a poem and put it on my mastodon and then bridgey scrapes it and copies it. How do we get that taken down? A picture of my kid? A picture of someone else’s kid?

    There’s absolutely no issues with ActivityPub growing, it can encompass the whole internet for all I care, but that needs to come with the protections, provisions and failsafes that the ActivityPub protocol offers. Bridgey doesn’t do that, so again I say… If BlueSky and Nostfr want to pivot to ActivityPub, they’re more than welcome, but the Internet I’m trying to build isn’t about profiting off of small people without a voice and that’s what Bridgey and this isolationism rhetoric tries to do.

    • Corvid@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Bridgy doesn’t scrape anything. It works the same as any other ActivityPub instance, the only difference is that it converts some JSON from one format to another.

      It also converts edit and deletion events, so in your scenario it would relay that you want your poem or photo deleted.

      This isn’t a web scrapper that reposts content like all the bots reposting Reddit threads to Lemmy. This is a protocol translator between federated networks that speak different languages.

      • Hominine@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Crickets

        Small wonder. A tangent, but I’m also of the opinion that someone shouldn’t put their child’s photo (or any information) on the internet if they don’t want to distribute it in the first place.

        • Corvid@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Not entirely sure what you mean by that. It deletes posts in the same way that any other ActivityPub server does, by federating the deletion request.

          It’s up to the receiving servers to handle that request and delete the post. You can easily have an ActivityPub native server that doesn’t honor those requests.

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        I found the bridgy website a bit confusing, but people who areupset should read through to get a better idea of what it actually does.

        Initially I thought it was just scraping and reposting too, but I find what the dev is working towards is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.

        • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          It doesn’t scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That’s how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.

          • rglullis@communick.news
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            9 months ago

            The largest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) has 360k MAU. This means that one can crawl all of its activities with less than 5 requests per second, every day.

            Even with rate limits, the Fediverse is still so small that I could crawl the top 10 mastodon instances in less than a day.

            From my desktop PC.

            On my shitty DSL.

            Anyone thinking that bullying one developer into a well-meaning project will be enough to keep their “secret clubs” away from malicious actors are in for a sad realization.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      ActivityPub doesn’t guarantee your post gets taken down on other instances after you delete it. Federation with another site isn’t more a less trustworthy just because it uses AP proper or a bridge.

      I think that everyone being on the same protocol is better for compatibility and UX but I think bridges can have their place for those who choose to use them until then.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      why don’t they switch to ActivityPub and problem solved immediately get defederated

      FTFY. That’s what would actually happen, and you and me both know it. 😛

    • rglullis@communick.news
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      9 months ago

      That’s what the ActivityPub protocol provides a platform for.

      That’s ridiculous. ActivityPub is a standard to allow communication between different systems. What you are saying is that people should only be allowed to speak English if they want to be part of the British Empire and be subjects to the crown.

        • rglullis@communick.news
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          9 months ago

          No user cares about the language an application is written in, only about its features.

          Also, should Python developers not be allowed to use Rust libraries through bindings? What a weird and broken analogy.

          • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf
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            9 months ago

            To be honest, I don’t know enough about either Rust or Python to continue with this analogy 😂

          • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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            9 months ago

            I’m confused by your and the parents comments

            You can create an ActivityPub server with any server software you like, you can even ask GPT to make a skeleton flask app for an activity pub site and it will. I think there’s just an overlap in fediverse secs and that fans.

            ActivityPub is just a standard for how users can interact with a server, and how that server pushes data to other servers. What that data is is entirely up to the developers, it just needs to be roughly social media shaped.