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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Nah. Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual. Yes, the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network. It's technically possible, yes. It's still a dick thing to do and it pissed people off.

And again, it wasn't about Bluesky in particular. If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.

In general, "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it there". It wasn't the bridge creator's decision to make.

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Public = consent for the public to see it. That includes the public on Bluesky. It was consensual. And the ruckus was in fact about Bluesky in particular. That's why the same project already supported other protocols without a big ruckus.

In general, "I want my stuff on Bluesky but don't want to deal with cross-posting to multiple different platforms and keeping up with responses on all of them"

And, "I want my stuff on whatever platform people want to read it on without having to individually approve each one" (which is quite literally the entire point of public posts on Mastodon).

OH - and it wasn't the bridge creator's decision anyway; it was the decision of people on Bluesky to follow you that would trigger your posts to be federated, so...

It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.

Similarly, I don't want my blog posts used to train LLMs. I know they're likely to be since they're published right there on the Internet for anyone to see and read. But my intent was for other humans to see and read them, not for someone to feed them into a regurgitator. There aren't technical means that let me allow humans to read my stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it, and someone could make the (bad) case that if I didn't want my work to be used to train an LLM, I shouldn't have made it public. Maybe. However, I reserve the right to think someone's an ass for doing it.

Well, no technical hurdles kept the person from copying data out of the network people meant to post it to. It's probably not illegal. It's not a nice thing to do, though.

> It was meant for the public to see, not to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.

Except literally the entire design is for other Mastodon servers to bulk copy it en masse to somewhere else.

> There aren't technical means that let me allow humans to read my stuff without allowing LLMs to ingest it

Yes there are. Don't make it public.

> However, I reserve the right to think someone's an ass for doing it.

Of course! You can think anyone is an ass. You can think anything you want. That doesn't mean that person did anything wrong.

> "if I wanted my stuff on Bluesky, I would have put it there"

How about "If I wanted my stuff on the your Mastodon server, I would have put it there"?

"If I wanted my Mastodon content on your RSS feed, I would have put it there".

How about "If I wanted my stuff on the Internet, a publicly available internet, I would have put it there".

This tribalism around network/brands/protocols is beyond stupid. The thing that is killing Twitter is its closedness and the assumption that the means of communication is what matters. It's not. Let open protocols be open.

If people want privacy, then they should use a secure communication protocol and not a social media network.

> Yes, the posts were publicly accessible, but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network.

I thought that was the point of activitypub.

>If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.

exactly like they did with usenet without any issue?

Well, at least they paid money for Deja. Slight difference no?

I'm completely confused under what moral framework the fact that Google paid to buy the Dejanews archive makes a any difference.

To make it clear, for people who don't know:

Google Groups was originally Dejanews, which was a web based archive and front end to Usenet. Google started searching Usenet, but didn't have historical archives so they bought Dejanews.

Obviously no one who posted on Usenet got paid under this transaction.

It's like if Google bought a Mastadon archive off someone now: this argument seems to indicate that would be better somehow than Google archiving Mastadon posts themselves.

I don't understand why at all?

> Consent is a thing and this wasn't consensual

The whole point of a fediverse is it's a federation. Therefore there is implied consent to copying from one instance to another.

> but the intent of posting to Mastodon isn't to have it show up automatically on another network

Mastodon isn't a network, the network is the fediverse. Mastodon is some software that runs on the network.

What thing is consent?

Mastodon is an odd sort of network, there's more blocking than I expected and it somehow seems as if blocking is an intrinsic part of the design. In Mastodon, blocking looks like a choice one makes for whatever reasons, not an unloved measure needed for fighting abuse.

As if the design doesn't tell users "you can follow people in the fediverse" but rather "your ability to follow people in the fediverse is limited by you and three other parties and the software isn't among the three".

So… if the mastodonish idea of consent doesn't extend to all of the fediverse, what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people? If the poster's/follower's/would-be follower's consent isn't taken for granted in one case and isn't taken for granted in the other, what makes the two cases different? There obviously is a technical difference, but what is the difference wrt. consent?

> what makes bluesky different from some unvetted mastodon site run by weird people?

Absolutely nothing! Fediverse admins block unmoderated sites all the time, for being unmoderated. Bluesky is just, effectively, one unmoderated instance that everyone will block by default.

Assuming your assertions are correct (they're not, but let's assume they are) - what's the problem with the bridge being opt-out if everyone will block it anyway?

> If Google announced that they were going to ingest all Mastodon content and post it in a new Google Groups kind of thing, they'd be pretty understandably upset about that, too.

Except that's not what the bridge does, at all. It only follows you on someone's behalf when someone on Bluesky specifically requests to follow you through the bridge.

I’m a sucker for a particular mix of condescending plus wrong.

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