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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I think you’re misunderstanding just like the Mastodon users who think every tool should be opt-in. The consent piece IS moving to a closed system with whitelisted federation. If you’re giving data out publicly with no restrictions but trying to put stipulations on how it’s used, it’s the same as trying to enforce control through robots.txt, which is by the way a standard protocol.

    So if you’re going to whine about votes being shown, you should be using a whitelist to block those actors from seeing it, and should be using authorized fetch to limit access to those whitelisted instances specifically, otherwise this is every stupid argument about “why robots.txt should be respected”.









  • Except ActivityPub data is by in large already not private, it is handed out to any tom dick and harry who run a server and have subscribed to actors on this one, and most of the time, it doesn’t even really require extra authorization. That is fundamentally how ActivityPub and federation work, but you can’t have any expectation of privacy in this system when it comes to the content shared. Expecting it to be private because it’s labeled is as dumb as expecting your website not to get scraped because you said so in robots.txt.


  • It’s not good practice. Really one shouldn’t be assuming anything is private or some entitlement to privacy on a service where all content you post is made publicly available to any and all linked instances. They miss the point of a federated public forum. If one wants privacy, data must be kept locally only. That’s why Lemmy has local-only communities, the “private” community aspect that many people want just won’t be federated, because you can’t make something like this private otherwise.








  • Couldn’t disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn’t viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it’s objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it’ll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren’t entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.

    Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support.

    You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.

    Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.

    Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.

    You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.


  • They’re choosing to attack the public square anyway, because they don’t want their shelters, they want the whole fucking world. And they can’t have it.

    This is the best way of putting it, the whole thing about people complaining about defederation. Honestly fuck the people who are like this, who do you think you are asking for the whole world when you weren’t entitled to it in the first place. You weren’t entitled access to Facebook content from Reddit or vice versa. It’s the same here.

    I know that part of the reason people like that came her in the first place was because Mastodon and the OG fediverse services made that empty promise to them in the beginning (also saying a lot of shit about freedom and free speech) so those are the people that have been attracted. It really needs to be said loud and clear that this isn’t the case or intention, and catering to people who want the world when they don’t deserve it, is not the goal of the Fediverse or decentralization.