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Somehow found myself arguing with someone who talks about "the fediverse" like it is a) a singular thing and b) a separate thing from bluesky. It helped remind me of a fundamental truth about talking to people who are mad on the internet. What they're mad about is entirely uncorrelated with how well they understand the issues. Anger is an *emotion*. So is fear.
In my commentary about mastodon and bluesky today, I didn't say all that much about my thoughts on the core issues of privacy and consent. That's what most people actually want to fight about. For people who are worried about that, anybody who isn't immediately on their side is the enemy. I'm used to that specific internet dynamic, so I'm not that bothered by it.
What I'm realizing is that I don't wanna talk about that though. Not because I don't care. I do. But there are much smarter people who have spent way more time on those issues. It's a deep and gnarly topic. So I don't have anything to say about it that is smarter than what is already being said by people who are actually *working* on the issues.
Instead, my musings from the peanut gallery are driven by something else that is bothering me as I observe people's evolving relationship with The Fediverse™.
To me, one of the fundamental things to understand about the concept of decentralization and federation is that nobody is "in charge". There's no central authority to appeal to.
In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?
I keep feeling like I'm missing something. But it seems clear to me that fighting with every other individual in the whole world until you carve out the specific level of visibility that you are comfortable with is a solution that doesn't scale very well.
More importantly though. I thought the whole point of the fediverse as a concept was that each of us can chose a platform that gives us the tools we want so that we're *not* beholden to the choices that other people make.
What's wild about the bluesky bridge thing is that it seems to be trying to follow all of the rules. It's using the same ActivityPub protocol as everyone else. It has a name and the author is trying to make sure it respects everybody else's moderation settings. You can block it or defederate from it. But very few people who I've seen talking about it seem to be placated by that. They're still mad for some reason.
As I was puzzling through that, I landed on what I think is a core issue. People do not feel that the tools necessary to protect themselves *are in their hands*. They're still operating as if they have to ask other people to do the right thing. (Or yell at them as the case may be). Is that a failure of the way mastodon is set up? Have we not gone far enough with "you get to decide how your presence on the internet works"?
If you don't want your content to be bridged to bluesky without your consent, you shouldn't have to fight with anybody except the admin on your local mastodon instance. You can yell at them all you want. I have fewer judgments about that.
Many people have yelled at the bridge guy telling him to make his tool opt-in by default. He shouldn't have to do that. You can make your own instance opt-out by default. Why is that not a preferable solution?
@polotek all other things aside, what matters isn’t the technical architecture but the social norms. Mastodon is full of folks who are extremists (by modern tech standards) about consent, and who want defaults to be opt-in for nearly everything. In particular, Bluesky has both a different economic model and a different privacy model than the rest of the fediverse, so it makes sense to start with consent because the decision to federate is irrevocable in terms of data leakage.
@anildash @polotek the social norms are worthless the first time a bad actor joins the scene. I find it irresponsible by those folks to claim mastodon/fedi has safety properties that it clearly doesn’t have. And then yell at folks for pointing that out as if that is a sustainable safety practice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@anildash @janl I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be upset about this. I am arguing that being mad at this one person for doing what devs always do with open and available tech is not actually reasonable. Especially when these same people haven't taken advantage of any of the tools actually available to them to protect themselves from unwanted federation.
@anildash what we disagree on is the definition of "community". Many people I've talked to about this don't give a fuck about community. They care about themselves. And they didn't know anything about what the norms were. They just hate bluesky. You're projecting the norms of your own circles onto a much wider group of people.
Also there is a strong argument to be made that the actual community norms are to federate with everybody. Because that's what happens in almost all cases today.
@anildash you may get to the rest of my threads about this at some point. But I'll say it here as well. My argument was never to say "people don't get to be mad about this". That's not even a discussion I care about. My discussion was "being mad at this one random guy does not solve your safety problem. So now what?"
@polotek @anildash i think people getting mad about it are trying to create and enforce cultural norms, they don't want the tools to be needed to protect people, they want it to be taboo, and harshly punished, to do the things they think are bad for privacy.
I think it's related to the "you can't fix social problems with technical solutions", idea, if you try to enforce things technically, there is always a way around, so they want culture to solve it instead. Except there will be outliers.
@tshirtman @anildash right. Make one random guy's life hell as a warning to everyone else. Makes sense.
@tshirtman @polotek it’s worked at chasing off lots of devs and even more casuals. For sure.
@tshirtman @polotek @anildash “you can’t fix social problems with technical solutions” is a phrase I see with basically no support whatsoever. Encryption, for example, seems to be a very effective solution to “don’t snoop on private conversations.” There’s even varying levels of technical security based on how much you care.
@agocke @tshirtman @polotek this is only tech solving a social problem if every conversation everywhere is encrypted. You can't fix social problems with technical solutions.
@anildash @tshirtman @polotek if it has to be solved everywhere to be considered solved, nothing can be solved. In some cases it looks like only tech can solve social problems, e.g. gun control.