Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content
New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content · Issue #35086 · mastodon/mastodon
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I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.
I'm inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it's impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.
So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven't looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can't be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.
TL;DR: You're not just right, you're mathematically right.
Mathematically right, the best kind of right.
Mastodon's federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.
Servers don't remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There's work being done on both, but I'm surprised it wasn't prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.
There’s also the fact that instances can simply choose to ignore delete requests. Because that’s all it is; A request. Let’s say I post on .world and it gets federated to other instances. If I then delete that .world post, there’s nothing requiring those other instances to actually delete anything. .world simply sends a delete request, but the individual instances can choose to ignore it if they want.
That’s a large part of why the “I delete my content after a day or two so LLMs can’t use my data” crowd is so stupid. If someone was looking to train an LLM on Lemmy data, they’d simply set up an instance to aggregate posts, and refuse to delete anything.
I assume most licenses out there are irrevocable? They're certainly a feature of copyleft licenses.
If someone posts copyrighted material they were not allowed to share then 3rd party servers still need to deal with DMCA takedown requests and false reports, regardless of TOS. An explicit license might help but by how much? It may also push some users away.