Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon's Toxicity
It turns out, if people in an online community really don't like what you're doing, they can turn to harassment, threats, or worse to try to shut you down.
Somebody put up a site saying
It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.
There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content "without consent". Trouble is, there's no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I...
Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn't transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren't even aware of Mastodon's new opt-in/out search features?
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they'd used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust -- which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you're on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.
I'll refrain from writing the uncharitable version of my reaction to the idea that the Fediverse should be some small, close-knit community forever and instead say that people who want small, close-knit communities based on ActivityPub are free to create them. Mastodon and other major server software supports allowlist-only federation.
People using servers with open federation should expect that their posts will reach an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of ActivityPub running on a jailbroken smart light bulb, and that it will behave differently from vanilla Mastodon.
That’s where my frustrations with “consent fedi” come into play. They want to force people to comply with their views. They could go into allow list federation and connect with those that views thing similarly yet they don’t.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via [email], without any further communication, may I…
Isn't the answer just the same if you consider it as email? I mean ActivityPub is basically just email but with "social media" features. Surely lawyers already have answers to the question when it comes to email.
If I send an email to the whole world, what is anyone allowed to do with it?
In some ways, I feel like ActivityPub is just public. It's not reasonable to be able to enforce any license, so it may as well just be considered public domain. But IANAL.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.
On the other hand, if someone takes photos I've shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they're definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.
Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren't based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
What, exactly, is unsophisticated / un-machine-readable about
This post licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
?
There have been many attempts to add content licencing but some of the devs (lemmy devs) really dont like the idea.
Its already implemented on peertube and pixelfed but lemmy devs have so far refused to add it.
"Refused", I mean there is an open issue for it. I don't think most users want to think about licensing when posting their stuff either.
I absolutely agree with everything in this post, I’m am just now learning about this but I’m really disappointed to hear that this happened.
I have looked past a lot of the toxic behavior of certain segment of neurotic individuals on the fediverse because I believe in the idea of protocols instead of platforms and user ownership of their data.
But add this to another example of zealots for privacy and “stopping harassment” being bigger bullies than the people they are supposedly against
If you don't want your posts/content to appear on other websites from the one you posted it on, why would you use a federated platform in the first place? Isn't the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
And on a mostly unrelated side note, that bit about people trying to force the website to display CP to get the owner in legal trouble is exactly the reason why strict liability crimes that don't care about intent are a bad idea
Isn’t the entire point of these kinds of platforms that this kind of content is shared between sites?
I have the same thoughts. I feel like when you post on the Fediverse, it's just public. It's like shouting something in the town square - it's out there, anyone can hear it. If you're not cool with that, maybe you shouldn't use ActivityPub.
Not just ActivityPub, everything you upload publicly online is, well, public. One of the first things I learnt as a kid about the internet is that everything you put online stays online. You can't expect to be able to upload things online for everyone to see but somehow still have full control over what those people do with it.
While I agree with you, I just want to mention that not necessarily all fediverse users have a formed opinion (at least at first) about open platforms, sharing content with other websites, and so on.
Some people just suffered from platforms like ex-Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. enshittifying, heard that other victims were trying to build something better, and (generously, might I add) decided to give it a chance.
That doesn't excuse any horrible behavior they might've engaged in. But remember that just because someone is surprised and reacts negatively at how their content is handled on the fediverse, that doesn't mean they were in the wrong to join.
Folks can jump into things without fully understanding them, and sometimes it's nice to, circumstances allowing, take that as an opportunity to inform, rather than question "Why are you even here?"
Do we have the next "debacle" about public content being, surprisingly, public? Really? Has it been a week already? 😅
There's quite a bit to unpack in this article, even if some of it is only mentioned.
It's a saddening read. There are issues with Fediverse culture and surrounding technical discussion at wide, but also with interactions between law and new technologies like ActivityPub—and that's on top of the law, on it's own, already doing a horrible job way too often, in my opinion. None of this is news, but it always hurts a little to be reminded so.
I've been thinking about trying to get into mastodon, to form my own opinion on several topics it intersects with. I'm a little uncomfortable with how popular it is compared to other fediverse software, considering how poorly they seem to integrate. I hoped some time on mastodon would dispell this feeling, or at least give me insights I could work with. To be honest, every day it gets a little harder to justify that idea.
But that's just a personal thing. Maybe I'm simply not fit for micro-blogging. Really, I don't care which software is the most popular, I literally just wish they'd integrate better. Despite my misgivings, I'm grateful for the positive impact mastodon has made in the social/tech circles, changing how many people see social media and their relationship with it.
The us-versus-them mentality is unreal. The only valid them, to me, is proprietary closed platforms. We should strive for more decentralized networks that shift control over user experience back to its users, because we need and deserve safer, healthier social networks. This is not it. I can only hope culture will improve, because I'm not sure how you'd tackle a problem on this scale.
And if mastodon can't fix itself? Screw it, and keep an eye on what comes next.
It's not a competition, we're in a team effort to build a part of the internet that can resist enshittification inevitable in closed platforms; so long as the platform is open, I'll keep my mind open as well. If my lemmy instance decides to migrate to Sublinks, that's fine. Worst case, I'll migrate elsewhere. Assuming Bluesky turns out OK as a company, even atproto taking the lead over ActivityPub might be fine. Hell, some of the original AP creators are still experimenting with new ideas.
I fully agree with the point that too many people act like the fediverse, or their specific brand of it, is more open-minded and kinder than what they're trying to replace. I hope it's possible to make that true, one day.
P.S. Sorry, brevity is the soul of wit, and I'm an idiot. This ended up as an outlet for issues that have been frustrating me for a while.
An unfortunate part of the fediverse is that it attracts people who were too obnoxious for even the more annoying parts of Reddit/Twitter/etc. I've made plenty of attempts to "get into" Mastodon and can confidently say that's a miserable experience across the board if you aren't willing to do the work to curate your feed. Even if you do get a feed that is free of bad actors, conversations rarely veer off-course from Linux, programming, computers, tech, etc., at which point that's fine, I guess, but it's hardly diverse. Also, for all the complaining about "techbros" ruining the fediverse, it sure is full of them.
I have more faith in Bluesky currently. If they're able to achieve their own kind of federation then I'll gladly jump ship since their userbase is a lot friendlier and more diverse that Mastodon IMO.
I’ve made plenty of attempts to “get into” Mastodon and can confidently say that’s a miserable experience across the board if you aren’t willing to do the work to curate your feed.
I honestly feel like this is applicable to any social media, federated or not, and could arguably even be extended to socializing in general, in terms of choosing one's friends wisely. Technological or otherwise, navigating society is neither easy nor smooth sailing.
Although this is by no means to dismiss your experience, only to chip in with my own across different social media and otherwise. Finding one's place among others, curating/filtering one's connections, has always felt like a struggle to me no matter where I've found myself.
That's a shame, thank you for the input. I guess I could try Bluesky instead.
Not sure how up to date you are on Bluesky's situation, but it might interest you to know they've recently started doing early-access federation. It's... not ideal (opinion), but it's moving along (fact).
For what it's worth, if you post a story (for example) to the open internet -- your blog, social media -- and there is NOT a paywall or explicitly restricted access, many (if not all) publishers will consider that material previously published. That doesn't mean it's public domain at all, but it does recognize that the work is not private. Likewise, I'd consider any social media post being akin to posting a sign in my front yard. If someone does the work of driving by and taking pictures of the signs in my front lawn, that's their right -- unless I'm in a closed, gated community.
Then again, i see people thinking that they somehow "own" their Facebook feed, so ....
If someone does the work of driving by and taking pictures of the signs in my front lawn, that’s their right
I think in some countries it would still be your right to say "no" to that. Part of the reason why Germany has terrible Google Streetview coverage. (just a fun fact)
Oh, neat! Thanks for pointing out the USA centrist viewpoint I had there! My bad indeed!
Meanwhile here I am just tooting with folks in my small part of the community blissfully unaware of
Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?
Why is Mastodon being treated as a monolithic entity?
Oh the usual: makes a batter headline.
I guess I’m spreading toxicity by replying to a post from a Mastodon app…? Or something?
Not really a comment on this specific case, but isn't it a bit strange to refer to Mastodon as a thing or community as a whole?
I get it when you have a platform like Twitter, you refer to the users of that platform. But Mastodon is many different platforms with different rules and social norms and communities that are more or less (in case of defederation) connected. Treating that as a single user base sounds a bit strange in my head.
Thoughts?
It is generalising for sure, but IMO touches on a real phenomenon. It’s more like saying if you encounter these behaviours they are likely to come from mastodon users.
The importance though is that mastodon is so dominant on the Fedi with a highly effective brand and relatively ambitious CEO, that fostering a toxic culture, however much of a minority, has implications for the whole fediverse. Whole swathes of people have left the fediverse because of the broken promises of the mastodon experience.
Who is this Mastodon CEO you think is controlling Mastodon's culture? Rochko? He doesn't have any influence on what posts anyone sees on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn't have a central server or moderation team, and their algorithms are too dumb to instill a culture or even present a single unified culture. I see posts from people I follow, and people they boost, that's it. It's like a step removed from RSS feeds.
A cohesive culture has definitely formed distinct from the rest of the fediverse. I think microblogging as a paradigm kind of lends itself to this but Lemmy certainly has a distinct culture as well.
I still haven't run into problems on mastodon. Maybe I'm not using it right lol.
But I've not run into any jerks frequently enough to notice. The feed is easy to curate, so I don't have to deal with political shit since I just don't scroll through the "all" equivalent feed unless I'm really bored. Even then, I've seen less toxicity the entire time I've been on mastodon (a couple of years, irc?) than I would in a week of Twitter or a single day on reddit.
I'm sure it's there, don't get me wrong. I'm just thinking it's an exaggerated perception based on how people use it rather than being indicative of the user base as a whole. Shit, on my author account, the whole writing and book community is wholesome as fuck. Supportive, friendly, helpful. It's fucking awesome.
Same situation, for the most part. I was, however, originally on an arts & crafts server that had to shut down because the admin was being bullied by the folks over at .art, so I have seen a bit of the nonsense.
Seems like most people on there are just normal nice people, but unfortunately as in the real world being awful gets you attention and power and disproportionally affects the reputation of your server, platform, state, country, etc.
There's also a ton of crossover, again as in the real world but also as on Lemmy and everywhere else, between people who obsess over politics and this kind of toxic behaviour. So I think in having most of that filtered out we kill two birds with one stone.
As an end-user, you won't be the subject of this kind of controversy. Run a service that attempts to make a profit using federated content or that provides very different discoverability features from Mastodon and it becomes very likely.
Ahhh, that makes sense
The larger the group of people gets, the more likely it is to contain toxic people. Normal distributions and all that.
Mastodon is by far the largest Fedi platform, which the article points out. So it will unavoidably contain the largest number of toxic people. Also most likely the largest number of absolute saints but that's hardly as obvious I suppose.
BLAME IT ON FACEBOOL THREADS
