As someone who did her PhD on consent I just want to flag a few things in the bsky bridge discussion. One: medical style disclosure based consent (terms and conditions, EULAs etc.) is totally inappropriate for this sort of situation and has been for decades. But it serves the needs of slow-moving legal requirements and companies that like people to forget they signed up to stuff (or were coerced into doing so for social or other reasons). See https://liedra.net/thesis for more details. (1/n)
Two: A community's normative expectations need to be taken into account, for example, that posts are only easily visible to a certain subsection of the fediverse. These expectations may (and often are) completely disconnected from the technical capabilities of the service (e.g. that posts are publicly available), and that's okay. We encounter these expectations of behaviour despite capabilities for different behaviour all the time in the real world. Social contracts regulate them.
@CatherineFlick This seems to be the crux of things — pro-bridging folks seem focussed on the tech, and anti-people are talking about the culture. And all that means the two groups are somewhat talking past each other.
Three: A normative expectation for mastodon is that posts stay on servers that share your server's norms. There are many and varied reasons for this, many of which are reasonable, some of which are perhaps a bit paranoid, but how reasonable or paranoid they are does not invalidate them as reasons for normative expectations of behaviour within the mastodon environment for their community. You don't have to like or agree with it, but you should respect it when interacting with the community.
@CatherineFlick Where does that expectation come from? It's contrary to the whole promise of Mastodon and hasn't been true, ever. Mastodon has always interoperated (often imperfectly, of course) with other AP software like misskey, calkey or whatever it's called now, pixelfed, lemmy, and all the earlier things from before I was here, some even predating Mastodon. Usually you don't even know or care what software someone else's instance is running.
@dalias And then so this is why defederation is a thing. It's one of the ways we regulate these expectations here. So if something (e.g. a bridge to a set of servers that don't share our behavioural norms) shows up then defederation is a reasonable response to that too.
@CatherineFlick I don't think the actual expectation is "posts stay on Mastodon". I think it's something more like "posts stay on small to medium sized non-corporate instances became everyone is expected to defederate any instance launched by a giant corporation".
@dalias Yeah okay, so I took a bit of a short cut there - "posts stay on servers that largely conform to the ideals and behavioural expectations of the server I'm on". (I think your summary is conflating a few things here.) I don't think people expect their posts to be available to Gab etc. either - there's a more complex set of expectations going on here.
@CatherineFlick on this point - isn't this mostly about education?
Those of us who have come here from Twitter must surely be aware that messages go beyond the platform (see the guy who made a joke on twitter and was arrested)
@Sbectol So I think there's two things here: one is that yes, people probably understand their posts are public (for discovery purposes etc. like you suggest). The second is that there's a difference between that and making your posts fully available (/searchable/etc.) to a wider audience on a different social network. If you craft your posts for a specific audience it may not always translate to another one well. And you might not want to deal with the fallout of that (which is fair).
@Sbectol I mean like with all social aspects, "it's complicated", and there's never just one reason people do things; so sure, some of it probably is education, some of it is probably also ideological ("I don't like bsky") and some of it is probably just general fear of the unknown (amongst others). Education will only serve some of these responses, but won't help for the more ideological ones for sure.
@CatherineFlick this reminds me of danah boyd's thesis on teen publics ~15 years ago “their idea of public is not about all people across all space and all time. They want publics of peers, not publics where creeps and parents lurk.”
This is part of the original twitter illusion - that you were talking to the people who you follow, not those who follow you, and not the firehose feed. That created a good normative sense for the most part, but the illusion broke with search and reply notifications
Finally: So discussions about the technical capabilities (all posts are public), reasonableness of expectations (people are paranoid) and all of these other objections are moot if you are a responsible person developing tech that interacts with that community. Engage with the community, respect that community, and don't get mad if that community rejects your tech if you didn't do the legwork to discover the normative expectations of behaviour within that community. #bsky#bluesky
@CatherineFlick Thank you, the complete disregard for the social and cultural part of social media is eternally frustrating. It's extra frustrating since there are so many qualified and knowledgeable people engaged on the fediverse who could be included in design discussions and planning (who are not all femmes but, not unsurprisingly, many are).
Addendum: yes the mastodon (and general fediverse) community is fairly fractured, with wildly different ideas about how the fediverse should operate and that's okay too. If that's going to be the case, make your thing opt-in. (See how the mastodon Search stuff was done for an example.)
@CatherineFlick Professor, it's refreshing to see this online. As a shaman I frequently meditate on reciprocal relationships which is something the universe delights in, and is horribly lacking in our modern societies. with our legal frameworks. What do you see as a solution to that? Is there a solution to that?
@praetor I don’t think there is any real fix to this other than to just get back to basics, humans relating to humans directly. Maybe that is technologically mediated but it’s the humans that are important.
@CatherineFlick
I think something like this would have got a lot different reaction. And would still have got plenty of people sign up.
"Hi guys,
I created a bridge to Blue Sky.
It allows you to follow BlueSky people and them to follow you.
If you think this is cool, just follow account YYYYY and it will be set up automatically for your account. Unfollow and we will deactivate it.
If you le but don't want a certain post to go across, just use this HASHTAG in the post.
For all the details see WEBSITE
Here a screenshot of how a bluesky follower will look on the fediverse"
@NatureMC someone wrote a bridge to Bluesky, a bit like the twitter ones that existed prior to the API shutdown. They’d allow people on either server to follow the posts of someone on the other, usually without their knowledge.
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