A libre networking project that's designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.
Bridgy Fed made a splash earlier this week by announcing its latest progress in connecting the Fediverse to Bluesky and Nostr. Sadly, not everyone was welcoming.
This insane isolationism from the vocal minority will kill ActivityPub.
The fact that the author is now backing down and switching to an opt-in system is infuriating. Makes want to fork the project and host a copy of the bridge that’s opt-out.
Anything remotely useful to connect to other people gets shouted down rather quickly and irrationally.
Look at the foam-mouthed Threads opponents.
It’s just embarrassing. This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
There is simply no reality where everyone decides to switch to Mastodon. Instead, if Bluesky grows, I can see people move away from ActivityPub-based microblogs.
I get the feeling the vocal people don’t actually want ActivityPub-based social media to be adopted by anyone (or just desperately need a hobby outside of complaint generation)
Opponents should use an instance that blocks the bridge if they’re concerned. But nobody should pretend ActivityPub is a private protocol.
It’s just embarrassing. This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
Yeah it's all "We hate walled gardens" and then a minute later "DO NOT TOUCH MY GARDEN WALLS!!!!1!!".
And it's always the same utopian idea that you can somehow both be relevant and big enough to have "enough" activity to be a fun space where to spend free time for discussion and avoid any and all corporate interest in the technology. Instead of trying to get ahead of it and figuring out how to handle of this so that when it inevitably happens you got a clue what to do about it. As if defederating from Threads would even stop Threads from both copying content to them and - if they wanted to - copying their content here. Ridiculous, if they wanted to, they could and they would. That they don't even want to is the far more interesting bit, really.
Instead, if Bluesky grows, I can see people move away from it.
When has that ever worked?
This is how we wish to present ourselves as an alternative to corporate social media?
The whole idea in the first place was to NOT be corporate. It's pretty understandable that when those corporations come knocking pretending to be nice, a lot of people want nothing to do with it.
Threads is quite blatantly just going to throw it's weight around. It's not in good faith. They're already not going to properly implement ActivityPub (which they apparently would do, according to pro-Threads federation people), and so certain content will appear different on Threads and AP. And of course threads is massive already as if you have an Instagram account you have a Threads account.
Smaller services and services which aren't megacorps are fine. Honestly, BlueSky federation seems like a good thing to me. But we'll have to see about that.
My point is there's a line between "federate to get more exposure and connections" and "federate to get EEE'd". Threads crosses that line. BlueSky I don't know about. They're very different scenarios.
I kinda get all the Threads worries and the fact that some people might not be comfortable with Meta collecting their data for advertising. But this is just insane. It just makes me think people are just irrationally angry at everything, and they like being that, instead of informing themselves about what everything does.
That’s exactly the point. Isolationists instances can always defederate bridges if they don’t like them. This outrage is them imposing their will on the rest of the fediverse.
It's a crawler that ports things from one platform to another without consent from the user. If either of them are unethical and should be blocked, then both should be blocked.