Thank you for the detailed explanation. It matches what I’ve heard from others while having this same debate. Now allow me to explain my side.

I have consented to functionality in which my posts are distributed to other instances within the Fediverse. It’s widely advertised and clearly explained that is how things function. I can readily find which implementations are part of the fediverse

This is the part I think is wrong and the cause of all of this. You can not find which implementations are part of the fediverse. No tracker that you can use has an up-to-date and accurate listing of implementations. New ones come online every day as some random developer builds something new. The fediverse doesn’t have clear boundaries and I think the advertising that you mentioned does a disservice by implying it does. The fediverse is similar to the web; they’re both based on open protocols and can be guided but not controlled, because anybody can build something on those protocols.

One response to this fuzziness has been to demand most features be opt-in. The reason I don’t think this is tenable is because you have to have a hard boundary to determine what should be opt-in and what is ok to be opt-out. Your heuristic was native ActivityPub implementation. I don’t think this scales (I feel like you’re going to say this is a technological argument and therefore invalid, but it’s also a social argument. Ppl don’t want to use something that they have to constantly maintain. Constantly adding new servers/users to an allowlist is a chore that would drive ppl away. See google+ circles). It doesn’t scale because like I said above new implementations pop up every day and these implementations are starting to branch away from the static archetypes we’re used to (Twitter-like, Facebook-like, Reddit-like, etc). And some of them are existing projects that add AP support.

For instance, Hubzilla/Friendica has been bridging AP content for years. Do all of those instances require opt-in because they use a different protocol in addition to AP? There have also been bridges that translate RSS feeds to AP actor for years. Did the owners of those RSS feeds opt-in and should they have been required to?

What I’m trying to say is I think you’re right that you can never keep up with the boundaries of the fediverse and where your posts end up. And I don’t think there’s an easy delineation for what should be opt-out vs opt-in. So instead we should be demanding that implementations add controls to our posts. Thinks like ACLs and OCAPs would allow you to control who can see your posts and interact with them and not care about new bridges/instances/whatever. Which is why I think the argument over opt-out vs opt-in is a distraction that will only keep the fediverse in this quasi-privacy space where you’re dependent on yelling down any actor who is doing something with yours posts you don’t like.

I said the two things are different, you said how does that make asking for consent for the two things different, and my response was that for one of them it already works that way without your consent. That is a clear difference. Yes, I’m talking about the technology to explain the difference, because it’s a concrete fact. Your argument that a bridge should be opt-in requires an abstract boundary that some instances are are allowed to federate on an opt-out basis and others are not.

You don’t build trust in users by using practices like opt-out, which is again, the only argument I am trying to make.

The instance you’re on uses opt-out practices. You didn’t consent to your post federating to kbin.social and yet here we are. If you don’t trust the bridge, fine, block it. Every tool on the fediverse that you already use to deal with its inherently opt-out nature is available for you to use with this bridge.

in terms of giving one’s consent, exactly how the two are different?

Because in the second case, the user is choosing to post on a network where any other server can request their posts. A bridge is just an instance that understands more than one protocol. There’s no difference in it and any other server requesting your posts. That’s how the network works.

I think there’s a huge difference in scraping your content to churn out a for-profit “AI” and federating your public posts on a federated network.

I suppose this is where the root of our disagreement lies. For me the technical network that links tools is not the fediverse. The fediverse is what is built on top of that network and it is inherently linked with the community

I wrote a long reply disagreeing with each of your points, but you’re right. This is our disagreement. You’re using the term fediverse to apply to a specific group of ppl/servers that share values with you and I think that’s co-opting the term. The fediverse is more akin to the web (a platform based on technology that allows ppl access to other ppl and information) and it doesn’t make sense to talk about it as a single organization.

I think trying to change its meaning like this is flawed and leads to issues like we’re having now with Bridgy-Fed. You can’t shout at everyone to use the tech in the way you want, because eventually there will be ppl/orgs that just don’t listen. Instead, I think you should be pushing for existing platforms you’re using (lemmy, mastodon, etc) to give you more control of your own data. There are ways to allow small-fedi users to create the exact type of spaces they want and anybody else to have the wide open fediverse they want, if the various project would implement them.

I’m happy to continue discussing this with you or leave it here. Either way, thanks for the chat and have a good one.

For example, free software, no advertising as a business model, not commercial, not run by big corporations and talking over AP.

None of those are requirements to be part of the fediverse. The fediverse existed long before ActivityPub was even proposed. Free software, ad free, non commercial, not run by big corporations are all just coincidence because its a grassroots effort. Even now, there’s multiple companies invested in the fediverse: Mozilla, Flipboard, Facebook, Automatic being the most obvious.

Even if you take those as given, none of those dictate any shared values. Bridgy-fed itself meets all of those requirements but clearly holds differing values. Truth Social, Gab, Spinster, etc are all on the fediverse despite being abhorrent to the majority of the rest of the fediverse.

I’m in favor of groups maintaining shared values and enforcing policies based on them. But those policies can never apply to an entire network made up of distinct projects, servers, and people all with different ideas about how it should work.

the nature and direction of the fediverse

The fediverse is a decentralized network. It doesn’t have a cohesive nature/direction. It’s made up of servers providing twitter-like experiences, servers providing reddit-like experiences, forums, personal websites, video platforms, etc. You’ll never know all the places your fediverse data has reached because the fediverse doesn’t have hard boundaries so you can’t possible measure it all.

Which is why I think complaining about other what other software does is pointless. Instead, users should be pushing their own software to adopt more features to allow them to control their experience and data.

a lot of people want nothing to do with it.

And nobody is disagreeing with their right to do that. They have the tools to curate their own experience. But they can’t demand the fediverse work they way they want it to and no other way.

It doesn’t scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That’s how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.

Only if you want to force everyone to adopt this behavior

Did you read the proposal? No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The proposal would allow one community to follow another. Communities don’t have to send a follow request and the other community doesn’t have to follow back. This works just like users following users/communities. It’s all optional.

There are tons of people here that are telling you that this is a non-issue to them, why do you think that all clients need that?

There are tons of ppl telling you it is an issue for them. If its not an issue for you, then you lose nothing if this is implemented, but ppl who care have one of their pain points solved.

it absolutely is better to delegate behavior to the nodes as much as possible… Pushing as much functionality to the client is such a good way to follow Postel’s Law that is basically second nature to those developing distributed systems.

The nodes are the servers not the clients. Your argument is the exact opposite of what every fediverse developer says. The reason most of the fediverse uses the MastoAPI (or lemmy api for the threadiverse) instead of the ActivityPub Client to Server API is because the C2S expects a more client focused ecosystem but all the developers find it easier to handle logic on the server.

The proposal was intentionally written to be easy to implement. All fediverse platforms deal with follows so handling follows for groups is a simple extension to that.

Some subreddits are still not wanting to move to Lemmy

I’ve seen ppl saying they don’t want to use any threadiverse platform because of disparate communities/threads. This issue keeps being talked about and always generates pretty big threads so its clear that its an issue that causes a lot of users friction. There’s also plenty of issues that are way lower priority than this but they’re still filed on various projects’ trackers.

I think it’s higher priority than you do and would contribute to helping the fediverse grow but I don’t think we’re gonna convince each other so I’m gonna bow out here.

requires no extensions in the spec

That proposal doesnt require an extension to the spec. It requires a group to follow another group, which is definitively within the ActivityPub spec. The proposal above is written as a FEP (Fediverse Enhancement Proposal) which is the agreed upon way to propose new behavior in an interoperable way.

no changes in the server side

But it takes changes on the client side. One is not inherently better than the other. Also, doing it client side means you have to duplicate the work for every client. Doing it server side means it works for everyone.

easily prototyped/tested

Every fediverse platform already supports following Actors. That’s part of the spec. Handling follows for groups is just as easy as for users.

The third solution wouldn’t cause extra communication. If you’re subbed to a community that follows other communities, you receive all the posts once. That’s the same as if you followed all of those communities yourself.

If your server hosts communities that follow others, that would still be the same as having users on your server follow those servers. It’s the same amount of communication.

I’m assuming you were talking about this comment. That doesn’t explain why merging communities is bad, only why you may not want to do it. Which would always be an option. Having the option to merge duplicate communities doesn’t mean you can’t maintain similar communities without merging them.

That’s exactly what the third proposal in the article would do. See the proposal its based on for more detail.

the Lemmy devs are not interested in this

I know. I’m the one who posted that one of the lemmy devs is not interested in this. But if the userbase gets behind it, they could convince the dev team. Kbin, mbin, or sublink could implement this and even if lemmy doesn’t it would improve things for lemmy users because who follow communities hosted on those implementations and could serve as a proof of concept.

there is also the “political” aspect

Everything about the proposal is optional. Nobody would be forced to do anything, unless the owner of the community decides to go against the wishes of the community members.

Lemmy has been around for years, not months, and this is still an issue that ppl are having. Some ppl know each other and can choose to keep their communities separate. But for ppl who want larger, more in depth discussions and new ppl, this simple technical measure can make the platform better for the multiple reasons I mentioned above.

Your arguments against it seem to be:

1. Its not needed. - I’ve pointed out multiple reasons I think its needed. Consolidation either doesn’t happen, is never actually completed, or is a years long process. Discussions are fragmented which leads to communities that don’t have enough activity. New users are unfamiliar with the platform and unaware of large players so don’t know how to find the most active community. Consolidating on a single community means you’ve centralized the community and put it at risk if that server goes down.
2. People might not want it - The proposal doesn’t force anybody to group their communities. They can maintain their independence. I imagine that mods thinking about grouping with another community would have a discussion with the other mod team and both communities’ members.

I disagree with both of those arguments but even ignoring that, I don’t understand why it matters to you. You seem to be fine with the current state and this proposal wouldn’t disrupt that. Either the communities you’re in don’t join up with others or they do and you wouldn’t notice (unless a mod groups with a wildly different community)

I don’t think we’ve consolidated around [email protected]. You’re using a single post as an example. I’ve posted links that got 40+ comments in [email protected] but way less in other communities. I’ve posted or seen threads in [email protected] that got more discussion.

The merge of cooking communities on lemmy.world is also not really relevant. Those communities were each supposed to be specialized communities, not general cooking communities. They shutdown because they couldn’t sustain enough activity. And they were all on lemmy.world so the userbase likely all overlapped; I’d bet that most ppl subbed to them were already subbed to [email protected] anyway.

What I’m talking about is when small and medium sized servers (not lemmy.world) have their own communities that overlap with other communities. Users who join those servers aren’t necessarily going to know about lemmy.ml or lemmy.world. They’ll see communities they’re interested in and sub, but then won’t see as much interaction as they want. This leads to ppl just giving up and going back to the corporate sites.

Even if consolidation is happening, there’s a transition period where ppl are posting in multiple places, ppl get the same post in their feed multiple times, comment threads are separate. Then when consolidation happens, you have a single community where those mods hold all the power. If we used something like the proposal above, each community could still exist but all the conversations are still consolidated. That keeps the power spread out and likely keeps each mod team in check and provides multiple on-ramps to the community. You could find [email protected] or [email protected] but if they’re grouped, you still find the super-community. And then if one of those servers goes down, only users subbed to that community have to migrate and they should be tangentially aware of the other community so migration is easier. Their server could even handle that migration automatically.

Lemmy doesn’t have to have missing features for someone to want to write their own implementation. And in a decentralized system you want multiple implementations to exist. This is a good thing

Exactly. It’s also using Spring Boot, Hibernate, and Lombok. It looks just like projects at work. It might be the first fediverse project I contribute regularly to.

But if you increase the userbase, you’ll end up with more ppl who like yugioh and want a community which leads to duplicate communities. But for niche topics, the duplicate communities are likely to end up with userbases too small to sustain enough activity. A way to combine communities makes it more likely that users find other users who want to discuss niche topics with them. That helps to grow the userbase.

There is no point

Yes, there is. If we can keep those 5 users here, its better than them being on reddit. There’s no reason not to work on this. We have multiple projects, each with multiple contributors, so we can do multiple things at one time.

Because all the evidence shows…

What evidence shows that? This post is in [email protected] and crossposted to [email protected]. There’s also [email protected] and I know I’ve seen others. Most of these communities have been running for a few years now and there’s still no consolidation.

You can see the same pattern with communities for gaming, linux, gardening, movies, tv, etc. I’m subscribed to multiple communities for each of those topics on separate servers because the consolidation doesn’t happen.