I have added an opt-out hashtag and I'll be curious to hear what you think of Zeitgeist (and perhaps to confirm that my posts don't appear in your summaries).

If you think this is problematic, let me know, but I'd like to understand what the actual alternative is here.

Yes, I do think it's problematic that you seem uncertain whether the people you follow are consenting to your use of their posts by using this client. But I don't think you should leave the coop over it. I would miss you!

I wonder if you'd feel okay with tagging your bio the same way I just did? #LLMClient perhaps?

@Dan Phiffer thank you, I think it's likely I'm leaving given how things are likely to go, but we can remain in touch and I wish you well! I just dislike enclosure by committee, left-authoritarianism, time wasting, and people assuming and expressing bad faith -- and I've seen too much of this over the years, even as I was putting hours of work for the coop in preference to spending time on my personal projects or alongside more like-minded people. At some point it's just rational to move on to greener and more progressive (from my PoV) pastures, and leave the instance to people who want it to be a different thing. I will probably write a retrospective in any case, and do it in an orderly way making sure the TWG in particular has everything they need.

This is surprising and sad to hear. I'd like to remind you that my very first encounter with this subject, minutes after reading about it as the on-call mod, was me offering to meet synchronously to talk things through on this. That offer that was not accepted, and now I wonder if you regard it as being made in bad faith?

@Dan Phiffer No, I have no doubt about your good faith! Thank you for the offer. I did not decline it, I said I was open to it? We can talk in the next TWG sync as well.

I've added this to my profile: "#searchable, occasionally #llmassisted." -- the earlier is for Tootfinder.ch. I settled on #llmassisted because it seems more generic while still clear enough, and can also cover things like "I'm using LLMs to write some posts"? Which I'm not, but I think people might occasionally want to do?

I did not decline it, I said I was open to it?

@Flancian apologies, I'm looking at the thread (on Zulip not here) and still not seeing your message. It seems like a missed opportunity.

EDIT: I found the message, this one was on me.

@Dan Phiffer no problem!

After reviewing https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/commit/90b09ad6f683d7059ef4a5c4a3883704a7e71057 and seeing #nobots and #noai are supported to opt-out, I'm thinking of just having #bots and/or #ai in my profile to signal the opposite (endorsement/opt-in/likelihood of using these technologies).

@flancian a couple of thoughts:
- we should be concerned about the tool usage against our data, but perhaps not a specific developer account
- personally, I'd like this person to remain blocked, if not at the instance level, then at least at the level of my account (currently not possible because social.coop blocks him). If we unblock him, **I'd really like to know about that when it happens.

@Sieva I think that makes sense; to be clear my understanding is that if we move to Limit you will not be able to interact with them without seeing a warning, and if they follow you that would show up as a follow request. From the Mastodon docs on limiting at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-user:

"Previously known as “silencing”. A limited account is hidden from all other users on that instance, except for its followers. All of the content is still there, and it can still be found via search, mentions, and following, but the content is invisible publicly. Notifications about activities from limited accounts will be handled according to account-level notification preferences (which default to “filter” for limited accounts).

If a limited account attempts to follow a user on that instance, the follow is converted into a follow request.

At this moment, limit does not affect federation. A locally limited account is not limited automatically on other servers. Account limitations are reversible."

So if I have this right, limiting would probably be as safe as suspend for most users? And still allow others to opt-in into interacting with this account.

I would prefer blocking requests with User-Agent=Zeitgeist/1.0.

@Sieva that makes sense, but note that it'd be hard (the TWG would have to think about it I believe, @Dan Phiffer @Calix @Ammar) to do this for only some users, it would be more like an instance-wide ban (similar to this suspension). I would personally find this unsatisfactory because it means my Fediverse experience would break any time I wanted to interact with someone who is using this client.

Yeah, to my knowledge this isn't something we've done before, blocking based on User-Agent. I bet we could figure it out though.

Setting aside the chaotic launch of this one project, do you feel okay with AI systems harvesting posts and training LLMs?

No.

Any use of a user’s data, LLM or otherwise, should be opt-in. Anything less is unacceptable.

I don’t consider myself a tedious bastard. I do think we as a cooperative should always protect ourselves against the entitled actions of those like Laurie Voss.

I'll go one further than say I don't consent to LLMs using my posts: doing so constitutes what I see as "altering the deal:" when I started posting I never imagined that my posts would go to such things and now we have someone doing exactly that.

Also, what is it with certain people here defending people/organizations who are clearly bad actors? This happened with Facebook/Meta and the discussion about Threads and now I'm seeing it again.

@Dave V. ND9JR  that's probably me 😅 I just disagree with the assertion that these people and entities are necessarily "clearly bad actors" as a whole/in totality, so I try to err on the side of being able to communicate with them until proven wrong. In the Threads case, I made the point that it was better if people in the Fediverse were to talk to "good" users in Threads and the other way around; in this case, I'm making the point that this person is worth talking to for at least some of us, as are other potential users of this new client, so I don't think it's ideal if Social.coop blanket-bans everybody effectively removing them from the Fediverse.

I think it's reasonable for people to want to want talk to others, even if you in particular see no point to it -- this is why we're different people also we share an instance. Strength in diversity and such?

@Flancian Yes, it's you. Except this isn't just about "talking to others." It's allowing an instance that's clearly using people's posts without their consent to feed LLMs (which themselves have a history of slupring all sorts of data without people's consent, including violating copyright), led by someone who when told "We don't consent to this" basically said, "Your consent doesn't matter; I'm doing it anyway." How that doesn't constitute a bad actor I don't know, but it certainly does to me.

@Dave V. ND9JR one correction -- I think the discussion so far is not about allowing or disallowing an instance. The thing being developed is a client, not an instance, and the current suspension is only against the developer of the tool (a single account.)

I think I understand your position, it's just that I consent to people using this tool because I don't care about my posts going to LLMs, and I think people blocking each other seems good enough if they want to signal they don't want to interact for any reason, including the other person being more pro-LLM or anti-copyright or whatever than them. 

The issue here is perhaps that you and I have different preferences but are trying to share an instance, and there's no effective per-account mechanism for this "setting". So I'm asking people not to prevent me and others from setting this setting how we want it, same as I don't want to prevent you from doing the same. I think we should try to respect each other's preferences essentially instead of jumping to telling each other "this is the way and every other way is wrong", which an instance-wide setting of suspend, or a blanket block based on user agent, would be.

@Flancian  No worries there; I'll be leaving this instance in about a week.

@Dave V. ND9JR oh! But why, if you want to share? Where are you going? Single hosted or a different community?

@Flancian I refuse to share until you state your motive for asking these questions.

@Dave V. ND9JR I was just curious, other people have left recently and I was also considering moving instances. But your tone makes it clear this is no friendly exchange, so disengaging now. Good luck.

There seem to be two threads of conversation here:
1. The risk that if a social.coop member signs in to Zeitgeist, the OTHER party to that user's DMs content would be compromised. In other words, if Dave and Anna have a DM thread on social.coop, and Dave signs up for Zeitgeist or a similarly poorly architected client without Anna's consent, that client could read Anna's DMs or private replies to Dave. This seems genuinely concerning, though could be true of ANY client that is poorly designed, whether it uses AI or not. I would like to prevent the general case of this, if possible. Though, I'm not sure it's practical, unless we have an allow-list of clients we all agree to.
2. The risk that LLMs will use public posts for training. I understand people's concerns, but as people posting on the open web, hoovering by all manner of parties seems just inevitable at this point. We can certainly use robots.txt directives or any other directives that indicate our desire for LLMs not to use our posts for training, but the only thing that will actually stop it, given the completely rampant violations of consent AI companies are currently engaged in, is having your social network in Signal threads with disappearing messages. I think we should do everything practical to prevent LLM crawling, but I certainly don't expect my posts won't be used for training whatever we tell bots to do or not do.

Personally, I don't care about blocking Laurie Voss. I believe I followed Laurie, but I don't know because they're... blocked now. I don't particularly want access to people I follow to be blocked as "punishment" for something that doesn't impact me because I didn't sign up for Zeitgeist and never will, because it's a bad idea poorly executed.

I support @Flancian's proposal:

My proposal is that we should remove this suspend, perhaps downgrading to a limit if people have significant concerns with this user (I don't). Limit removes their posts from timelines and makes the profile harder to access (IIUC) but crucially allows people who are following the user to continue to interact with them.

Because it seems reasonable and right-sized to the actual risk, and I'd prefer to be able to interact with and see what this (apparent) charlatan is up to.

My 2c:
- There are lots of different ways in which people's data can come into contact with an LLM, which I think it's important to distinguish. E.g., inference vs training, local vs remote-hosted LLMs, various forms of contractual use and privacy commitments, various forms of hardware-based privacy guarantees. I believe these are all relevant to making policy decisions (i.e., at least some combinations of these should be allowed).
- LLMs have huge potential to give people more more agency over their attention. E.g., people who find certain content triggering or bad for their mental health can create bespoke interfaces to modify that content or filter it out. I was involved in this paper which makes this argument in much more detail if interested.
- I hope we can find a policy that allows for such use cases — e.g., inference-only, no training, sufficient privacy guarantees.

(Not endorsing or commenting on Laurie's behaviour or how his specific app was designed.)

Kia ora koutou, this is just the beginning of the gold rush of vibe-coded apps, and other uses of generative models. For now there is a moratorium on listing fediverse-related software on the fediverse.party if it makes any use of this technology. We're keeping a watchlist for this purpose, please let me know about any gaps in this list.

I had missed most of this, but it's an example of a simple principle.

Is there consent?

Yes or No?

If the question is not even being asked, then block by default.

1. My sentiment, currently well-represented in other's comments, is broadly and deeply anti-LLM and pro-consent, in line with our corner of the fediverse' norms against projects to scrape content or misinterpret "it's public" as consent.

2. But this case is complicated in terms of response because it is not a scraping project but a client acting on behalf of (a presumed) user of social.coop. I'm broadly in favor of folks developing and using clients of their choice. Some of those clients will have flaws (in intent or in implementation, perhaps moreso for vibe-coded ones) that e.g. expose DMs, or be written by people whose interactions get them blocked by our instance - yet acting-as and authorized as a client for a member in good standing who is trusting/using that client to e.g. summarize or prioritize their feed.. The central question I have is how we might regulate this.

3. There's a totally separate (agreed by all involved?) concern raised here about CWG moderation of the developer's account, that I'll leave to CWG to receive feedback and address.

It seems it would need to be a new capability and instance-wide policy to block User-Agents that we agree are risks or not in line with our values. Also entails vetting and moderating/reviewing use of particular clients - banning any source-containing-AGENTS.md client is a possible policy, banning clients that have known security or value deficits is another, but with significant tech/policy workload to maintain this list with some level of open access for new clients. This case might indicate the start of a desire/direction from the membership, but despite being opposed to such tech I'm not sure I would vote to undertake the work to exclude it. Uncomfortable.

@Luke Opperman 

If they are acting on behalf of a social.coop user, then we need to add to our rules that members of social.coop do not use these services.

My position on this is based on a distinction I think is worth making:

I accept that anything I publish publicly on the web can be read and processed by an LLM — this was already true before LLMs existed, with search engines, RSS aggregators, archive.org, etc. If I post publicly, I lose control of the data. That's the deal.

However, I draw the line at the nature of the output:

• I'm fine with my public posts being processed by an LLM whose output remains private (e.g. someone summarizing their own timeline for personal use).
• I would want an opt-in mechanism for cases where my posts are used to produce a public artifact — a published summary, a generated article, anything redistributed publicly that derives from my words.

On private messages, my position is simpler: I am opposed by default to any private message being sent to an external service, whether it involves an LLM or not. This should require explicit opt-in from all parties involved in the conversation, not just the person using the client.

The concern with Zeitgeist, for me, is less about LLM access to public data and more about these two boundaries: the public/private nature of the output, and the protection of private messages from external processing.

I don't know that the user has violated our code of conduct or federation policy so much as gone and done something that many of us are uneasy with, myself included, but that we don't have an articulated and agreed upon policy framework for. Because of this, at this point, I don't think suspending the user is a good thing.

That said, I think some of their behavior is incredibly obnoxious and presumptuous. For one thing, this person has basically come out and put themself in a position to build tools that will affect the direction of the fediverse. So speaking of whether or not "its public" equals consent, this person put themself in a public position. To then block users who criticized them is a bad faith move. Yes, generally blocking people you don't care to interact with is desirable, but we're not just talking about run of the mill clash of personalities. This is the one thing that gave me pause on whether this person violated our policies.

Nonetheless, I think the way to handle this is to start thinking about and discussing clear policies around AI that reflect our values.

This from @Stéphane Klein resonates with me strongly:

However, I draw the line at the nature of the output:

• I'm fine with my public posts being processed by an LLM whose output remains private (e.g. someone summarizing their own timeline for personal use).

• I would want an opt-in mechanism for cases where my posts are used to produce a public artifact — a published summary, a generated article, anything redistributed publicly that derives from my words.

Though I still am uneasy with the first bullet point too.

Our Federation policy does state that bot accounts following users with #NoBot in their profile is cause for suspending, however I don't have a problem with bot accounts following me. Some of them are dumb and obnoxious and I can just block them individually. I do have a problem with AIs following me. Can we make #NoAI a thing to express we don't consent to AI accounts following us? And still, a user using AI such as this Zeitgeist thing doesn't necessarily make it an "AI" account in the same way that bot accounts are bot accounts.

@Aaron GK The main people who use the "Public = Consent" argument are usually Techbro's who want to do something that they know people will not like.

Like the Glassholes using GoogleGlass in bars to find vulnerable women to target.

@Aaron GK 

I do have a problem with AIs following me. Can we make #NoAI a thing to express we don't consent to AI accounts following us?

Broad brush policies against "AI" risk throwing out babies with bathwater. I think it's worth being more specific than that. Despite the common misuse of "AI" to describe LLMs and other generative models (which I've taken to calling Trained MOLEs), AI as an area of computer science is both much older and much broader than the current data-driven MOLE Training goldrush. It has produced, and may produce in the future, many forms of AI automation we might be fine with.

@Danyl Strype I would go even further: When folks say LLMs, does that include, for example, locally-hosted models? Or setups where the data is used for inference but not shared for training purposes?

There are some legitimate, worthwhile uses for thoughtfully-implemented LLM-enabled systems that I would still want to allow (accessibility being a big one, others have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

@Ana Ulin FYI This is a live debate across a number of project communities, including F-Droid. Maybe there's a need for a cross-project meeting (or even a conference) about AI ethics?

The most pressing issue for F-Droid purposes is answering the question; when is "Open Source AI" really libre software? Where people using it have full autonomy, down to being able to reproduce the model from freely-licensed raw inputs (source code, weights, and data). But we're also concerned about other ethical issues raised by LLMs, and AI / automation in general, which might justify the use of anti-feature flags, or require some new ones.

@Luke Thorburn the link to your paper takes me to a library directory not a specific paper. Can you include title and citation info?

@Stephanie Jo Kent — here you go!

The moral case for using language model agents for recommendation
Seth Lazar, Luke Thorburn, Tian Jin & Luca Belli
Inquiry

Various links:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2025.2515579
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2025.2515579
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12123 (preprint that has a different title, but the same paper)

@Django  in the general discussion above the poll it was mentioned that the account belonging to Laurie Voss, the maker of this Zeitgeist LLM, was suspended.

@Aaron GK I understand. My comment is critiquing the current formulation:

using or developing AI or promoting the use of AI

The user was using AI.

No one was suspended for Promoting AI.

I think it muddies the question to lump all those cases together.

@Django that's literally what the top of the page says happened to Laurie Voss. I can't see their account anymore so hard to say.

@Luis Villa The user was feeding public and private posts into a commercial LLM.

No one was suspended for Promoting AI.

The third point needs more elaboration, but I don't have time to give it. Ideas on that include:

• https://www.loomio.com/d/ASGoq9TQ/zeitgeist-and-other-fediverse-llms/63

@Ammar 

I would make sure we take some time to define AI

100%. "AI" is and has always been a buzzphrase. A handwave at a computer science research goal, not a specific kind of technology. No sensible policy can be enacted about all of the things that have been or will be described using this buzzphrase, as if they are a single class.

synthetic content could be considered waste that unnecessary makes the infrastructure of the network more expensive

This comment sneaks in any assumption that social.coop can make decisions on behalf of a global view of 'network good'. This is neither possible nor desirable. The fediverse and other decentralised networks are, by definition, systems where participants like social.coop can only evaluate and make decisions on what's right for our members, and our infrastructure. Decisions about network-level concerns belong in protocol standardisation forums, like SocialCG/WG or to a lesser extent, the FEP process.

Like others, I'm not OK with AI systems harvesting posts and training LLMs (on the final question asked in the initial post).

I think I mostl agree with this, if I understand things correctly:
If I start to follow an account that someone else has reported for AI, then I get a warning but can still choose to follow or not, right? That's cool by me.

Things I'm unclear on for this suggested policy:
If someone reports an account I've already followed, what happens if it gets limited? Is there any warning I get to see, or is it just a silent thing that doesn't affect me?

What counts as "using or developing AI or promoting the use of AI in the fediverse"? My particular line is "I do not want AIs following me and scraping my content into training data". I understand this likely happens, but I don't consent to it and would love if social.coop helped keep them away from me. But I don't mind that those things exist if there's a clear opt-in policy. And I don't mind accounts existing that, say, use LLMs to describe alt text, or something like that.

Considering ANY post that is sent to an LLM is potentially used for training, and that current consent models are Opt-out, I believe this is a fundamental breach of contract with the social web.

Social.coop users deserve the protection and precaution they have come to trust from the Moderation team.

If anything, I would like to see our policies reviewed in light of this threat model (ranging from Grammarly style impersonation, to more nefarious Surveillance).

With respect to the proposal for social.coop to run an ATproto personal data server (PDS): I would just like to point out that, by virtue of the complete openness and lack of privacy in the ATproto architecture, we have to assume that everything (posts, media, social graphs, etc.) available even in a social.coop-hosted PDS will be systematically archived by many, many different actors, and this information will certainly be used for training LLMs (e.g., https://arxiv.org/html/2510.02343). Selfhosting does not prevent this.

There is no realistic option for opting out due to the basic constraints of ATproto: everything is public and designed to be aggregated into globally-visible "firehoses" of content, which actors with resources can simply keep indefinitely.

@Adrian 

> by virtue of the complete openness and lack of privacy in the ATproto architecture, we have to assume that everything (posts, media, social graphs, etc.) available even in a social.coop-hosted PDS will be systematically archived by many, many different actors

The same is mostly true of the AP architecture, which works by having social.coop send copies of posts to every instance where someone follows the person who posted it. Yes, AP posts come with metadata about the intended scope of a post. But without Object Capabilities to enforce Followers-only, or E2EE to make Direct Posts reliably private, scope metadata is just a suggestion, not a law of the network.

In the absence of effective technical mechanisms to prevent this, public posts anywhere on the net can and will be scraped, and probably used for MOLE Training. Anyone who thinks they can prevent this by making policies is channeling King Canute.

But all of this is orthogonal to the topic(s) raised by this thread. What social.coop members can make and enforce policies on is what kinds of following relationships the service enables with accounts on other services, and on what basis.

@Danyl Strype I agree that public posts can be scraped, but even this is much more difficult in AP than ATproto. In ATproto, all data are consolidated into a centralized firehose, which dramatically facilitates scraping the entire network. One could argue that ATproto provides the ideal design for surveilling a whole network.

In AP, it would be necessary to scrape across thousands of servers to achieve the same effect, and the effort can be detected and mitigated by server admins (which happens all the time in response to increasingly aggressive scraping bots). It would be much more challenging to scrape all of AP. Not to mention that AP actually permits private posts, which are impossible in ATproto.

@Adrian 

In ATproto, all data are consolidated into a centralized firehose, which dramatically facilitates scraping the entire network

This is true. By the same token it facilitates indexing of public posts in search tools. For posters whose intention is to publish and for our posts to be widely discoverable, this is a feature not a bug. See my reply to @Nic about how we need better tools for people who don't want their posts to be openly discoverable and reusable, but do want them to be readable beyond the scope of Followers-only posts.

Not to mention that AP actually permits private posts, which are impossible in ATproto.

Also true. But again, orthogonal to the sub-discussion we've been having, which is about the technical reality of posting publicly on the net. Although it does point to what I've said a few times in the larger discussion, which is that the solutions lie in finding better ways to flag how we do and don't want our posts used, and ideally ways to technically enforce those desires (E2EE of private messages, OCaps for Followers-only posts, etc).

Rather than focusing on use of specific technology in our code of conduct, I'd be in favor of a narrower policy amendment:

- Scraping of follower-only content or DMs for any reason (AI or not) is prohibited as it violates users' normal privacy expectations. Any accounts or instances engaged in such scraping activity may be suspended immediately.

- If and when accounts or instances that have previously engaged such practices credibly discontinue them, they may be unblocked after a period of 30 days, but repeat violations may result in indefinite suspension.

@Erik Moeller This strikes me as a better way of approaching this. If it wasn't obvious before, this thread makes it clear that social.coop has a range of opinions on LLMs and AI. I don't think participating in this instance means we need to disagree on everything, or on the value and ethics of AI and LLMs in particular. Given the diversity of opinion here, I think it's important that members be able to express their individual preferences for how they want to interact with AI tools and the people that builds them.

I think this is a good idea. Many of us would like a policy that goes further but certain ideas will encounter opposition. I think we should continue discussion around consent and LLMs and to focus on ideas such as this where there is fairly broad agreement.

https://social.coop/@flancian/116375830084655955 for my updated position on waiting for arbitration for the Seldo incident 🙂 Thank you all for working together on this!

About the poll/sense check: thank you for participating! I agree a better worded proposal should follow. People disagreed with the framing in both directions (some thought it went too far by assuming Limit for things potentially as broad as AI promotion, which I agree with; some thought we should be stricter for any kind of AI use.)

Again, I too want as little AI as possible in the Fediverse. I think we should put clear guidelines in our policy documents such as the code of conduct and federation abuse policies that would address that. I do not think our policy documents currently have that.

Some facts to ground some discussion I hope to have:

• At least one account was suspended (see very original post in this discussion) and it seems perhaps more.

• While it seems the majority so far are fine with the suspension, there are several coop members who disagree with it because they do not want AI banned from their use of social.coop

Some questions I have. These are not rhetorical. If anyone would like to take a crack at them I'd like to read your thoughts:

• Do you think use of AI violates any existing social.coop policies? If so what parts specifically? In what way?

• How would you explain to a fellow member of this democratic organization that does not want accounts using AI suspended that we have all already agreed that suspension is what would happen to accounts using AI?

• Do you think the moderation actions should be based on agreements we as social.coop members have made by joining and participating, such as the code of conduct and federation abuse policies? Always, or just usually?

  • Do you think the CWG can/should make moderation decisions based on what they think is best for us, if a behavior is not address in policy?

  • What if a minority of fellow members don't agree the moderation actions is best for us? What if a majority of fellow members don't agree the action is best for us?

@Aaron GK the phrase "use of AI" is so vague as to be meaningless. "Using a local LLM to summarize and read out loud" feels very different from, say, "send all posts and DMs to OpenAI and allow them to train on them". As I understand it, the latter example is what most folks here are strongly objecting to.

• Do you think use of AI violates any existing social.coop policies? If so what parts specifically? In what way?

Not inherently. As I understand it, what's special about the Zeitgeist project is that it ingested data from users who authorized the app, which may include contexts such as follower-only posts, DM, or accounts excluded from search engines. If those issues have now been addressed (i.e. if the bot now respects privacy boundaries) then IMO this specific account suspension could be revisited.

The federation abuse policy doesn't go into much detail here, but it does include as grounds for suspension "A bot following social.coop users who have #nobot in their Mastodon profiles."

See https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Federation_abuse_policy.

Disclaimer: I'm not in any of the working groups and wasn't involved in this moderation decision.

• How would you explain to a fellow member of this democratic organization that does not want accounts using AI suspended that we have all already agreed that suspension is what would happen to accounts using AI?

"Using AI" is a very broad category that is not sufficiently descriptive of the policy violation that caused the Zeitgeist account suspension, as I understand it.

• Do you think the moderation actions should be based on agreements we as social.coop members have made by joining and participating, such as the code of conduct and federation abuse policies? Always, or just usually?

Yes, per the bylaws (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws). My understanding of the bylaws is that any major shift in social.coop moderation policy to, for example, ban specific opinions about AI, or use of AI in drafting posts, or suspension of accounts on other instances that permit such use, would require a larger vote among members.

Those of us (myself included) who are opposed to such significant changes may not only vote "disagree", but could vote "block". Per the governance section of the bylaws:

"A Block vote represents a fundamental disagreement—a belief that the proposal violates Social.coop's core principles. Proposals with Block require at least 9 times more Agree votes than Disagree and Block votes in order to pass."

@Erik Moeller Thank you. Appreciate this response very much. It has helped me understand where some folks may be coming from better.

Narrowly, I agree that a "limit" policy is better than a "suspend" policy in this case, and that limitation should be more often exercised as a moderation tool. I don't, however, think limitation is the right approach in this case.

The CWG should make a decision to limit or suspend based on our Code of Conduct and the Federation Abuse Policy. At the moment, there is no policy regarding "using or developing AI or promoting the use of AI in the Fediverse", so the CWG should not make a moderation decision on those grounds. We do have a policy around bots following users, but LLMs don't need to follow anyone to view public content, and as I understand it, as a client, Zeitgeist isn't a bot.

To answer @Dan Phiffer's original question: "do you feel okay with AI systems harvesting posts and training LLMs?" - I don't feel okay. I am skeptical that a policy could be crafted to address it that doesn't radically shape how our server federates.

@Derek Caelin yes, I agree, well put. Part of the reason I appealed to the moderation decision is because I think it is important we keep moderation policy and our public CoC/FAP aligned -- +1 also to @Erik Moeller's related message above.

The main problem here is there is NO OPT-IN mechanism, the burden falls to user/authors OPT-OUT by adding hashtags into their bio

the #NoBot example is interesting, because IIUC it comes from pre-ActivityPub days (Ostatus) when the social network lacked effective moderation tools.

This is a question of baseline consent!

+1, this is totally a key question on how consent works in the Fediverse. I think it probably makes sense to have both opt-out and opt-in instances IMHO. Would you agree with that?

If so, the question becomes whether we want Social.coop to be an opt-in or an opt-out instance. I am proposing opt-out because I think this aligns clearly with our stated values (we are, after all, about social networks and cooperation!). But I understand if some subset of the community thinks the other way.

I think the time nears to actually propose a way and vote on it, and then be explicit about it for people who are around or want to join. Wdyt?

P.S. when I started bonfire.social.coop it was because, beyond several people wanting to experiment with Bonfire (myself included), I was interested in exploring the idea of Social.coop running a second instance for people who want a different set of rules of engagement, or who want to experiment with Fediverse-enabled governance.

@Flancian My view is that consent doesn't "work in the Fediverse" differently from other places (consent is an explicit understanding between two parties). There are structures built into the software, like a field for content warnings and quote boost settings, that can better facilitate consent in ways that are not as well defined on other networks. And, as a result, the software choices have made the Fediverse an attractive option to people who've felt underserved by the capacity for consent offered by other networks.

@Flancian is it possible to set up an account on bonfire.social.coop? I tried my social.coop credentials and that didn't work.

@Alex Rodriguez yeah, I can help you get setup. What is your social.coop handle? I'll DM you over there.

@Dan Phiffer https://social.coop/@arod

Thanks, I just sent you an invite.

One twist to the Zeitgeist model that makes consent impossible in some scenarios, is that it reverses the flow of information:

1. Alice follows Bob (but Bob does not follow Alice)

2. Alice announces their intent to use Zeitgeist in a Mastodon toot

3. Bob does not see the announcement, and has no way to know that they could modify their bio with hashtags to opt out

4. Alice proceeds to process Bob's content with LLMs, no consent was possible

@Dan Phiffer this is a good point. Still, I'm not clear this changes things too much, as the question remains: is the onus on the AI adopters to seek consent from each individual party they will interact with (the opt-in path), or on AI celibates to manifest their wish not to interact with people who use AI in e.g. their Fediverse clients (the opt-out path)? I think the latter is more reasonable, but that is my opinion; we are having this conversation because both opinions are in principle sensible, AND there has not been a Social.coop vote on this specific decision. Do we agree on that much at least?

Note that society already works on implied consent to some way, and which additional explicit consent is needed is part of the social contract (which is why I'm trying to frame this as an explicit update to our CoC or FAP). When you talk to someone in a public, you don't usually have to go through an additional pre-talking process to see if they are OK being talked to. People who want to lower the chances that others misjudge their availability for a chat often end up wearing headphones, which is a way of opting out of most social interactions. Etc.

@flancian You do, in fact, have to go through an additional pre-talking process with someone in public to see if they are willing to have a conversation with you. A lot of this is informal -- social conventions about time and place, body language -- and opaque to some people, in which case the ethical thing to do is to formally ask a person if they are willing to talk.

It would be more accurate to describe the wearing of headphones as a response to common patterns of harassment, in which people will ignore informal rules about initiating conversations and will respond angrily to formal rejection to their initiating a conversation. The headphones are, in short, a defense against a material danger.

Commercial social media operates by deliberately subverting people's intuitions about the social context of conversations, in order to datamine those conversations and manipulate them into conflicts in order to drive engagement. The Fediverse, while somewhat better, still leans too heavily on the models of commercial social media, and it remains difficult to negotiate the intended audience for a post and the expectations about participation in a thread.

LLMs, as datamining tools that ignore consent, make the situation worse.

Agreed. And for this reason, I'm generally just very skeptical of this
idea that one can or should publish things openly on the web (i.e.,
without access gated by agreements) and then expect more control over
that content than is implied by commonly held expectations related to
redistribution and reuse. Both the law and common sense allow for at
least some redistribution and reuse (e.g., "fair use"), which I think
is generally a good thing.

If the data is not public and/or if getting access to it requires an
agreement to some different set of rules, and/or if the material is
private (like DMs), that's clearly different. The DM thing mentioned
above sounded like a pretty clear violation of expectations. But it
also seems to have been addressed in this specific case.

FWIW, the reuse of public data by AI models is very much in line with
what I think people should all expect from any data published openly
on the web in 2026. Whether you like it or not (and I don't!), I'm
having trouble keeping my public webservers online at all given the
massive traffic from AI scraper bots. There are many tens of thousands of
copies of any public webpage I maintain—regardless of what I
say in my robots.txt, write on the webpages, or want in my heart.

In the absence of changes to the law, I think we'd be well served by
treating openly published data as public and at least largely out of
our control. We should ensure that material we want to be kept private
or semi-private is distributed using tools that have a technical
design that makes them appropriate for that purpose.

@Benjamin Mako Hill 

In the absence of changes to the law, I think we'd be well served by
treating openly published data as public and at least largely out of
our control. We should ensure that material we want to be kept private
or semi-private is distributed using tools that have a technical
design that makes them appropriate for that purpose.

This! 1000 times this!

Public is public. People who demand software that gives them the power to publish to a global audience, without any of the consequences that naturally comes with it, are either a) demanding dry water, ie deluding themselves, or b) seeking to separate power and accountability, which is totally counter to cooperative values.

I want to be clear that I'm not saying that the group demanding dry water don't have legitimate needs that aren't being served by existing fediverse software. On the contrary, I think it's important to listen to these people and find out what problems they're actually trying to solve, and help them find ways to solve those problems that are both possible and desirable.

The current butting of heads between people pushing Public Not Public discourse, and people pointing out that public *is* public, produces far more heat than light in most cases, and is not really serving anyone.

The current butting of heads between people pushing Public Not Public discourse, and people pointing out that public is public, produces far more heat than light in most cases, and is not really serving anyone. @Danyl Strype

There seems a bit of blurring between the argument that it's technically possible to scrape public, published work; that it's legally ok to scrape public work (which I think depends on context, use and jurisdiction, afaik, ianal); and that it's all morally fine…

> Whether you like it or not (and I don't!)… regardless of what I
say in my robots.txt, write on the webpages, or want in my heart. @Benjamin Mako Hill

Sure out there we've no control. But here? As an intentional community of people trying to do social media different to big-tech, can't we acknowledge the technical and legal realities, while still saying 'we think doing ABC is bad, it goes against our community's discussed and agreed principles'? Not every value needs be defined by legal and technical capabilities - that's not how day to day life works…

Of course this in turn is granular and contextual – more complex than one line in a policy saying yes/no LLMs. Me using Mastodon's in-built DeepL to translate a Fediverse post in my feed is technically scraping then using an LLM on a post. But it's obviously very different to scraping all my published data to profile / credit-rate / misquote / train / impersonate / better surveil / clone me by LLM (etc) – and I'd be much happier having a social.coop ToS or CoC that this would be in breach of.

@Nic These are all very familiar Public Not Public talking points. I can't extract an argument from this that isn't answered in the comment to which you're replying. Can you @Benjamin Mako Hill?

Care to TL;DR what you want responded to here Nic?

@Danyl Strype I thought you had written that people who say they don't want their posts on social.coop to be scraped are demanding 'dry water' and are 'deluding themselves', sorry if I misunderstood. I'm saying just because we can't stop a behaviour doesn't mean we have to endorse it.

@Nic 

People who say they don't want their public posts to be scraped, on social.coop or elsewhere, are demanding dry water and are deluding themselves. Also "web scraping is good, actually".

because we can't stop a behaviour doesn't mean we have to endorse it.

I don't disagree, but I'm not sure how this is helpful. If there is consensus that members don't want posts ingested by tools known to be feeding them to Trained MOLEs - and I totally sympathise with that - then work needs to be done to define exactly what tools/ uses are the problem, and write policies targeting those specifically.

But quite frankly I think social.coop members would be better to put time and energy into things the co-op can actually have an effect on. Like investing some resources in the effort to E2EE DMs and Followers-only posts, so only their intended audience can see them.

Also "web scraping is good, actually".

That link also points out that "Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually" & "Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually" . So the question is perhaps more "Scraping and then what?".

Perhaps 'Scraping and non-consensual processing, other than to assist with translations and accessibility – or anonymised for research & analysis – is bad actually' would cover a lot of the concerns…

but I'm not sure how this is helpful

Because it helps distinguish between people who want to respect people's wishes, and those who don't give a hoot, ie consentful technologists. Which I think would be helpful in the original question about whether or not to suspend or block accounts who use AI – is their use going against the wishes / policies / code-of-conduct of this community or not?

I'm saying just because we can't stop a behaviour doesn't mean we
have to endorse it.

I don't think anybody here is "endorsing" people doing anything they
want with any public data. I think my post makes it clear I am unhappy
with many of the same kinds of data use/reuse that you are. I'm
arguing that we should acknowledge the technical and social realities
of the internet we are living and interacting in and build for and
around that.

Your "out there" and "in here" metaphor above feels off because the
point of this place is to publish things "out there."

"In here" corresponds to the shared social and technological
infrastructure where we really do get to make the rules, vet folks
before participating, and so on. When people sign up here, they have
to apply, agree to principles, answer questions, are vetted, etc.

None of that applies to the people who view the stuff we post publicly
or the content itself. We should be wise to acknowledge that when we
throw messages over the wall with the express purpose of letting the
world see and copy and share them, our desires for how it should be
treated (stated and unstated) are just that.

If we want this place to just be "in here" we can do what most other
likeminded internet communities have done and just raise the
drawbridge and become fully insular. But I think that defeats the
point and undermines the promise.

@Nic 

So the question is perhaps more "Scraping and then what?".

Bang on. Thus my point about making policy that targets specific tools/ uses, not vague categories like "scraping" or "AI".

Because it helps distinguish between people who want to respect people's wishes, and those who don't give a hoot, ie consentful technologists

Given 2 options I take the third. Like CreativeCommons licenses, the protocols that make the net, the web, and the fediverse possible are permissionless by design. Using protocols as designed does not, in itself, indicate a lack of respect for consent. The problem is not with the protocol implementer, but with the publisher who displays a CC BY-NC-ND license on their work, despite wanting people to ask permission for every use (EDIT: I changed my example here to make it simpler and more directly relevant).

Public Not Public discourse emerges from a desire for a post scope that sits somewhere between Quiet Public and Followers-only. A post that is not published - in the sense we've been using here - but is available to a perceived network of allies beyond one's current followers. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want, I'm just not sure how it can be implemented in software.

People who want this, could make it much more likely to exist by doing the conceptual work. Defining, and describing in detail, exactly how they do and don't want their posts to be distributed and displayed. Such that the concept no longer contains the divide-by-zero logical impossibility of a post being Public Not Public. Instead of putting time and energy into that kind of effort, Public Not Public advocates have mostly wasted it trying to bully fediverse devs into doing the impossible. So no significant progress has been made on it, and discussions around it generally produce more heat than light.

@Danyl Strype  you're talking about people producing heat while throwing around accusations of bullying, wasting effort, and having 'meaningless' questions (on the BlueSky thread).

Just a point of process - am I right in thinking you don't post on social.coop or even have a handle there? I thought this Loomio was a place for people who made social.coop a fediverse home… (and ftr - I have enjoyed our discussions on Mastodon - I'm just not sure why we're discussing here if you're not a social.coop user - but maybe that's a moderator question)

@Nic This has drifted a long way from the topic of this discussion (social.coop policy on LLMs), and is now feeling a bit targeted. Questioning my right to speak is an unhelpful (if unfortunately common) way to deal with disagreement that upsets you. If this important enough to you that you'd like to keep discussing it, you know where to find me in the fediverse. Or you can hit me up on my new alt account @strypey@bonfire.social.coop.

@Danyl Strype Now who is making the attacks?

We are questioning your right-to-speak here. In this forum.

This is supposed to be a discussion forum for members of social.coop to talk about the running of the co-operative.

If you are not a member, then why are you here taking part in this conversation?

These posts by Nic and Billy Smith are drifting further and further off-topic, and they're now escalating from passive-aggressive to open personal attacks. I'd appreciate a moderator(s) stepping in to help us find a way to resolve this, without derailing the threads it's been happening in (this one and to a lesser extent the one about ATProto).

For context, I've been participating in this Loomio group for years, as an enthusiastic fediverse veteran and co-op advocate. The fact that I didn't have a fediverse account on social.coop infra (until recently) has never been raised as a problem before. It appears to have been raised now because these people disagree with what I'm saying, and would prefer to silence the messenger than try to explain why they think I'm wrong (which is always possible).

"It appears to have been raised now because these people disagree with what I'm saying, and would prefer to silence the messenger than try to explain why they think I'm wrong (which is always possible). @Danyl Strype

Wow, just wow. Billy and I have both made pretty clear we didn't know people could post on this Loomio who weren't using social.coop. And we only knew that this included you when you were asked by @Nathan Schneider what your handle is last week and you said you don't have one. I'm waiting for a moderator to explain a) no this is fine anyone can post on this Loomio, or b) this is a mistake, or c) we make an exception for Danyl as they've been here forever.

Whatever… I really don't mind. The inference that Billy and I are part of some kind of anti-debate conspiracy trying to silence you because we don't like our views challenged is offensive and exactly the kind of 'heat' that feels wrong here.

Sidenote - it seems you do have a social.coop handle now with the Bonfire instance on here. I also didn't know we had a social.coop Bonfire - which shows how little I know about things here.

But this "escalating from passive-aggressive to open personal attacks" is precisely how I am experiencing your communication so I will duck out for a while.

@Nic @Danyl Strype @Billy Smith hi all! I'm not a moderator, just a fellow cooperator, but could I suggest we please chill it a bit here? The discussion has been interesting with good points "from both sides" but got progressively more heated and is now at danger of devolving into conflict. As someone who has recently been the target of open unfriendliness escalating into snubbing, I would really like to see this not happen to anyone in this thread, "full coop member" or not.

Let's take a step back to recognize that we might want different things, or may even have markedly different viewpoints about the meaning of terms like 'public', 'ethical' and 'reasonable' -- without our discourse needing to devolve into attacks, or perception of ill intent. FWIW so far in this thread I think all people have shown good intent, so I hope we can carry on in this way even if it requires agreeing to disagree.

FWIW, on the topic of Loomio access being restricted to members of Social.coop: I don't think it's currently enforced more than best effort. I do think clarifying the current status and the intent of the community (which, as per the discussion above, might not be uniform) is a good task for the CWG or the Organizing Circle if they wish to take it. I will say though that, whenever people who aren't "full members" find their way to a Social.coop discussion, I wish we were maximally welcoming and understanding of their needs and tried to make Social.coop a good home for them if they are interested and this is at all feasible.

@Flancian 

Just to clarify:

I thought that all of the people taking part in the conversations here were members of the co-operative.

As we are taking part in voting decisions about how the co-op will be run, why would non-members get to vote?

If they join the co-op and take part, then I'm fine with that, but if non-members have been voting on how we do things, how can those decisions be said to be valid?

How long has this been going on?

-----------------------

As @Nic said, "But this "escalating from passive-aggressive to open personal attacks" is precisely how I am experiencing your communication so I will duck out for a while."

That description is exactly how I was reading the posts from Danyl Strype.

"It appears to have been raised now because these people disagree with what I'm saying, and would prefer to silence the messenger than try to explain why they think I'm wrong (which is always possible). " Danyi

- This is an example of projection. It is the same tactic that Danyl used to make @Nic leave.

Just from looking at the thread ending in this comment:

https://www.loomio.com/d/IF5MGpyU/would-social-coop-want-to-experiment-with-running-a-bluesky-pds-/103

It looks like @Danyl Strype is using a Sealion form of attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

By continuing to ask questions again and again, it makes people give up through exhaustion.

And this was taking place before Danyl got the bonfire account.

I originally voted Abstain, as I was happy about the situation, but after finding out that Danyl was not a member of the co-op when taking part in the previous votes, I would like to change my votes to Block.

As Danyl said, "Thanks for the suggestions. I've got a long backlog of things to blog about. Correcting BS/ ATProto misinformation (both pro and con) is one of them, but it's a fair way down the list. I've been commenting on this here because a decision was being made about it here, with implications for the future direction of social.coop."

Why are you taking part in these conversations when you are not a member of the co-operative?

Why were you voting on the decisions when you were not a member of the co-op?

@Billy Smith thank you for your replies, Billy!

First, on the topic of votes: that's a very good question, and the answer is I don't know in both counts. It is true that it seems important that only coop members vote in at least some subset of votes, in particular those having to do with governance questions (and maybe in all). I am not aware of any process existing to make sure e.g. that people who leave the coop get removed from Loomio, but there is a process to review/accept requests to join our Loomio space that the CWG executes, and that includes making sure we know which instance account maps to each Loomio. So perhaps in this case it didn't take place for some reason, but in general I would say that the vast majority of people in our Loomio space and voting should be members. Of course getting hard numbers on that would be a good idea, and perhaps the working groups can be tasked with that?

Second, on sealioning and/or assumptions of ill-intent: I'm not sure and I'd rather we all took a step back and started again assuming that we all want something reasonable from our point of view and are arguing with good intent, even if we are taking positions that the "other side" thinks are unreasonable. As I haven't participated actively in this thread until now and I agree with points that everybody made it's easier for me to take this stance, but hopefully it's possible still for everyone.

I agree with Flancian that this is getting a bit out of control.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here but my understanding from the
thread above is that Danyl is a member of the cooperative.

It sounds like he applied in the normal way, was vetted, and then was
accepted and added to Loomio. He also said in this thread he applied
during a period when account creation was disabled, so he created a
Fediverse account elsewhere while he was waiting, never created an
account on social.coop as a reuslt, and then recently created a
Bonfire account on bonfire.social.coop.

I don't think we have any criteria for how much people need to be
using our shared infrastructure to justify membership.

As I said, this matter really needs it's own discussion space, as it risks derailing this important discussion about social.coop policy. But since this is where people are commenting on it for now, a couple of clarifications ...

@Billy Smith

I thought that all of the people taking part in the conversations here were members of the co-operative.

@Benjamin Mako Hill 

my understanding from the thread above is that Danyl is a member of the cooperative.

I participate here on the understanding that I am a member. I've been here since the early days, when the Mastodon instance was considered an initial experiment in co-op controlled social network infra, not the whole purpose of the co-op. If using the social.coop Mastodon instance is a prerequisite for membership, that's news to me.

I tend to limit myself here to commenting in an advisory capacity. Based on my experiences with the fediverse (going right back to the original identi.ca), and with Loomio as one of the pioneering platforms co-ops (I was the main champion of making it a co-op, and switching to AGPL for licensing the software to mitigate the risk of corporate capture).

@Billy Smith

Why were you voting on the decisions

I did not vote in the poll in this discussion, which for the record was a sense check, not a binding decision. As a general rule I avoid voting on polls here. I don't think I've ever voted in a Binding Decision, and certainly not in one that only affects people using the Mastodon instance, in which I have no stake.

If there is a further induction process I need to go through to be recognised as a formal member, I'm willing to do that. As I mentioned to @Dan Phiffer in a private message, I live on a disability benefit, so it's easier for me to pay membership dues in time than in money. I'm keen to contribute labour to the the working groups maintaining experimental infra like the Bonfire instance, to build the experience necessary eventually help maintain the Mastodon instance and other production infra.

I did vote on the first sense check about the ATProto experiment. Because this is something I'd be willing to put my labour into, and therefore I do have some level of stake in it.

@Benjamin Mako Hill

he applied during a period when account creation was disabled, so he created a Fediverse account elsewhere while he was waiting, never created an account on social.coop as a result

Just so all the facts are on the table, when I applied to join social.coop I was *already* using @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz, which is how I learned about the co-op. At that time I was living in China, so interested in having a an alt account aligned with my interests, and I was keen to get involved in social.coop as a trainee server maintainer. 2020 blew my life sideways pretty hard, and this is one of many, many things I'm only just getting around to following up on.

I hope that clears a few things up.

I've removed Danyl Strype from Loomio and Bonfire. Instead of applying for a membership, as I'd suggested they do, they continued posting to this thread. When they had asked about the possibility of working in lieu of a membership fee via DM, I said we had not made that arrangement before.

Social.coop members are welcome to join the Tech Working Group, and we have budgeted stipends for those contributions of effort. But that does not mean that anyone who wants to avoid paying a fee can expect to have a seat reserved for them on a working group.

Strype is free to apply for a Social.coop membership and then they could potentially join the TWG. And they're free to engage in governance discussions around membership policies, but they have to be a member first.

And yes, I agree that there is some fuzziness about the distinction between a Social.coop membership and having an account on a Mastodon instance. I do see them as distinct and IMO membership here entails 3 things:

1. An expressed interest in cooperative governance.

2. Agreeing to abide by the Code of Conduct.

3. The possibility for material exchange, both membership fees and stipends, via Open Collective.

In my view, Strype has met the first but not the other two conditions. Ultimately, as a cooperative, it's the members who get to decide what the actual rules are.

@Dan Phiffer thanks for being transparent about this, Dan. I think it's reasonable to ask Danyl to join before participating in Loomio discussions, although I wish we hadn't suspended him (at least in Bonfire?) and that we had been more clearly welcoming when they made it clear that they want to apply even though they are under financial hardship.

Instead of saying "we haven't done this before" let's maybe consider saying "we could consider that" or even better "we have waived contributions in the past and could do so again", which I believe is true. Where there's a will there's a way.

@Flancian yes I agree, the suspensions were unfortunate. I asked Danyl to sign up as a member in order to address the concerns raised in this Loomio discussion. I still think the way forward is for them to apply as a member.

@Dan Phiffer although the membership criteria are rather vague in our Bylaws, it does state that someone's account is only to be frozen for violations of the Code of Conduct after two warnings. Can you confirm that warnings were given before the suspension?

FWIW, I agree that either way it's important to sort out with them what their membership status is (and our criteria for membership). Does the CWG have a policy around this beyond what is stated in the bylaws?

@Alex Rodriguez yeah, Alex, that would make sense had Danyl agreed to the Code of Conduct by signing up to be a member, and something that I pointed out in my DM exchange with them (that they had not yet agreed to the CoC, which was an expectation of members).

Does the CWG have a policy around this beyond what is stated in the bylaws?

To my knowledge we haven't had a scenario like this arise where someone had access to Loomio but hadn't gone through the membership signup process. I floated the 3 criteria I posted above with CWG and I'm open to some other guidance from the coop. But those 3 things are basically how we evaluate incoming signup requests.

@Dan Phiffer I see, it sounds like that step wasn't taken back when they joined originally. Makes sense to pause until that gets sorted.

Just to be clear - Danyl's payment of dues was not the problem I was raising - rather their use (or not) of the service they were discussing. I agree it would be good to have a path to membership that didn't make money the barrier - also for long-standing members who have to pause payments for a while because of a change in circumstances. I can imagine a few ways it could happen - a set number of comp memberships that can be applied for, existing paying members could nominate people for a fixed 'free' membership year or two, or long-standing members could get a number of months for every year they've been a member. But I appreciate that's a completely different governance discussion and decision.

@Nic Social.Coop, afaik, has never required payment of dues as a condition of membership. It is suggested, and we do require people to have an account on Open Collective, but from the start the idea has been to have no monetary barrier to membership. It has also been true for many years that a few members do not have accounts on our mastodon server.

I don't think the bylaws really say you have to have a Mastodon account to maintain membership, but moreso if you apply for membership today, you will by default receive a Mastodon account:

The path to membership is as follows:

1. People may apply at https://social.coop/about

2. Based on policies previously agreed through proposals in the full group (see Governance), the application is approved or denied

3. Approved applicants receive a Mastodon account

4. After 42 days of probationary membership without having their account frozen:

   • They are expected to begin making monthly contributions (membership dues) between USD $1 and $10 (via https://opencollective.com/socialcoop), unless they have been approved as non-paying member by the membership working group

   • They are expected to join the Loomio group, and are invited to get involved in governance and participate in working groups

The "path to membership" bit to me means this is one becomes a member today, but obviously some people preceded this setup.

The "governance" document does have a provision that would seem to provide grounds for excluding a member from loomio if they are not maintaining a Mastodon account:

Strategic contribution via Loomio account. Members may be inactive, invisible, and visible.

• Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing. Required social.coop Mastodon account, no mandate on activity status.

However, the bylaws in that second bullet under membership step 4 state "They are expected to join the Loomio group, and are invited to get involved in governance and participate in working groups". As I understand it, the "governance" document is a place to keep policies that are subordinate to the bylaws and the bylaws would supercede.

So, my two cents is that someone who slipped through the cracks without ever creating a Mastodon account is still a member in all aspects because its not in the best spirit of coop values to have members who can't vote and to me the bylaws and policies point more toward them still being members. At the same time, its not in the best spirit of coop values for someone to participate in discussion and voting on something (Mastodon moderation) in which they don't really have a stake, but that would be something more to keep in mind for potential future policy revisions.

Thanks alot @Aaron GK. So it seems that members don't always need to pay something:

> "unless they have been approved as non-paying member by the membership working group"

If Danyl had previously been approved as such - then not paying shouldn't block them from Loomio. But, those who contribute on Loomio need an Open Collective account and social.coop handle …

"Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing. Required social.coop Mastodon account, no mandate on activity status."
… "Approved applicants receive a Mastodon account"

It's not clear if this happened and Danyl didn't use it, or that part of the process failed. It's also not clear if Danyl had an Open Collective account or not…

So if I put this all together - there appears to be situations where non-paying members who haven't received their social.coop signup access yet can post here. If that applies to Danyl then they shouldn't have been suspended (or should be unsuspended) - but more information would be needed to confirm this. I'm not sure how to flag this for the 'membership working group' (I can't see contact details here or on mastodon) but hopefully someone there sees this.

Throughout this discussion many people including myself have mentioned it would be positive to come up with some actual updates to the Code of Conduct and Federation Abuse Policy regarding LLMs and/or consent, which is the underlying principle identified by many members.

I've looked over all of this discussion to try to look for the ideas that there seems to be broad enough agreement on, and lack of the type of disagreement where members might vote to block a proposal.

Some possible ideas:

These are the ideas I could identify from this discussion so far that I think may have enough broad support to be worked into a proposed update to our policies.

1. @Erik Moeller's idea of a limited policy prohibiting scraping of non-public posts

- Scraping of follower-only content or DMs for any reason (AI or not) is prohibited as it violates users' normal privacy expectations. Any accounts or instances engaged in such scraping activity may be suspended immediately.

- If and when accounts or instances that have previously engaged such practices credibly discontinue them, they may be unblocked after a period of 30 days, but repeat violations may result in indefinite suspension.

A caveat I would add would be to that suspension of an instance would require repeated violations by their users like with most other violations of our policies.

1. Using LLM tools that scrape posts that do not allow users to opt-out, or that do not follow well-established opt-out conventions like profile settings, established tags, or failing to follow Creative Commons best practices for their licenses, is not allowed. However any policy should state that social.coop's ability to enforce this is limited.

This one is more controversial but I do not get the sense that most of those who disagree would vote to block such a proposal or leave the coop due to it. The impression I get is that some folks feel this should not be a priority because enforcement would be extremely imperfect and/or they don't subjectively feel the same level of harm that some of us do subjectively feel at how corporate LLMs take the gathering of public data to an extreme level that constitutes harmful surveillance. I gave a lot of consideration to how members might feel before adding this one even to this general discussion post. Its not that I think a majority of users should be able to push around a minority. Its that the deeply felt views of what I think is a large majority is important enough to ask the minority if they could live with a proposal like this.

1. Users using LLMs solely for accessibility would not be in violation.

Question for folks: should a provision like this specify that the use cannot extend unreasonably beyond what is necessary for the accessibility need?

What do folks think?

Do you think these ideas, if and when thoughtfully put together into a refined policy proposal, and perhaps a few details worked out, would have broad enough support? If so what details need to be worked out?

Do any of these 3 ideas seriously miss the mark? Do you feel they are not compatible with what this coop is about? Would they harm your ability to use Mastodon on social.coop the way you'd like?

Is anything seriously missing? Keep in mind, there are as many opinions on just the right policy as there are members, and some of these ideas are very different from each other? So that said, is there anything missing that you think many/most members would think is an important improvement, that almost everyone could live with, and that few if any would think actively detracts what they should expect from their experience as a coop member?

If response is positive, I may work these ideas into a proposal to update the Code of Conduct and Federation Abuse Policy and do at least one sense-check or other non-binding poll before a full proposal. If not, I will just keep reading and taking part in discussion.

• @Erik Moeller's idea of a limited policy prohibiting scraping of non-public posts

This one seems easy.

Using LLM tools that scrape posts that do not allow users to
opt-out, or that do not follow well-established opt-out conventions
like profile settings, established tags, or failing to follow
Creative Commons best practices for their licenses, is not allowed.

I think required that tools respecting expressed preferences according
to agreed upon standards (think robots.txt) makes sense. This is
exactly the point of the IETF's AIPREF group (I know CC is involved),
which I am a big fan of: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/aipref/about/

My understanding is that no such widely agreed upon standard exist in
this space. As a result, I'd like to understand more clearly what,
concretely, this would require and what it would block. If someone
wanted to write a bespoke LLM-based tool to filter their social.coop
feed in some way, what is the full list of the things they would need
to do to be in compliance with our policy? Is there a rubric that
could be applied to evaluate whether tools do/don't satisify this? Are
there any such AI tools in existenence that do all of these things?

My understanding is that no such widely agreed upon standard exist in
this space. As a result, I'd like to understand more clearly what,
concretely, this would require and what it would block. If someone
wanted to write a bespoke LLM-based tool to filter their social.coop
feed in some way, what is the full list of the things they would need
to do to be in compliance with our policy?

I also don't know of any widely agreed upon standard. For this reason I don't think it would be wise to try to write an exhaustive list into a policy, as the different ways of expressing an opt-out could evolve over time, but focus on the desired general outcome, which is to give people a reasonable, accessible opportunity to opt-out of their content being scraped.

So a policy might look something like, in the code of conduct under "Unacceptable behavior"

I will not:

• Use LLM tools which fail to give other users a reasonable, accessible opportunity to opt out of their content being scraped.

  • Any tools used must make a reasonable effort to honor common opt-out mechanisms such as tags (#NoBots, #NoAI, #NoLLM), and certain Creative Commons/copyleft licenses

  • Members should be aware due to the nature of many LLM tools this provision is difficult for the CWG to enforce fully

And the Federation Abuse Policy might be similar but worded to apply to users of other instances.

In this way, the creator of an LLM tool would not have to make sure their tool follows every convention under the sun anyone has thought up, as long as they make a reasonable effort to include the most common ones, so that on the other side of the coin, a user who makes a reasonable effort to employ a common opt-out or two stands a very high chance of success.

Side note - I'm not married to the idea of including the bit about creative Commons licenses. They are technically more permissive than traditional copyright, but they're also more intentional so I would assume anyone including one in their profile intends for LLMs to follow applicable best practices for the license they've chose (if that's a relevant factor for their license). If anyone has thoughts or strong opinions.

@Aaron GK

I am in favor of blocking bots that don't honor robots.txt or noindex, which are established technical methods for telling bots to bugger off. In fact Mastodon has a setting for noindex - "Include my public posts | profile in search engines" in the privacy settings.

Given that major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) are now also AI tools, and given that all major AI tools are also pretending to be search engines, I am not sure that we actually need more than that until better standards are defined. There is already a box in preferences people can tick. What am I missing there? A box that say "search engines okay, LLMs bad"? That's increasingly a distinction without a difference.

"Common opt-out mechanisms" feels too broad to me and essentially turns any kind of tool building into a game of opt-out whack-a-mole.

@Erik Moeller 

This is a good approach, as it can be integrated into the larger scheme of things, so we are not just working on a social.coop-only approach, but feeding back into the larger campaigns about consent and privacy. :D

@Aaron GK I'm skeptical of adopting a policy to penalize people who use tools that do not follow "common opt-out mechanisms such as" a non-exhaustive list. Especially when that list includes things I'm not convinced are particularly common or widely used (if, for no other reason, than because I've never seen them).

I think @Erik Moeller's suggestion is sensible. It's clear, specific, relies on standards we can reasonably expect people to know about/follow, and is as effective as anything else (i.e., not particularly effective for the vast majority of sketchy scrapers that are using residential IP proxies, not declaring their user agents, etc).

I am in favor of blocking bots that don't honor robots.txt or noindex, which are established technical methods for telling bots to bugger off. In fact Mastodon has a setting for noindex - "Include my public posts | profile in search engines" in the privacy settings.

I think specifying some well established standards that must be followed is a good idea. I'm not opposed to including that robots.txt must be followed but since this can't be added at the profile level, I'm not opposed to leaving it out for brevity.

"Common opt-out mechanisms" feels too broad to me and essentially turns any kind of tool building into a game of opt-out whack-a-mole.

The intent as clarified in my follow up response is not that developers, or the users using their tools, must perfectly follow all mechanisms anyone might come up with to try to opt-out of LLM scraping. It's for them to make a reasonable effort to meet users where they are at. The alternative is basically that potential subjects of scraping would have to perfectly follow how developers think they should opt out. Even if there are some well established standards, I don't think its fair to expect all potential subjects of scraping to all have enough technical knowledge to know

I think a good policy would encourage a state of affairs where developers and subjects to have the ability to make a reasonable, less than perfect, effort and for their efforts to be compatible most of the time. I think a good policy also should anticipate that the latest mechanisms people are using to opt-out could change.

So combining that perhaps certain established standards must be followed, and there should be a reasonable effort (not perfect, just reasonable) to follow other common opt-out mechanisms, a policy might look something like:

In the code of conduct:

I will not:

• Use LLM tools which fail to give other users a reasonable, accessible opportunity to opt out of their content being scraped.

  • Any tools used must honor profile settings opting out of indexing, robots.txt, and make a reasonable effort to follow other common opt-out mechanisms

  • Members should be aware due to the nature of many LLM tools this provision is difficult for the CWG to enforce fully

The formatting above is meant to follow the existing formatting in the CoC, but please take a moment to parse it out as below:

• Any tools used must

  • honor profile settings opting out of indexing, robots.txt,

• and make a reasonable effort

  • to follow other common opt-out mechanisms

Same wording and when broken down in this way, hopefully it is apparent that such a policy is requiring certain minimum standards, and also to just make a good faith effort to meet people where they're at, but not asking perfection.

On the flip side, users who want to opt out of scraping have some options for what social.coops preferred, recommended methods would be (though many LLMs will ignore those standards unfortunately) but lay users have a good chance at other efforts being honored as well. Additionally, in the future, if some other practices became standard, the policy would not need to be updated, and users using the new standard would likely have their opt-out honored as well.

What do folks think? Thanks for the feedback so far.

@Aaron GK 

I see where you're coming from, but I feel that the existing noindex and robots.txt convention are a sufficient baseline requirement that gives us a clearer demarcation line of whether a tool is in violation or not. It also feels like a useful opportunity for us to advocate for standardization.

Regarding the code of conduct language, any "use of tool" language must IMO very specific what category of use you mean. As I understand it, this discussion is about tools that access your account and through doing so, have access to posts by others. So I would use explicit language like "Any tools you give access to your account for the purpose of data scraping and processing" or similar. Or am I misunderstanding your goal?

As I see it, we don't want non-LLM search tools that access accounts to do these bad things either, so I'm not sure saying "Don't use LLMs that do these bad things" is sufficient. As I understand it, the common denominator is third party data scraping and processing that ignores machine-readable instructions to not to scrape and process.

@Erik Moeller 

Yes I'm talking about tools that scrape.

I am in favor of blocking bots that don't honor robots.txt or noindex, which are established technical methods for telling bots to bugger off. In fact Mastodon has a setting for noindex - "Include my public posts | profile in search engines" in the privacy settings.

I want to get into a bit more detail here. As you mention there are two settings:

Include public posts in search results

Your public posts may appear in search results on Mastodon. People who have interacted with your posts may be able to search them regardless.

Which seems to be related to searches within Mastodon, and

Include profile page in search engines

Your profile page may appear in search results on Google, Bing, and others.

Would you propose that such tools should have to ignore users who have either setting unselected, both, or one of them specifically?

@Aaron GK Ideally, tools that scrape content should not have to care about the internals of Mastodon at all (which after all is just one fediverse software stack among many). Instead they should simply follow the existing conventions for this: robots.txt (site-level exclusions) and noindex (page-level exclusions).

If they do so, in practice, they will honor the second setting, because that is what it does -- "If you opt out of search engine indexing, a noindex flag will be added to your public profile and status pages." https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/preferences/

The first Mastodon setting would have no effect either way; its scope and meaning is constrained to Mastodon search features.

+1 🙂