The Bluesky Bridge

@Dynamic I think so? I used the default governance template for yes/no questions.

Update: the second vote has been blocked for a "rushed feeling". At this point I am considering dis-engaging from this issue as it feels like we have entered a tar pit. Unfortunately I do not agree with the fact that reversing a unilateral provisional policy decision apparently takes more than two votes spread over nine days, six months after the fact, even though the latest vote (which I set up in quick succession to the first one to incorporate feedback and address criticism) is provisionally showing that a majority of social.coop would prefer to remove the limit; and we could always have another vote if new information comes to light or if the community wants to put some different policy up for a vote.

I will wait for answers to my requests to more information, but in the meantime will be considering next steps w.r.t. my engagement with this issue in particular and social.coop in general.

@Flancian WRT to the original unilateral decision, that's a fair criticism and I apologize. I had meant to give us time to do some more research and then hold a proper poll, but I let the ball drop there and it turned into 6 months of a thing I just did being the de-facto policy.

I hope you won't consider disengaging from social.coop because of this; you're a valuable team member on the CWG team and we all enjoy working with you. Democracy is messy sometimes, and I think we're all mostly just worried that there wasn't time for discussion and understanding the issue first. As you said though, we can always do it again later, whether that's first clarifying a few things for the person who cast a block vote, or whether that's coming back and re-voting to limit or suspend the bridge if we find out the author is doing something we don't like.

@Sam Whited thank you, Sam! I appreciate that, and likewise.

I would indeed consider leaving social.coop if we become isolationist or what I term internet-xenophobic, meaning a community which is uninterested, unwelcoming or actively hostile towards people who use a different protocol or are stuck in corporate instances, or people who are interested in outreach to those people. I would at least likely stop my engagement in working groups partly or fully as I'm interested in doing work to improve the Fediverse and make it more inclusive, diverse and vibrant; and such an instance wouldn't embody those values sufficiently in my opinion.

@Flancian Understood. As is possibly obvious by now, I tend to want to achieve the same goal of making the fediverse a more inclusive, diverse, and vibrant place, but I think the way we do that by the opposite means. That is to say, by protecting our users from bad actors and not being a "growth at all costs" network like the large corporate networks. I don't think we have to be hostile towards people using a different protocol or instance, we're just limiting them so that they can't spam our users or slurp up their data without asking first. That seems like a good way to ensure everyone is safe and happy and we don't invite the same kinds of abuse that are widely present on the major corporate networks and makes us a safe place for people who may have been threatened on big corporate networks in the past.

@Sam Whited I'm glad we share similar goals! That makes sense of course.

Furthermore, I think there is definitely room for one or many conservative instances in the Fediverse, meaning instances willing to risk over-limiting or over-suspending to protect users from as many attack vectors as possible. I think we are just not fully aligned in social.coop being that kind of instance. I for one do not identify as a conservative in this regard, and would love to see social.coop remain well-moderated but clearly liberal and as open as possible by default.

@Flancian thanks for raising this. I am a community organizer on surveillance issues and I don't think I could actually stay here if I can't bridge my public posts to the fediverse because people won't get information they need, or if have to build a coalition with people from lots of different instances to post across instances since I can't broadcast.

I understand there's a fundamental tension between two ways of achieving this goal.

Wouldn't a way of resolving this tension in terms of political strategy be to involve the open web movement in work to pass a law that prevents said slurping? Or could we create a content license for our posts that is non-commercial only and then organize the resources to legally enforce it?

Information questions:

1) If someone on BlueSky who uses Bridgy does a search for a Mastodon user who does not use Bridgy, what happens?

2) If someone on BlueSky who uses Bridgy attempts to follow a Mastodon user who does not use Bridgy, what happens?

3) If someone on Mastodon who uses Bridgy boosts the public post of someone on Mastodon who does not use Bridgy, does the boosted post show up on BlueSky?

(Edited to correct a minor typo)

@Dynamic I will ask the developer directly and relay back the answers.

@Flancian Thank you!

@Flancian
TY :D

This will help inform more of us, so we can make a more balanced decision.

From a personal perspective, i was of the "feeling rushed" situation, and that's because i didn't have the time to understand what i was being asked to vote on, before the vote was due. :D

How to deal with this situation in future will be part of the larger conversations about how we do things, though the way that this was done was handled well, up until the "rushed vote". :D

As for the larger conversation around the bridge:

There are a few people that i met via Twitter, who i would still like to talk with, who are now on Bsky. I got a Bsky invite from one of them, but i didn't want to jump from one corporate platform to another.

At that time, i couldn't persuade them to move to Mastodon, as i wasn't able to communicate with them about it effectively, as i was still learning myself..

Letting them see some of the conversations here, will help them see that this will be the better option.

Even though i am not it's target, i am really aware of how some of the racism was carried over from Twitter to Bsky, and i don't want things to become any worse for anyone else here.

A better explanation of how this style of bridge will operate would be really useful, as well as a clear explanation, of how Bsky's moderation operates, and how this will affect the workload that will hit our moderators. :D

@Billy Smith

Thanking for chiming in to say that you have also felt rushed by the way that these proposals were put forward. I am currently licking wounds about the fact that I blocked the current proposal for this exact reason but most of what I've gotten back has been Flancian objecting to my "not letting the vote go forward."

I want to reside in a community where there is a culture of building consensus. I've been feeling the opposite of that, and it hurts.

@Dynamic I reached out to the developer and they got back to me with the answers to your questions:

"1) They see nothing. Bridgy Fed doesn't send anything from a given Mastodon user to Bluesky until they opt in, including their profile.
2) Same. The Bluesky user won't be able to find the Mastodon user - they're not in Bluesky at all yet - so they can't follow them.
3) No."

My apologies for pushing back against your block in a way that hurt you! It was not my intention. I thought if blocking a vote was fine, then pushing back against the block would also be fine. But feel free to block as much as you need of course, and I'll make sure not to question blocks so freely in the future.

@Flancian

If you can edit your proposal to clearly lay out 1) that there is buggy behavior caused by the Limit, and 2) that you have confirmation from the developer that users who have not intentionally followed the bridge will be completely invisible to the bridge instance, then I will lift my block.

@Flancian

Thank you for apologizing.

If you want, I'd be happy to talk more with you about why I wasn't feeling good, but I'd prefer to do that in a more private space. Or we can drop it.

@Dynamic I will edit the proposal now, making it clear that it was edited on 2024-09-10 adding this information. The buggy behavior (w.r.t. notifications) is already mentioned in the vote currently so it doesn't need to be mentioned further I think.

@Flancian

Thank you. I have changed my vote. I would have preferred to make it clear that the answers came from the author of the Bridge software, but this is acceptable.

I think I'm missing something. Are Social.Coop users currrently able to follow accounts and accept followers through bridgy? As I understand it, if an instance or user is limited by Social.Coop, our users can still follow and be followed by them. Limit just means a) I have to find and follow them and b) their posts will only show up to people on our instance who follow them. Is that right?

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-user

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server

Yes, as far as I know this should not stop anyone from following users on bluesky instance, they would just have to hit the "Show this Profile" (or whatever it's called) button first. The problem would be if someone on bluesky tries to message or follow you, then you wouldn't get a notification, I don't think. You'd have to follow them first or they couldn't engage with you.

@Sam Whited That makes sense. I can see why people eager to engage with bluesky users would see that as overly restrictive. It would be great if users could identify themselves as open to bluesky user contact...

@Matt Noyes I think the bridge author may have updated it to work that way after the initial push back against automatically bridging everything. It's still not completely clear to me though; I think @Flancian is asking after another user also asked for more information.

@Sam Whited I just searched @bsky.brid.gy in Mastodon and got a list of accounts with the "show this profile" button, as you said. So it seems the only issue is that bluesky users can't use the bridgy app to find people on our Mastodon instance, due to the limit. I wonder if someone who has accounts on both could test that? @Nathan Schneider ?

Thank you for doing this legword, @Matt Noyes. I think it is very important that multiple people be doing research on what is actually going on with the bridge, so that those of us who have no idea what Bridgy even is can cast informed votes as to how the bridge should be moderated.

@Matt Noyes Been doing some experiments with the bridge myself after I migrated to social.coop. On my 1-person instance it was working fine, but here I'm observing some weird stuff: I can't actually follow Bluesky from Mastodon (a "follow request" is shown) and my posts from Mastodon don't appear on Bluesky. If needed I can try to do more debugging.

@Matt Noyes hi Matt! Thanks for looking into this!

Following individual users works for me but interacting with users without previously following them doesn't, in two ways, one obvious and another not obvious:

1. You can't really see the bridged users or their posts because of the limit, so it's hard to find them and follow them in the first place. This is the obvious one because that's sort of the definition of limit (which doesn't make it correct in this case, though).

2. If you find a user and attempt to interact with them but forget to follow them at the same time, you will never see their replies (no notification takes place). I was hit by this, which prompted me to look again into this issue and start the vote(s).

Note also that we have limited not only the bridge domain but also the personal domain of the developer, so on top of the bridge disruption any social.coop users who want to interact with Ryan Bartlett are also affected by our limit; IMHO for no good reason.

@Flancian

In addition to everything else that had not been clear to me, I also hadn't realized that one of the limited instances was a personal domain. When you expressed concern about it previously, I'd thought you were saying that the bridge domain was the same as the personal domain which hadn't seemed to change things.

FWIW, if that was just the authors personal domain I apologize, that shouldn't have been part of the limit. My understanding was that the bridge was running there at the time, but I could have been wrong.

EDIT: and if the bridge is not running there, we don't need a vote for that one, feel free to just unlimit that if it was an innocent domain that just got accidentally limited by me.

@Flancian I'm not sure what you mean by you can't really see them. I just searched @bsky.brid.gy and I can see bsky users, their posts, posts and replies, and media. The fact that you have to follow someone to see their replies doesn't seem like too big a burden and seems fitting for a limit. I still don't understand how the limit -- beyond doing what limits do -- interferes with your use of bridgy?

@Matt Noyes ahoy! Thanks for following up on this.

1. You're right in that searching for @bsky.brid.gy or user handles works better than I thought it did, thanks for correcting.

2. I respectfully disagree that having to follow someone to see their replies is not too big of a burden, as it is silently and fundamentally breaking expectations. If Mastodon showed a warning that you might not see replies it might be OK, but it doesn't, and this bit me and is likely biting other users all the time.

3. Beyond this, I just saw that @Juanlu reported issues with following bridge users in https://social.coop/@astrojuanlu/113113817065751404, and I am seeing similar issues when following bridge accounts. I'm still unsure this is due to the limit, but it might be.

@Sam Whited thanks for the follow up on snarfed.org. I checked and https://fed.brid.gy/web/snarfed.org makes me think Ryan is using Bridgy there, but not Bridgy Fed. This means he has a Wordpress site that is showing up as an instance thanks to his other bridging project, which in this case only bridges to his personal site. I see no reason to limit that so I agree we should just remove the limit.

@Flancian @Matt Noyes
I do think it's worth noting somewhere that bridges are kind of by their nature quirky objects trying to patch together services that are not designed to interoperate, so in that sense, buggy behavior feels sort of inevitable.

I therefore don't think that in the general case "ensuring bridges behave as expected" should be enough reason for an instance to change moderation levels if there are other reasons to keep the moderation levels in place.

In this specific case, there doesn't seem to be any major risk associated with lifting the limit, which gives the convenience aspect more weight than I think it should normally have.

After receiving feedback that a six days vote is too quick, I have extended this vote for an extra four days, for a total of ten days. This also gives people an extra weekend to catch up with coop affairs and vote, which I hope will make this vote more inclusive.

Given that six days was considered too short for such an issue, even after a previous vote that took three days, I would suggest we change the default governance template. But that can probably be the topic of a different thread.

This thread is relevant as it discusses the moderation problems that we will face:

https://cyberpunk.lol/@vantablack/113133448621534708

:|

First time participating on a Social Coop proposal - It is my understanding that this has now passed, right?

@Juanlu yes! After your post I communicated an outcome above and took matching action.