Loomio

The Bluesky Bridge

Sam Whited PublicSeen by 335

Hi all,

As you may be aware a new bridge with the bluesky network is being deployed that allows two-way federation.

I have temporarily taken the liberty of limiting the bridge pending community discussion. This is not my decision to make, and I recognize that, but I thought it was broadly the same as federating with Threads and, though I strongly disagree with the decision not to suspend Threads, the community chose to Limit it so I took the same action here so that follows from the bridge would at least need to be approved first.

The gist of the matter is that this is different from most bridges in that it doesn't just allow you to read the posts of eg. Twitter users, but more like Threads it allows you full two-way communication with them. It also allows Jack Dorsey to vacuum up all of your public posts and sell them for sentiment analysis or train AIs on them or whatever. If someone from Bluesky follows you, your (opt-in on the mastodon side) full text search preferences are no longer respected. Also, the author has a terms of service that he claims you are accepting by using the bridge (this is almost certainly not legal in any jurisdiction, but I'm not a lawyer), etc.

The author of the bridge has written a blog post [1] where he gives the game away somewhat: "If bridges were opt-in, and I could only follow 4% of people on other networks, they would be drastically less useful." in other words, he doesn't care about your consent.

I strongly think we should fully suspend this bridge, but also acknowledge that it's exactly the same as Threads and this community didn't want to suspend there, so I'd like to follow up and ask separately for us to discuss what to do with this bridge. I'll follow up with a full proposal and vote later on depending on the results of this discussion. Thanks.

If you'd like to block it yourself for your own personal account you can block the domains

You can also add #nobridge to your profile and the author says they're respecting that as an opt-out flag (but suspending both domains above is probably the better option).

[1]: https://snarfed.org/2024-01-21_moderate-people-not-code

Flancian

@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.

Dynamic

@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.

Flancian

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.

Juanlu

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

Flancian

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