The Bluesky Bridge

Follow up:

I think we should put a pause on this until we've actually discussed what we're voting on, how the issue is framed, and until we're sure we have all the information about the bridge.

Normally I'm not the type who wants a long discussion about how we're going to vote on something, but I find the framing of this issue and the odd rapid-fire voting process a bit off putting. If there were problems with the poll the first time, we should probably discuss how to do it not just make another poll in a slightly different way which may or may not be better.

I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the framing of the issue. The statement that the bridge "should be treated as our instance treats any other instance in the Fediverse by default going forward" seems wrong to me. It's not like any other fediverse instance. Even if we agree that it is, any other instance would be limited or blocked for the sort of consent issues in the authors original post (and this would be done at the mod teams discretion, we wouldn't be seeking a vote on it). So I don't think we are treating bluesky like any other instance, and I don't think we can, this is very misleading and puts things in a positive light that I don't think they deserve.

The other option says "they are special cased (which means limited visibility for people using the bridge, and the possibility of missing notifications from bridged users even if you are interacting with them directly)", the idea of "special cased" aside (same idea as the previous paragraph), I don't think limiting visibility means missing notification from bridged users even if you're interacting with them directly. If it does, it's unclear to me exactly how. To interact with the profile you'd have to go in and show it, to interact you'd have to follow the user, which effectively undoes the limit for your specific account. I may be wrong, but the question doesn't explain how all this works well enough to make an informed decision. Even if I am wrong, we're presenting downsides only for the No vote. I don't see anything about the problems with corporate social media and why a Yes vote might be a bad idea.

And the last thing about the poll: if we're deciding what to do going forward we should present all the options, not just two of them. This is framed as "vote to undo the previous decision", but it equally could have been framed as "vote to ratify the previous decision", which I think would have been equally a problem, but maybe shows why I'm uncomfortable with this framing? We're missing some options here. For example, we also have the option to suspend the bridge, and while I don't think users will choose that, it feels odd to leave it out and bypass any discussion of other options and only frame it in terms of the previous vote.

It's also still unclear to me whether with the bridges new opt-in rules if consent is only required to let someone follow you (a good first step) or if my public posts will still be slurped up into bluesky where they can be seen by folks not following me. Until this is cleared up, I believe this proposal should be blocked (but won't do so myself as I see this as a conflict of interest and am not sure that anyone else would agree with me).

All that being said, thank you for following up with a vote. I said I would, and I forgot, so I owe you and the community an apology for not doing that. I don't want to delay this unnecessarily, and I also didn't do this correctly the first time, so take this all with a grain of salt.

@Sam Whited Thank you for your comment!

1. By 'treated as any Fediverse instance by default' I meant the set of users using the bridge, which are strictly a subset of Bluesky and Fediverse users. I think it's reasonable to model them as an instance given that e.g. they will all share a domain name in their interactions. Anybody could set up a Fediverse service backed by any kind of database; as long as they speak ActivityPub, we wouldn't even really know they are not vanilla Mastodon and we wouldn't care unless their users break our code of conduct or are otherwise abusive. Which hasn't happened here.

2. I have seen the surprising notification behavior myself. I tried interacting with @snarfed.org, they responded, and I didn't see the response at all until the developer pinged from their @indieweb.social account to let me know I probably wasn't going to see it because we had limited them. It felt like I was cut out from these domains, which I am, without any kind of UX warning; and it makes social.coop less usable for me day-to-day.

3. There is always going to be a framing problem when we have a yes/no decision, but I heard feedback after the previous vote that yes/no was preferable. Note that the previous ranked choice vote, even though it was confusing and I wouldn't try it again for such a situation, worked around this issue as people had to rank 'remove limit' and 'keep limit' explicitly. I think framing the vote with yes="keep the limit" would be acceptable, and if anybody else had set up the vote that way I wouldn't push back against it.

4. The concerns with the 'rapid-fire' voting process need to be put in context: first, on a personal level, I only have a few hours I can dedicate a week to social.coop usually, so for me it's either Doing Stuff or focusing elsewhere, and I Do Stuff hoping it will at least help bring the conversation forward. Having said that, this is a second vote incorporating feedback from the previous, and it runs for six days in itself, so hopefully an end-to-end process lasting nine days to undo a unilateral decision taken without a poll six months ago should not blow anybody's socks off? :)

5. Finally, if you want a vote to suspend or explore other options, feel free to set one up, but I don't think that is a sufficient reason to block this vote. Surely if people want to suspend, they will clearly vote to limit for now; and from there the cooperative can move on to a suspend vote if limiting is not enough for you.

"The concerns with the 'rapid-fire' voting process need to be put in context: first, on a personal level, I only have a few hours I can dedicate a week to social.coop usually, so for me it's either Doing Stuff or focusing elsewhere, and I Do Stuff hoping it will at least help bring the conversation forward."

I don't understand this urgency at all. Is anyone being harmed by the limit?

The rest of us are busy too. The fact that you only have a few hours a week to dedicate to social.coop does not mean that the rest of us should have to drop everything and re-research what the bridge even does and form an opinion about it without even a straw poll to gauge interest.

@Flancian
I really really do not have bandwidth to research this, but if there is anything to @Sam Whited's concern about public posts being slurped up and cross-posted onto corporate-run instances, I think that is a big problem, yes. I'm not interested in adding to the user experience for people who opt for BlueSky over the open web.

I'm also not interested in switching to only "followers only" posts, which are honestly a pretty terrible model for a bunch of reasons.

@Dynamic IMHO yes, the limit causes bugs when interacting with bridged users (see point 2. above); it causes social.coop users to not see any Bluesky activity, even when people are actively trying to interact with the Fediverse, and so miss out on opportunities for connection; and it causes Bluesky users to not be properly exposed to our instance and any others who follow our example, with the result that it partially locks them out from the Fediverse and makes them less likely to become or remain involved in the network. It also may hurt the developer, as we have blocked his personal domain as if he was a spammer for providing a service some people take issue with, even if it's opt-in.

@Sam Whited, could you clarify why you believe Bridgy Fed will break its apparently stated way of functioning and start "slurping posts" or otherwise subverting users' expectations?

I am not aware of a standing policy in social.coop that says that we will not federate with corporate interests in any way, or that we will block bridges. I do not understand why voting with supporting information, which I have included inline in this vote, is not enough to potentially (if the results pan out that way) undo a policy decision made provisionally and without a vote by the community working group oncall six months ago. You ask for more time, but I would like to understand what you would like to do with that time, and why social.coop users like myself must stand idle in a status quo we did not vote for and (in my case) do not prefer.

@Flancian

This is what the Bridgy policy says about what content will be visible on Bluesky:
"Who can see me and my stuff?

• Only the people who can already see you and your stuff, without bridging. Bridgy Fed only bridges fully public data, so if your account is private or protected or followers-only, it won't (can't!) bridge your account at all. Same with DMs and private/followers-only posts; it ignores those."
  
  I might be missing something, but this sounds to me like the person making the statement regards all public posts as up for grabs.

The absence of a standing policy about how to handle corporate instances is exactly the problem, yes. There should be one. We don't have it.

@Dynamic @Flancian this FAQ entry and the fact that the website seems a bit light on details (and is confusing, I'm still not sure which thing is which since there are two identically named products that appear to work differently somehow?) also made me wonder if the author had actually addressed the initial pushback to their blog post.

@Dynamic I have included inline in the vote the opt-in section I believe is key to parse the documentation, which is:

To bridge your fediverse account into Bluesky and interact with people there, search for and follow @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy. That account will then follow you back. Accept its follow to make sure your fediverse posts get sent the bridge and make it into Bluesky.

TLDR: I believe the section you quote is assuming you have opted in as per the above.

@Flancian

I understand that that is one way to read the text, but it isn't unambiguous. I would like explicit confirmation, either through software testing such as Matt Noyes has been doing, or through discussion with the developer (which I think you were pursuing?), that Mastodon content can only end up on Bluesky via the bridges if the author of the post has taken a positive action to ensure that it can end up there.

@Dynamic this has been confirmed by the developer, see below.

@Dynamic a debate on policies for the corporate web seems a separate issue. It seems like approving Bluesky to be treated as any other instance here would allow individuals to make a call for now, informed by this discussion if they participated.

Is it normal process for us to not be able to see votes until after we have cast a vote? It feels weird, but possibly that's because we normally have a chance for discussion before a proposal is even made?

@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.