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>...that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal resp

>...that same law will say that my Mastodon instance must federate with every alt-right-but-toeing-the-line Mastodon instance if I don't want to take legal responsibility for everything that shows up on my Mastodon instance. This seems highly unlikely to me. What if you are running a different version of the codebase or something from those instances? v2.0.1special. Even leaving aside constraints like that, volume of inbound traffic, etc. are direct costs to federation with other instances that I doubt laws would be willing to force you to pay. I wonder if there are examples of this having been done in the past. Microsoft's antitrust case is the closest that comes to mind, but they were operating from an absolutely dominant standpoint at the time. If Mastodon/ActivityPub ever reaches that level, I'd consider it...a win?

geofft 7y ago
The law doesn't have to force you to pay it - it just has to say, either federate with everybody or nobody. All it needs to do is say, if you're accepting posts from other people, you need to do so in a non-discriminatory way. (Providers like Twitter would love this law because it would kill decentralized systems. In fact this would allow Jack to "decentralize" Twitter https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 while making sure no decentralized systems run by the powerless can compete. Everyone else can technically run a decentralized system, but Twitter is the only one worth using. It's the perfect regulatory capture.) Sure, you can probably get by for a bit by just happening to fail to peer with Nazis, but you would immediately lose the ability to make a public shared block list with reasoning, a la https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/list.md https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/l... . You'd also have trouble successfully peering with non-Nazi instances - if you publish the protocol changes in v2.0.1special so other reasonable people can federate with you, the Nazis will just apply those patches too.

geofft 7y ago

The law doesn't have to force you to pay it - it just has to say, either federate with everybody or nobody. All it needs to do is say, if you're accepting posts from other people, you need to do so in a non-discriminatory way. (Providers like Twitter would love this law because it would kill decentralized systems. In fact this would allow Jack to "decentralize" Twitter https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106 while making sure no decentralized systems run by the powerless can compete. Everyone else can technically run a decentralized system, but Twitter is the only one worth using. It's the perfect regulatory capture.) Sure, you can probably get by for a bit by just happening to fail to peer with Nazis, but you would immediately lose the ability to make a public shared block list with reasoning, a la https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/list.md https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/blob/master/list/l... . You'd also have trouble successfully peering with non-Nazi instances - if you publish the protocol changes in v2.0.1special so other reasonable people can federate with you, the Nazis will just apply those patches too.