The analogy I have found that applies to many things on the Fediverse including this: A restaurant is a public space. Just because you are having a conversation

The analogy I have found that applies to many things on the Fediverse including this: A restaurant is a public space. Just because you are having a conversation in a public space does not de facto make that conversation itself public. There is an expectation of privacy, and it is considered rude to eavesdrop. In a restaurant, violations of such cultural norms may be challenged by shouting and might even result in fisticuffs. If you look like you are eavesdropping on restaurant conversation you shouldn't be, you might wind up getting punched for it. The author of this violated a similar cultural norm and got all the shouting. (They should feel lucky they didn't get the fisticuffs. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on point of view, we haven't invented the technology to punch someone remotely via the internet yet.) Given the above analogy, this shouldn't be a surprise. (Part of why this is a very useful analogy.) ' The author suggests that the Fediverse should do more technical things to better enforce these cultural norms, but discounts the existing cultural enforcement in the process (which was clearly noticed given the complaints about it). Not every problem can be solved technically and there's always a balancing act between "building a nice public space" (building a restaurant) and "giving people the expectation of privacy inside it" (letting your patrons have chill conversations). It's still a good idea to add additional technical enforcement of cultural norms as best as possible, but it isn't and shouldn't be necessary. Sure, there will likely always be bad actors, but bad actors exist in real life, too. We're coming off an era of social media where cultural norms were enforced by centralized Terms of Service agreements and centralized gatekeepers that often had something of a "if you can technically do it, it's fine to do" laissez faire attitude. A lot of developers aren't used to dealing with cultural norms such as "restaurant privacy", but in lieu of central Terms of Service enforcers (and lawsuits) most of what something like the Fediverse has *are* cultural norms, so there will be a necessary adjustment period for developers to learn that just because something is technically possible according to the specs/protocols/technologies/platforms it may violate cultural norms and may not be ethically right to do. Not every sociopolitical problem can be solved technically, especially in a distributed web of different instances. That leads me to what I think may be the best missing suggestion here: this is a documentation problem. Some of these cultural norms should probably be better documented somewhere, preferably not too far removed from W3C's ActivityPub specification, some of these cultural norms of what not to do with the specs to avoid many more developers falling into similar traps as this one.