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Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that cal

by dcow 3y ago

Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. The community doesn't get to make that call. The protocol makes that call and the protocol allows anybody to view stuff you post publicly. You don't get to say "I publish this but Meta can't view it". Not even legally you don't. That's not privacy and no amount of "web3" is going to fix that. Copyright cannot restrict who can view a work you created once you transfer or license that work to somebody else (e.g. by releasing it publicly on the fediverse). You don't get to say "here's my post but if you show it to Meta then that's illegal". We don't even have a common legal framework for dealing with content distribution that isn't copying (we got "lucky" that you have to copy content to view it digitally so copyright can be poorly jammed onto the digital content distribution model and everything doesn't burn down). Where the heck did people get the idea that they get to dictate how culture spreads and evolves?

Guvante 3y ago
Your understanding is flawed. Copyright is 100% okay with transitively controlling production of content. After all how else would you describe someone allowing Netflix to stream your content? You can't restream Netflix and Netflix is restricted on how it can stream to you. Both rooted in the original Copyright protection and the licenses to content given out by intermediaries. Most posting platforms give themselves very broad rights with what they can do in a transitive fashion. But that is "companies don't want to get sued for user uploaded content and are lazy" not "you don't have any rights over things that are published".
- dcow 3y ago
  It's not that simple. If I sell you a book, I cannot place a restriction on that sale saying you can't resell that book (first sale doctrine). You're allowed to do that because you own the copy of the book. You can't copy the book and sell it, because you don't own the copyright, but you can sell the original copy, show it to whomever you want, etc. It's not that "copyright is okay with transitive licensing" but more that "copyright simply prevents you from copying a work you didn't create (or otherwise don't have copyrights over)". That's all it does. If you want to place downstream restrictions on your content then you have to license it (and get someone to agree to your license). You have rights over how you license content. Yes. And users may agree that they're only "viewing" a copy and don't in fact own it when engaging with your licensed content, sure. But my main point was that you don't get to publish content to the public domain and then say oh wait no I didn't want Meta to see that oops #privacy #cancelmeta. And further that it's kinda silly to imagine a world where everyone licenses every little toot they make. At some point we're in a public forum and we just all need to understand what that means, including that someone you don't like might be listening. Anyway, I don't think licensing content is a positive thing for society. It may benefit media conglomerates, but not individuals. Arguably, creators shouldn't be allowed to say "Netflix you can stream this content to users but not in Brazil". I don't think it's a sealed deal that downstream restrictions on content distribution are healthy or in any way in the public interest. Charging a royalty for a views/streams of some show is one thing. Saying "only on Tuesdays and not in Brazil" gives too much control to creators to dictate how their art should be interpreted. And nobody can prevent you from using Netflix to stream a show to your Brazilian friend on the couch next to you... nor should they ever be able to. That would be really really bad technology, were it to exist. So short of attaching licenses to every post you make, no, there's not a socially healthy, let alone even viable, strategy to control content distribution in the "fediverse".
  - wpietri 3y ago
    > So short of attaching licenses to every post you make I think you have this backwards. Full copyright protection is the default for all content not licensed otherwise. Publishing does not put content into a "public domain" status. Social media platforms already have strong legal terms around every piece of content. If you violate that license, platforms may choose to fuck you up. E.g.: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-surveillance-firm-sued-for-scraping-facebook-and-instagram-data https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-s... It would be easy enough for particular Mastodon servers and/or accounts to be explicit about their downstream licensing.
    - dcow 3y ago
      I understand that generally you retain the copyright to your works implicitly and that you don't have to actively file for copyright in order to gain the protection of copyright law. I'm arguing that it's pretty preposterous for a global decentralized federated social platform to assume some authority (enforced by whom, that'd require a central group of enforcers) over the licensing of posts on the network by invoking US copyright law. Conceptually it doesn't make any sense. So the only thing Mastodon can do is at a protocol/code level require that public content flowing through the pipes be licensed for public consumption (copying and distribution) on the network, the colloquial "public domain". > It would be easy enough I can't really imagine the matrix of which nodes can federate with which others based on the default content license they impose on posted content. "Oh you can only view my post if you use this server over here because it uses a compatible downstream licensing configuration." Would that really "work"?
      - onlymonkeys 3y ago
        [dead]
      - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
        Mastodon-the-software doesn't have to do anything. Mastodon instances have to choose whether to block Threads or not. Of course there is no 'central enforcement', that would be at odds with the very principle of federated social media (namely, that instance admins are free to choose how they run their own instance).
- mattigames 3y ago
  Is Facebook supposed to scan all Twitter everytime you post something to check if it's not violating the copyright of someone there? To know every paragraph of every single book? Or scan the entire internet for that matter? That is not "lazy", that is just a ridiculous expectation, no (legal) social network would survive if that was necessary to operate Not to mention the millions of derivative works where the definition gets fuzzy: I applied a filter to someone else photo and put an emoji over it, is still the same work? Should FB algorithm be smart enough to classify it as a copyright violation? It would be unsustainable economically to run that algorithm against the millions of posts, and even if they told the user "stop! that is copyrighted!" a huge chunk of users would just edit their post a bit and just try again.
  - dcow 3y ago
    That's the point, they're not. Copyright is a dumb concept when applied to social network posts (let alone the internet) and we shouldn't be wanting to emulate it on a decentralized social network.
nobody9999 3y ago
>Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. A fair point, and one that's not really new either. Don't want something to be public? Don't post it publicly. As I recall, when my employer at the time (mid 1990s) "federated" their email with the rest of the world, they sent out a memo which stated, in part, "don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of your local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but I imagine you can see the parallels. That said, I do get to control who sees my content -- by not making it public (i.e., I don't federate my AP instances and curate who can create accounts on them). If you want something to be private, don't post it publicly. I'm not sure why that's such a foreign idea to some folks since, as I mentioned, it's not even close to being a new idea.
- jdp23 3y ago
  The article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair?
  - nobody9999 3y ago
    >he article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair? I was responding to the idea that if you post something publicly, whether that's on a Mastodon instance, a bulletin board at the library, in a Craigslist ad or any other public forum, it's unreasonable to attempt to limit access to the information contained therein. That's intuitively obvious, no? If you only want specific people to see that information, only give it to those folks. And if they're trustworthy, they won't share it with others but that's not guaranteed.` How does the old saw go? "Three can keep a secret, if two are dead." Don't want something to be public? Don't post it in a public forum. Full stop. I am unfamiliar with the example you mention and its potential privacy impacts. But even if (and maybe especially if) there are the risks/issues you allude to, that doesn't obviate (and perhaps even strengthens) my point.
mcv 3y ago
Controlling who can see your content is actually a very reasonable feature; some things are not meant for everybody, but just for the people who actually know you. But it's not a use case that ActivityPub was designed for. Google+ had a really nice feature where you could easily control who can see your post. Diapora has something similar, but considering it's federated, I'm not sure if you can really guarantee it. I think the only way to guarantee this control in a federated system, is to encrypt everything that's not completely public. If everybody has a public key, you can use that to encrypt the secret key. It's a hassle, but I think this would work.
- XorNot 3y ago
  This still doesn't make sense though: the reality is that your content will be private right up till someone reposts it publicly. Or saves the image, recompresses, posts it to reddit, reddit posts it to ActivityPub etc. etc.
  - mcv 3y ago
    Of course. On Google+, you got a warning if you reshared something that wasn't shared publicly, but it was possible. It's also a matter of trusting the people you share it with. In the end, every private, highly encrypted message can always be made public by the recipient. That doesn't mean encryption is worthless for privacy.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      Right but even then the basis of protection was still being gated in punishment metted out by a higher power. That literally doesn't exist in a decentralized model - not only can anyone setup a new instance, instances which are blacklisted can also simply rebrand. Beyond the tightest group of confidants who you can actually trust, your content can and will leak if you put it online - and the probability of this goes up as the legal entities involved become smaller and have less and less to lose.
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  The funniest thing about people wanting this kind of transitive control is that the only technical way to achieve this is through a wall-garden model like ... Facebook. Indeed, Meta/FB is eager to train people to want this model 'cause they know you at least one referee controlling everything if you have this transitive model. Diapora has something similar, but considering it's federated, I'm not sure if you can really guarantee it. Exactly, this level of access requires a hegemon. Who will be the hegemon?
echelon 3y ago
There's a portion of the far left and the up-and-coming gen-zalpha that takes on a dictatorial "censorship is okay for things we dislike" attitude. They don't realize that in the 90's and 00's free speech was a place of refuge for liberals to escape from evangelical attacks on everything from LGBT rights to Pokemon. They also don't appreciate that the "come one and all" nature of the internet back then led to many people crossing the fences and experiencing viewpoints they'd never seen or heard before. This is an atmosphere we desperately need to return to. Present day censorship, "gotcha" moderation, and algorithmic manipulation of emotion have led to hyper polarization. We should 1) deescalate the intrusion of these systems and remove them from our day-to-day experience and 2) reinforce the fundamental rights we all deserve. Social media networks with over 100,000,000 daily active users should not be considered as "private companies with a right to free speech through censorship". They are effectively public squares that we have all elected and chosen to share. Right and left alike. Public companies tend to censor to protect profits, but small individuals (such as Reddit moderators and Fediverse instance maintainers) do it from either a position of laziness or political retribution. The latter is a form of disgust and hatred for fellow humans and should be called out as such, even if the other party is guilty of the same. I've seen the free speech argument twisted into "right wing figures trying to force their views into everyone's feed", but that need not be the case. There are tools for individuals to block. And if we'd finally divorce ourselves from platforms and federation and escape to true p2p social networking, we'd all have maximum individual control: we could institute any blocking, boosting, ingestion, sharing, and ranking criteria we wanted. Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry. But back to the core point - you shouldn't get to choose who people talk to if you're not a first party in that conversation. You shouldn't get to choose who can publish openly or who can read public broadcasts. If you want to keep your words private, share them in private. Your choices should be limited to blocking what you personally dislike at your own consumption level, and it should be that way for everyone. Because that's fair. The pendulums of politics will swing. One day liberals will need the free speech refuge again. Preserve it now even if you want to get rid of it. Question yourself if you find yourself wanting to mute or persecute others. If you're angry with my words right now, please ask yourself why you want the other party to shut up. I want to emphasize that I do not agree with the far right. But I will fight with my last breath to preserve the right to free speech for us all. If we lose it, we will slide into tyrannical oppression from those in power. I wish we could all just get along. I know that's not going to happen in my lifetime, but we should make best attempts at deescalation and maintaining open communication with one another. Conversation can be a bridge.
c0balt 3y ago
It's entertaining from an outsiders perspective. On the one hand it's public content for everyone. However onnthe other hand ithey desire the public content to be restricted making it by definition not public, i.e., private anymore.
lakomen 3y ago
Of course I can say who can't use my work. It's my creation, I get to make the rules. If I explicitly deny Meta to use my work, then that is my wish and I can sue them.
- dcow 3y ago
  > It's my creation, I get to make the rules. As has been explained multiple times, that's now how it works. If you sell me a copy of your work, you do not have any authority after that to dictate how I use your work.

by dcow 3y ago

Guvante 3y ago

Your understanding is flawed. Copyright is 100% okay with transitively controlling production of content. After all how else would you describe someone allowing Netflix to stream your content? You can't restream Netflix and Netflix is restricted on how it can stream to you. Both rooted in the original Copyright protection and the licenses to content given out by intermediaries. Most posting platforms give themselves very broad rights with what they can do in a transitive fashion. But that is "companies don't want to get sued for user uploaded content and are lazy" not "you don't have any rights over things that are published".

dcow 3y ago
It's not that simple. If I sell you a book, I cannot place a restriction on that sale saying you can't resell that book (first sale doctrine). You're allowed to do that because you own the copy of the book. You can't copy the book and sell it, because you don't own the copyright, but you can sell the original copy, show it to whomever you want, etc. It's not that "copyright is okay with transitive licensing" but more that "copyright simply prevents you from copying a work you didn't create (or otherwise don't have copyrights over)". That's all it does. If you want to place downstream restrictions on your content then you have to license it (and get someone to agree to your license). You have rights over how you license content. Yes. And users may agree that they're only "viewing" a copy and don't in fact own it when engaging with your licensed content, sure. But my main point was that you don't get to publish content to the public domain and then say oh wait no I didn't want Meta to see that oops #privacy #cancelmeta. And further that it's kinda silly to imagine a world where everyone licenses every little toot they make. At some point we're in a public forum and we just all need to understand what that means, including that someone you don't like might be listening. Anyway, I don't think licensing content is a positive thing for society. It may benefit media conglomerates, but not individuals. Arguably, creators shouldn't be allowed to say "Netflix you can stream this content to users but not in Brazil". I don't think it's a sealed deal that downstream restrictions on content distribution are healthy or in any way in the public interest. Charging a royalty for a views/streams of some show is one thing. Saying "only on Tuesdays and not in Brazil" gives too much control to creators to dictate how their art should be interpreted. And nobody can prevent you from using Netflix to stream a show to your Brazilian friend on the couch next to you... nor should they ever be able to. That would be really really bad technology, were it to exist. So short of attaching licenses to every post you make, no, there's not a socially healthy, let alone even viable, strategy to control content distribution in the "fediverse".
- wpietri 3y ago
  > So short of attaching licenses to every post you make I think you have this backwards. Full copyright protection is the default for all content not licensed otherwise. Publishing does not put content into a "public domain" status. Social media platforms already have strong legal terms around every piece of content. If you violate that license, platforms may choose to fuck you up. E.g.: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-surveillance-firm-sued-for-scraping-facebook-and-instagram-data https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-s... It would be easy enough for particular Mastodon servers and/or accounts to be explicit about their downstream licensing.
  - dcow 3y ago
    I understand that generally you retain the copyright to your works implicitly and that you don't have to actively file for copyright in order to gain the protection of copyright law. I'm arguing that it's pretty preposterous for a global decentralized federated social platform to assume some authority (enforced by whom, that'd require a central group of enforcers) over the licensing of posts on the network by invoking US copyright law. Conceptually it doesn't make any sense. So the only thing Mastodon can do is at a protocol/code level require that public content flowing through the pipes be licensed for public consumption (copying and distribution) on the network, the colloquial "public domain". > It would be easy enough I can't really imagine the matrix of which nodes can federate with which others based on the default content license they impose on posted content. "Oh you can only view my post if you use this server over here because it uses a compatible downstream licensing configuration." Would that really "work"?
    - onlymonkeys 3y ago
      [dead]
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      Mastodon-the-software doesn't have to do anything. Mastodon instances have to choose whether to block Threads or not. Of course there is no 'central enforcement', that would be at odds with the very principle of federated social media (namely, that instance admins are free to choose how they run their own instance).
mattigames 3y ago
Is Facebook supposed to scan all Twitter everytime you post something to check if it's not violating the copyright of someone there? To know every paragraph of every single book? Or scan the entire internet for that matter? That is not "lazy", that is just a ridiculous expectation, no (legal) social network would survive if that was necessary to operate Not to mention the millions of derivative works where the definition gets fuzzy: I applied a filter to someone else photo and put an emoji over it, is still the same work? Should FB algorithm be smart enough to classify it as a copyright violation? It would be unsustainable economically to run that algorithm against the millions of posts, and even if they told the user "stop! that is copyrighted!" a huge chunk of users would just edit their post a bit and just try again.
- dcow 3y ago
  That's the point, they're not. Copyright is a dumb concept when applied to social network posts (let alone the internet) and we shouldn't be wanting to emulate it on a decentralized social network.

nobody9999 3y ago

>Yeah I stopped reading the article once it mentioned people getting annoyed and wanting to control who sees their public content. You don't get to make that call. A fair point, and one that's not really new either. Don't want something to be public? Don't post it publicly. As I recall, when my employer at the time (mid 1990s) "federated" their email with the rest of the world, they sent out a memo which stated, in part, "don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of your local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but I imagine you can see the parallels. That said, I do get to control who sees my content -- by not making it public (i.e., I don't federate my AP instances and curate who can create accounts on them). If you want something to be private, don't post it publicly. I'm not sure why that's such a foreign idea to some folks since, as I mentioned, it's not even close to being a new idea.

jdp23 3y ago
The article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair?
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >he article explicitly says that talking only about public posts ignores other privacy risks, and has an example related to a followers-only post. Knowing that, do you really think his point is fair? I was responding to the idea that if you post something publicly, whether that's on a Mastodon instance, a bulletin board at the library, in a Craigslist ad or any other public forum, it's unreasonable to attempt to limit access to the information contained therein. That's intuitively obvious, no? If you only want specific people to see that information, only give it to those folks. And if they're trustworthy, they won't share it with others but that's not guaranteed.` How does the old saw go? "Three can keep a secret, if two are dead." Don't want something to be public? Don't post it in a public forum. Full stop. I am unfamiliar with the example you mention and its potential privacy impacts. But even if (and maybe especially if) there are the risks/issues you allude to, that doesn't obviate (and perhaps even strengthens) my point.

mcv 3y ago

Controlling who can see your content is actually a very reasonable feature; some things are not meant for everybody, but just for the people who actually know you. But it's not a use case that ActivityPub was designed for. Google+ had a really nice feature where you could easily control who can see your post. Diapora has something similar, but considering it's federated, I'm not sure if you can really guarantee it. I think the only way to guarantee this control in a federated system, is to encrypt everything that's not completely public. If everybody has a public key, you can use that to encrypt the secret key. It's a hassle, but I think this would work.

XorNot 3y ago
This still doesn't make sense though: the reality is that your content will be private right up till someone reposts it publicly. Or saves the image, recompresses, posts it to reddit, reddit posts it to ActivityPub etc. etc.
- mcv 3y ago
  Of course. On Google+, you got a warning if you reshared something that wasn't shared publicly, but it was possible. It's also a matter of trusting the people you share it with. In the end, every private, highly encrypted message can always be made public by the recipient. That doesn't mean encryption is worthless for privacy.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Right but even then the basis of protection was still being gated in punishment metted out by a higher power. That literally doesn't exist in a decentralized model - not only can anyone setup a new instance, instances which are blacklisted can also simply rebrand. Beyond the tightest group of confidants who you can actually trust, your content can and will leak if you put it online - and the probability of this goes up as the legal entities involved become smaller and have less and less to lose.
joe_the_user 3y ago
The funniest thing about people wanting this kind of transitive control is that the only technical way to achieve this is through a wall-garden model like ... Facebook. Indeed, Meta/FB is eager to train people to want this model 'cause they know you at least one referee controlling everything if you have this transitive model. Diapora has something similar, but considering it's federated, I'm not sure if you can really guarantee it. Exactly, this level of access requires a hegemon. Who will be the hegemon?

echelon 3y ago

There's a portion of the far left and the up-and-coming gen-zalpha that takes on a dictatorial "censorship is okay for things we dislike" attitude. They don't realize that in the 90's and 00's free speech was a place of refuge for liberals to escape from evangelical attacks on everything from LGBT rights to Pokemon. They also don't appreciate that the "come one and all" nature of the internet back then led to many people crossing the fences and experiencing viewpoints they'd never seen or heard before. This is an atmosphere we desperately need to return to. Present day censorship, "gotcha" moderation, and algorithmic manipulation of emotion have led to hyper polarization. We should 1) deescalate the intrusion of these systems and remove them from our day-to-day experience and 2) reinforce the fundamental rights we all deserve. Social media networks with over 100,000,000 daily active users should not be considered as "private companies with a right to free speech through censorship". They are effectively public squares that we have all elected and chosen to share. Right and left alike. Public companies tend to censor to protect profits, but small individuals (such as Reddit moderators and Fediverse instance maintainers) do it from either a position of laziness or political retribution. The latter is a form of disgust and hatred for fellow humans and should be called out as such, even if the other party is guilty of the same. I've seen the free speech argument twisted into "right wing figures trying to force their views into everyone's feed", but that need not be the case. There are tools for individuals to block. And if we'd finally divorce ourselves from platforms and federation and escape to true p2p social networking, we'd all have maximum individual control: we could institute any blocking, boosting, ingestion, sharing, and ranking criteria we wanted. Many amongst the left obsesses over what the right is doing (and vice versa), which tells me people enjoy rubbernecking rather than tuning out. It's a game of "neener-neener" high school football rivalry. But back to the core point - you shouldn't get to choose who people talk to if you're not a first party in that conversation. You shouldn't get to choose who can publish openly or who can read public broadcasts. If you want to keep your words private, share them in private. Your choices should be limited to blocking what you personally dislike at your own consumption level, and it should be that way for everyone. Because that's fair. The pendulums of politics will swing. One day liberals will need the free speech refuge again. Preserve it now even if you want to get rid of it. Question yourself if you find yourself wanting to mute or persecute others. If you're angry with my words right now, please ask yourself why you want the other party to shut up. I want to emphasize that I do not agree with the far right. But I will fight with my last breath to preserve the right to free speech for us all. If we lose it, we will slide into tyrannical oppression from those in power. I wish we could all just get along. I know that's not going to happen in my lifetime, but we should make best attempts at deescalation and maintaining open communication with one another. Conversation can be a bridge.

c0balt 3y ago

It's entertaining from an outsiders perspective. On the one hand it's public content for everyone. However onnthe other hand ithey desire the public content to be restricted making it by definition not public, i.e., private anymore.

lakomen 3y ago

Of course I can say who can't use my work. It's my creation, I get to make the rules. If I explicitly deny Meta to use my work, then that is my wish and I can sue them.

dcow 3y ago
> It's my creation, I get to make the rules. As has been explained multiple times, that's now how it works. If you sell me a copy of your work, you do not have any authority after that to dictate how I use your work.