Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (@sindarina@mastodon.lol)
mstdn.socialI am a bit worried about the number of people here who, like me, are fairly recent arrivals, and who are using the so-called 'extreme' and 'unreasonable' reactions to them wanting to 'hack' the fediverse to write off the whole conversation around consent as somehow not relevant.
The NSA monitors anything you do on the internet anyway, so why are you complaining about tech bros wanting to harvest out in the open, yada yada.
It seems we need to define what consent actually is.
AGAIN.
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I could be wrong, but I interpret this post as being about Mastodon’s culture of being against search technology, which I find depressing and irritating for reasons I explained in that other thread as well as this one.
However, I just noticed a place where there is some lack of informed consent here on Lemmy: in the Lemmy UI, it appears that upvotes and downvotes are anonymous. I checked a long time ago, and realized that they weren’t really; the identity of the up or down voter is federated, but it is simply not shown by the UI.
I would assume that many (probably most) lemmy users do not realize this: admins of your own instance and all federated instances have the ability to see who upvoted and downvoted what.
It just now came to my attention that Friendica actually is showing this information publicly, in the form of “$username does not like this” for a downvote! https://rytter.me/display/4c906314-4763-d3aa-4584-11a516756414 🤣
(hey @OptimusPrime@lemmy.ml … why did you downvote that? I myself am also listed there as not liking it; I downvoted it as a test to confirm my assumption that it would show up as “does not like”, and then when I undownvoted it that event apparently didn’t get federated.)
imo these are the kind of “informed consent” issues that fediverse developers should be thinking about, rather than “how can we increase the power imbalance by making it so that only the elite are allowed to have fulltext search… in the name of justice” as so many seem to be hell-bent on doing.
i clicked a button that most lemmy users would assume is an anonymous up/down vote and now my name is listed on a 3rd party website saying i “don’t like” something (even though I tried to undo it).
#thisisfine?deleted by creator
And here’s the point at which we go off the rails (towards the end of the thread; the earlier section is quite well expressed):
We then have some reasonable responses from others in the thread:
Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io
Arne Babenhauserheide @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social
*snip*
Finally, a thought of mine own:
Sindarina seems to fundamentally miss the central idea of the world wide web, that is, publically sharing information. This does not mean the work may be used for any purpose whatsoever, as the content of many websites is either copyrighted or CC-BY-SA. But publishing anything on the www or in print, opens it by necessity to aggregation and archival. I routinely save webpages to disk.
To run with the cafe analogy that has been brought up, one cannot post a note to the cafe’s bulletin board and at the same time expect that no one else may take a photo of it, then perhaps share it with some acquaintances.
This is a far cry from the data harvesting done by Google, Microsoft, Apple & co., or the dubiously collected data used to train “automated plagiarism engine[s],” as Arthur Besse put it not too long ago.
It’s fair that maybe the architecture of public inbox/outbox protocols aren’t suited for this kind of use (juxtapose with Matrix).
However consider this: Some people on the fediverse simply don’t want to be indexed. It should be opt-in instead of opt-out, for people who explicitly want it. People aren’t against search, they’re against non-consensual search.
I think it’s important for the culture of the fediverse that such civility is encouraged. Because on the fediverse, the community can actually make a difference. By blocking federation with offenders, we can guide the culture of fedi. And it’s better for it.
Running with the idea that people can “technically” do what they want because of the nature of the protocols is counter-productive, because we actually can do something.
All a search implementer has to do is adapt to that culture, and they’ll be fine. So I don’t see why there’s such push-back against this viewpoint.
I would fully agree that other internet protocols are much better suited to information not meant to be broadcast publicly.
Civility is great, and should be highly encouraged. That’s largely why I like Lemmy. Each instance can guide its community in line with its values, whatever those may be, block offenders, and generally forge the space it wishes.
However, I think Besse’s comments on setting the correct expectations in the public sphere are worth considering.
For a different internet example: all the messages I send in any chatroom on an IRC server will inevitably be logged by someone, especially in popular rooms. Any assumption to the contrary would be naïve, and demanding that people not keep a log any of my publicly broadcast messages would be laughed at by the operators. It’s a public space, and sending anything to that space necessarily means I forgo my ability to control who sees, aggregates, archives, or shares that information. My choice to put the information into that space is the opt-in mechanism, just how books or interviews do the same offline in print.
It’s not so much the protocol as it is how making things public fundamentally works.
With respect to your thoughts: just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should. I don’t want people scraping my posts. I find it creepy. The fediverse (some parts of it, at least) was, for many people and for a long time, a place they could go to connect with people without needing to argue about the legal definition of consent. The fact that people can technically get away with scraping my posts isn’t permission to do so. And, obviously, just turning off your computer isn’t an option, because, at least in the global north-west, you need to have an online presence to be involved in society.
Nobody is claiming that the web is a place for healthy relationships with corporations. It isn’t. The web is a place corporations constructed to make more money. This is about working together to build something better.
I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it. It’s just like, a courtesy thing. Will there need to be protocol changes to technologically force people not to do this? Probably. Should there have to be? I really wish I could say there didn’t need to be.
I think Besse makes a great point here:
I tried to single out the world wide web, as opposed to the internet at large, because the two are not synonymous. It’s rather absurd to publicly serve webpages to any querying IP address and maintain that the receiving computer is not to save said pages to disk.
All this to say: I find it difficult to argue that web publications should or could be exempt from aggregation and archival (or scraping, to put it another way). I understand that the ease with which bots do this can be disconcerting, however.
If we stay with the cafe bulletin board, getting a detailed overview of all the postings on the board is akin to scraping the whole thing. If we extend our analogy instead to a somewhat more significant example, library catalogs do the same with books, magazines, and movies.
This is the cost of publishing, be that in print or online. It must be expected that some person has a copy of every- and anything one has ever written or posted publicly, and perhaps even catalogued it. A way around this might be to move away from the web to another part of the internet, like Matrix, as alma suggested.
I assume the non-consensual collection of various (meta-)data is what you refer to when talking about intrusion and money making. Lemmy, like many projects, seeks to offer an alternative to corporate, data-gobbling social media sites, but doesn’t eliminate the ability to search through its webpages.