I don't think you're arguing in good faith. In fact, reading your comment again, I am pretty sure you are arguing in bad faith. And I have better things to do than engaging with that.

If anyone wants to engage in an honest conversation, those who follow me on fedi or have seen my comments around here know I'm totally game for that. But "and yet you engage in society! curious!"-level discussion is not worth anyone's time, frankly. 🙂

I agree with a lot of the spirit of what they're saying, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't agree with their concrete applications of it (although they are unclear in the thread).

I think blurring the lines between public and private spaces is the opposite of informing consent. Cultivating unrealistic expectations of "privacy" and control in what are ultimately public spaces is actually bad, imo.

Informed consent in the fediverse should look something like a message on the signup page that says: This is a publishing system. Be aware that everything you publish here will be distributed to a bunch of other servers which are not under the control of us, the operators of your server. When you edit or delete something you've published, we will honor it and relay the message, but other servers may or may not honor it. There are many other tools for private (encrypted) group communication, but that is not what this is. ActivityPub is for publishing.

ps: I, for one, am glad that the Internet Archive exists!

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):

Most people in tech do not want to hear this, because it invalidates
the vast majority of their business models, AI/ML training data,
business intel operations, and so forth. Anything that's based on
gathering data that is 'public' suddenly becomes suspect, if the
above is applied.

And yes, that includes internet darlings like the Internet Archive,
which also operates on a non-consensual, opt-out model.

It's the Western Acquisition, claiming ownership without permission.

It's so ingrained in white, Western internet culture that there are
now whole generations who consider anything that can be read by the
crawler they wrote in a weekend to be fair game, regardless or what
the user's original intent was.

Republishing, reformatting, archiving, aggregating, all without the
user being fully aware, because if they were, they would object.

It's dishonest as fuck, and no different from colonial attitudes
towards natural resources.

"It's there, so we can take it."

We then have some reasonable responses from others in the thread:

Rich Felker @dalias@hachyderm.io

Re: Internet Archive, I think many of us don't believe/accept that
businesses, organizations, genuine public figure politicians,
etc. have a right to control how their publications of public
relevance are archived & shared. The problem is that IA isn't able
to mechanically distinguish between those cases and teenagers'
personal diary-like blogs (chosen as example at opposite end of
spectrum).

Arne Babenhauserheide @ArneBab@rollenspiel.social

*snip*

This is the difference between the internet archive and an ML model:
the archive does not claim ownership.

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.

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! rytter.me/display/4c906314-476… 🤣

(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 ?

0x1C3B00DA

2023-01-03 14:21:47

Private and Public Mastodon

ongoing by Tim Bray · Private and Public Mastodon

^{www.tbray.org}

We're trying our best to build a place on the internet where association is more voluntary, where we can be ourselves without getting dumped on by people who don't think we deserve to exist, where we can say with more (but not perfect) surety that we aren't being spied on. I think(?) it's the last point you're challenging: ActivityPub is not the right protocol for what we're trying to accomplish. You are technically right, but it's what we have, and you can't really blame us for feeling uncomfortable when people try to do things with our data that makes us feel uncomfortable.

What's given the fediverse a place outside the corporate internet was, for a long time, the fact that it seemed irrelevant. That's slowly starting to change now. People are coming into the fediverse who don't share the same ideals, while plenty have been around for quite a while. We do what we can to keep our part of the fediverse a safe space

Now, what's scary is that we're getting to a point where it looks like we might be outnumbered, and the tools we've built over the years are being turned against us. Such is free software, but it hurts, and I do believe we have a right to be hurt, and to refuse to associate with people who hurt us.