Post #3449270

2026-06-28 13:28 UTC

Form here I have two other points. One is on ethics, and the last ties back to the post that started this thread addressing sociotechnical systems and individual accountability versus systemic behavior. Unless you adhere to Libertarian ethics, which is strict contractualism and NAP, then you must recognize that not all shitty behavior is a consent violation. It's not a consent violation write a parody of your music without permission. It is shitty, which is why Weird Al always gets permission first. (It also saves legal headaches, but it's optional.) A relay that, for example, just reboots every single post on a server to all other servers as an opt-out service is a shitty thing to do. However, it's absolutely allowed as part of the Activity Pub API, nor is it a violation of the well established Fediverse norms. There is no reasonable expectation that content you post isn't going to be seen or shared by randoms. ActivityPub is structurally designed as a way to publicly publish through FOAF semantics to an arbitrarily large audience. If this was G+ and you took a screenshot from within one community and pasted it elsewhere, which happened all the time, that actually _is_ a consent violation because the entire design of G+ was to be able to keep communication intra-community instead of inter-community.

Replies (1)

@AeonCypher@lgbtqia.space 2026-06-28 14:00

So, it might be desirable to actually change ActivityPub. There are actually a lot of things I think ActivityPub really sucks at, but those could be fixed by extensions. For Example, ActivityPod allows SSO style interactions which can allow Federated posts for comments in webpages. This is relevant because technological decisions are typically made with respect to technological constraints and idealized users instead of idealized technology and user constraints. The moment you put a person in front of a technological system, they interact with that system and change it, the system then changes the behavior and thought patterns of the user, which then changes the way they use the system. Thus, these are cybernetic systems. That's why dark patterns are leveraged. Without the cybernetic feedback loop the dark patterns don't work. The problem with OSS, intentional communities, and open standards is that very often the cybernetic relationship is entirely ignored. Attempting to reenforce norms through individual blame and social pressure, which is how these communities tend to deal with this, creates fragmentation in communities, and pushes people from those communities. (I could write a whole other essay about how social cache is an often ignored source of power and is very frequently used for oppressive purposes, entirely enabled by group / mob dynamics.) The solution is to create systems that structurally align with the values. In the case of Federation this could be only allowing federation with communities that implement certain protocols, and amongst those protocols could be Kripke Relational Semantics defining who is and isn't allowed to repost a toot.

Open ##3452061