I don't mean this title as a comparison, but as an antagonistic relationship...
I've been off-and-on in the fediverse for longer than Mastodon has existed, I've followed the building of the fediverse since before ActivityPub ever existed.
I still consider it a blessing the explosive growth that happened within the fediverse... but I'm honestly sickened by the Mastodon effect of it...
So many of the new people hopped on Mastodon and thought that fediverse is just another name for Mastodon... some people even got so far as thinking fediverse is just another name for ActivityPub...
And people came with so many flawed views of what they think the fediverse is as well as completely unrealistic ideas of what it should be.
So many people see it as this miracle pill against all the evils of corporate social servers like Twitter, fixing every single problem that's ever existed in those communities.
... Those people are completely delusional... but they're loud and violent.
They get pissed off any time they run into the actual fediverse... they get pissed off when they realize there's platforms other than Mastodon that don't even remotely behave like Mastodon or especially their imaginary version of Mastodon.
And frankly... I'm getting pissed off at the entitlement of these people.
They think the fediverse is all about their consent on who can see their posts... this is like going to a waterpark and complaining that you didn't consent to getting wet... you went to a waterpark! When you post on the fediverse, you have consented... if you don't consent then you don't post to the fediverse. Reminds me of the annoying cycles of people sharing blocks of vaguely legal looking text to Facebook to try and override the TOS, thinking they can just say "I don't consent to the TOS" to get out of it when you explicitly consented by joining and you revoke that consent by leaving.
They think this is the place for private insular communities... because they walked into an empty park and thought "this public space is mine and will never have crowds of people wandering through". They get pissed at the idea of Meta joining the fediverse with Threads because it means there might be actually be a crowd walking through this public space...
They fuss about community as if their little tiny corner of the fediverse is the whole thing. They mistake their standards and agreements as those for the whole fediverse.
And worst of all these people will actively harass someone over expanding the federation of the fediverse in a way that's not only normal, but part of the specific design of how this place works... especially as these people are so damn clueless they think this is a single instance they can just tear down with pitchforks as opposed to just the one that briefly crossed their attention.
People who want to actively destroy the fediverse by isolating it, breaking it, and otherwise trying to "control" it can get bent.
This whole discussion about not connecting the #fediverse to nothing outside like #bluesky or #threads is pretty astonishing. The #activitypub protocol is a W3C standard meant for global communication and there should be no expectation whatsoever to stay within a small tightly-knit community. People have been whining about #Mastodon being small and celebrate each time when it grows.
There is nothing wrong with the wish to be part of a closed and small community. Set up your own server and communicate only to those to your liking. Or set up a BBS as in the old days. There are plenty of ways.
But please don't expect a global system to stay small for what you perceive as being "for your protection". It was never meant to be that way and will not stay that way for long.
Get involved to create good visibility settings and similar things that are baked into communication protocols. Learn and use encryption where it matters.
@m @readbeanicecream That is very nice to know and should be made public knowledge. Actually a LOT more education about the visibility settings should happen.
Far too many people "join an app" because they don't understand much.
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it’s designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak different protocols capable of talking to each other natively.
For the last few years, Ryan has been hard at work building a sytem that can natively speak IndieWeb, ActivityPub, atproto, and Nostr, and translate interactions back and forth in a manner as close to natural as possible.
Who is Ryan Barrett?
Ryan Barrett is a software engineer with a long track record. He co-founded Google App Engine, worked at an early cancer-detection company called Color, then as an engineer for a Climate Tech startup called NCX.
Overall, he has a deep understanding of the space, and wants to provide a tool for anyone to use. He’s also someone who has thought at length about community moderation, and wrote an excellent piece called Moderate People, Not Code.
What is Bridgy Fed?
Bridgy Fed is an effort to create a multi-protocol communication server that can translate people, content, and interactions back and forth between networks that speak different protocols.
For now, it only speaks IndieWeb and ActivityPub, but Ryan has put in a lot of effort into making it speak the AT Protocol (Bluesky) and Nostr as well. Those are due to come in the following weeks, and were a central focus in Ryan’s announcement.
How Did the Community Respond?
To be fair, a sizeable amount of people had good things to say about the new development, and many IndieWeb and Bluesky users were supportive and even excited.
Unfortunately, an extremely vocal part of Mastodon expressed a range of negative reactions, going from critiques to insults to vitriol, demanding everything from the developer deleting his project to Ryan leaving the network permanently.
Looking through the comments, most negative feedback touches on the following:
This tool violates user consent by being opt-out, rather than opt-in.
I don’t want my profile and content showing up on Jack Dosey’s corporate social network.
So, let’s take a moment to unpack this, because it’s not as cut and dry as it appears.
User Consent and the Fediverse
The main controversy people seem to have in the Fediverse boils down to the fact that users have to Opt-Out of the service, rather than Opt-In. But, there’s a few fundamental misunderstandings here:
Federation itself is Opt-Out
A lot of people responded to Ryan with statements about how Bridgy Fed’s Opt-out nature violated their consent. In some cases, it got really nasty.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
Here’s the thing: everyone wants to bang on this idea that the Fediverse is based on consent, that users are the ones at the forefront of who they get to connect to, that those decisions are inherently opt-in, and users get to decide everything.
As evidenced by these geniuses.
But, that’s a myth: the very nature of how federation works in this space is “Open By Default”.
To prevent messages and interactions from flowing in and out of a place, users or admins have to activately block a server. What this fundamentally means is that the Fediverse is opt-out by design; connections flow until they don’t.
The point of the fediverse is to connect with others, with full control and safety. It’s for making connections between networks of different sizes and implementations.
We have ample tools to control who can connect with us on the fediverse — the visibility of our posts, deciding who can and can’t follow us, personal blocks, domain blocks, and filters. Extra opt-out features like a profile hashtag, searchability flags, or indexibility flags give even more control.
With any other network on the fediverse, we allow connections to get started first, and then use these control mechanisms to shape our experience as individuals and as instance communities. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do that with this bridge, too.
Evan Prodromou
That isn’t some random dude, that’s the guy who started the Fediverse, stating that the network being open by default is how things ought to be.
If any connections on the Fediverse were opt-in, people would have to opt in to federation on a case-by-case basis. This would seriously hamper the growth of Mastodon, and clashes with its own “open by default” philosophy. Bridgy’s own design values are more in line with what Mastodon does than against it.
Bridgy Fed isn’t a Crawler
A big part of the drama stems from the fact that people have assumptions about how Bridgy Fed works. Turns out, it’s not a bot that crawls the Fediverse and harvests user data! In fact, it doesn’t index anything, or offer search functionality of any kind. The dude isn’t building a data farm!
So then, what is Bridgy Fed doing, exactly?
An easy way to grasp this is to look at how interacting with remote stuff works in Mastodon. Let’s say you look up a remote user handle, or a URL to a post, using Mastodon’s search interface. Your server looks up that resource, fetches the data, and renders it locally for you to interact with.
Bridgy Fed and User Privacy
Bridgy Fed is basically doing exactly that, with just one extra step: it’s translating data on another network to something your own system can read, and it can work in two directions. That’s basically it.
There are also a couple of aspects of how Bridgy Fed works with user privacy settings and actions:
Bridgy accepts user blocks from ActivityPub, and also federates out edits and deletes. Actor blocks, reports, and domain blocks are recognized, and Bridgy respects Authorized Fetch.
Private statuses are not ingested by the bridge, because the other protocols don’t have an equivalent for private conversations.
If a user has #NoBridge on their profile or requests exclusion ahead of time, a cross-network lookup will fail for that user automatically, from every network, every time the lookup is attempted.
Bridgy and Multiprotocol Servers
Bridging across networks is something of a time-honored tradition in the decentralized social space. In more recent years, the Friendica family tree has acted as a glue between vast parts of the network, getting its hooks into OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub in addition to their own native protocols.
While there has been hiccups, dissonance, and occasionally frustration, these kinds of efforts have helped expand the network while keeping it from being a total monoculture. Many projects within the early Fediverse were able to find inspiration from one another, despite taking different approaches to solving various problems.
The idea of a public post being translated into another protocol being considered a violation of consent is, frankly, unprecedented. But, this was never about converting a post schema from one JSON form to another, was it? In its basic form, who could possibly care about that?
No, this is about your post showing up on *that other network*.
Misunderstanding Bluesky
Maybe none of the above details matter to you. Maybe you’ve decided, screw this guy for connecting my posts to Jack Dorsey’s fake decentralized network!
If this is your position, I have a few notes for you!
Jack Dorsey doesn’t own Bluesky! Aside from a position as a sitting board member in an advisory role, he’s actually not involved. In fact, he deleted his Bluesky account some months ago, and spends almost all of his time hyping Nostr and Bitcoin.
Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation – while it’s true that they’re still a corporation, and still have some kind of profit motive, this immediately changes the dynamic from “a platform owned by some rich guy” to “a platform owned by a company”.
Federation is coming soon – the Bluesky team has been actively testing federation and building for it. A lot of people claim that Bluesky doesn’t care about federation, and isn’t going to do it…but, it’s happening soon. If a network can federate, and other people can run their own nodes and services, the network itself isn’t Jack Dorsey’s, or even one entity’s.
We have an upcoming article that’s going to dig deeper into some of the myths about Bluesky. But the main point here is, Bluesky isn’t the Anti-Christ to the Fediverse that people claim that it is. It’s a different approach, by different people. That’s it.
In Conclusion
I chose to write this as an Opinion piece, because I don’t expect my point of view to be The Only View That Matters. I think Bridgy Fed is a cool project, and that Ryan doesn’t deserve the hate for building something he’s passionate about in his spare time.
I was struck by a really remarkable thread by Marco Rogers, who sorted through his feelings on the situation and identified the “ick” factor in this whole situation.
In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?
This is a decentralized network! Despite efforts to work together, optimize for user safety, and identify actively hostile communities, none of us are in charge. We can bring great initiatives, collaborations, tooling, you name it, but nobody is actually in charge here.
I want to be clear about my stance on user consent: I think it’s a good thing, and worth building for, even in a network where openness is the default. I think serious work needs to be done to better empower end users over privacy, access, and permissions. We can do better, in so many ways, and that future is coming.
But throwing a fit over your public data federating to some other network because someone on the other side decided to follow you from there? That’s some peak NIMBY Mastodon HOA bullshit. I would forgive them for unfollowing you.
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it's designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak differen
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it’s designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak different protocols capable of talking to each other natively.
For the last few years, Ryan has been hard at work building a sytem that can natively speak IndieWeb, ActivityPub, atproto, and Nostr, and translate interactions back and forth in a manner as close to natural as possible.
Who is Ryan Barrett?
Ryan Barrett is a software engineer with a long track record. He co-founded Google App Engine, worked at an early cancer-detection company called Color, then as an engineer for a Climate Tech startup called NCX.
Overall, he has a deep understanding of the space, and wants to provide a tool for anyone to use. He’s also someone who has thought at length about community moderation, and wrote an excellent piece called Moderate People, Not Code.
What is Bridgy Fed?
Bridgy Fed is an effort to create a multi-protocol communication server that can translate people, content, and interactions back and forth between networks that speak different protocols.
For now, it only speaks IndieWeb and ActivityPub, but Ryan has put in a lot of effort into making it speak the AT Protocol (Bluesky) and Nostr as well. Those are due to come in the following weeks, and were a central focus in Ryan’s announcement.
How Did the Community Respond?
To be fair, a sizeable amount of people had good things to say about the new development, and many IndieWeb and Bluesky users were supportive and even excited.
Unfortunately, an extremely vocal part of Mastodon expressed a range of negative reactions, going from critiques to insults to vitriol, demanding everything from the developer deleting his project to Ryan leaving the network permanently.
Looking through the comments, most negative feedback touches on the following:
This tool violates user consent by being opt-out, rather than opt-in.
I don’t want my profile and content showing up on Jack Dosey’s corporate social network.
So, let’s take a moment to unpack this, because it’s not as cut and dry as it appears.
User Consent and the Fediverse
The main controversy people seem to have in the Fediverse boils down to the fact that users have to Opt-Out of the service, rather than Opt-In. But, there’s a few fundamental misunderstandings here:
Federation itself is Opt-Out
A lot of people responded to Ryan with statements about how Bridgy Fed’s Opt-out nature violated their consent. In some cases, it got really nasty.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
Here’s the thing: everyone wants to bang on this idea that the Fediverse is based on consent, that users are the ones at the forefront of who they get to connect to, that those decisions are inherently opt-in, and users get to decide everything.
As evidenced by these geniuses.
But, that’s a myth: the very nature of how federation works in this space is “Open By Default”.
To prevent messages and interactions from flowing in and out of a place, users or admins have to activately block a server. What this fundamentally means is that the Fediverse is opt-out by design; connections flow until they don’t.
The point of the fediverse is to connect with others, with full control and safety. It’s for making connections between networks of different sizes and implementations.
We have ample tools to control who can connect with us on the fediverse — the visibility of our posts, deciding who can and can’t follow us, personal blocks, domain blocks, and filters. Extra opt-out features like a profile hashtag, searchability flags, or indexibility flags give even more control.
With any other network on the fediverse, we allow connections to get started first, and then use these control mechanisms to shape our experience as individuals and as instance communities. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do that with this bridge, too.
Evan Prodromou
That isn’t some random dude, that’s the guy who started the Fediverse, stating that the network being open by default is how things ought to be.
If any connections on the Fediverse were opt-in, people would have to opt in to federation on a case-by-case basis. This would seriously hamper the growth of Mastodon, and clashes with its own “open by default” philosophy. Bridgy’s own design values are more in line with what Mastodon does than against it.
Bridgy Fed isn’t a Crawler
A big part of the drama stems from the fact that people have assumptions about how Bridgy Fed works. Turns out, it’s not a bot that crawls the Fediverse and harvests user data! In fact, it doesn’t index anything, or offer search functionality of any kind. The dude isn’t building a data farm!
So then, what is Bridgy Fed doing, exactly?
An easy way to grasp this is to look at how interacting with remote stuff works in Mastodon. Let’s say you look up a remote user handle, or a URL to a post, using Mastodon’s search interface. Your server looks up that resource, fetches the data, and renders it locally for you to interact with.
Bridgy Fed and User Privacy
Bridgy Fed is basically doing exactly that, with just one extra step: it’s translating data on another network to something your own system can read, and it can work in two directions. That’s basically it.
There are also a couple of aspects of how Bridgy Fed works with user privacy settings and actions:
Bridgy accepts user blocks from ActivityPub, and also federates out edits and deletes. Actor blocks, reports, and domain blocks are recognized, and Bridgy respects Authorized Fetch.
Private statuses are not ingested by the bridge, because the other protocols don’t have an equivalent for private conversations.
If a user has #NoBridge on their profile or requests exclusion ahead of time, a cross-network lookup will fail for that user automatically, from every network, every time the lookup is attempted.
Bridgy and Multiprotocol Servers
Bridging across networks is something of a time-honored tradition in the decentralized social space. In more recent years, the Friendica family tree has acted as a glue between vast parts of the network, getting its hooks into OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub in addition to their own native protocols.
While there has been hiccups, dissonance, and occasionally frustration, these kinds of efforts have helped expand the network while keeping it from being a total monoculture. Many projects within the early Fediverse were able to find inspiration from one another, despite taking different approaches to solving various problems.
The idea of a public post being translated into another protocol being considered a violation of consent is, frankly, unprecedented. But, this was never about converting a post schema from one JSON form to another, was it? In its basic form, who could possibly care about that?
No, this is about your post showing up on *that other network*.
Misunderstanding Bluesky
Maybe none of the above details matter to you. Maybe you’ve decided, screw this guy for connecting my posts to Jack Dorsey’s fake decentralized network!
If this is your position, I have a few notes for you!
Jack Dorsey doesn’t own Bluesky! Aside from a position as a sitting board member in an advisory role, he’s actually not involved. In fact, he deleted his Bluesky account some months ago, and spends almost all of his time hyping Nostr and Bitcoin.
Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation – while it’s true that they’re still a corporation, and still have some kind of profit motive, this immediately changes the dynamic from “a platform owned by some rich guy” to “a platform owned by a company”.
Federation is coming soon – the Bluesky team has been actively testing federation and building for it. A lot of people claim that Bluesky doesn’t care about federation, and isn’t going to do it…but, it’s happening soon. If a network can federate, and other people can run their own nodes and services, the network itself isn’t Jack Dorsey’s, or even one entity’s.
We have an upcoming article that’s going to dig deeper into some of the myths about Bluesky. But the main point here is, Bluesky isn’t the Anti-Christ to the Fediverse that people claim that it is. It’s a different approach, by different people. That’s it.
In Conclusion
I chose to write this as an Opinion piece, because I don’t expect my point of view to be The Only View That Matters. I think Bridgy Fed is a cool project, and that Ryan doesn’t deserve the hate for building something he’s passionate about in his spare time.
I was struck by a really remarkable thread by Marco Rogers, who sorted through his feelings on the situation and identified the “ick” factor in this whole situation.
In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?
This is a decentralized network! Despite efforts to work together, optimize for user safety, and identify actively hostile communities, none of us are in charge. We can bring great initiatives, collaborations, tooling, you name it, but nobody is actually in charge here.
I want to be clear about my stance on user consent: I think it’s a good thing, and worth building for, even in a network where openness is the default. I think serious work needs to be done to better empower end users over privacy, access, and permissions. We can do better, in so many ways, and that future is coming.
But throwing a fit over your public data federating to some other network because someone on the other side decided to follow you from there? That’s some peak NIMBY Mastodon HOA bullshit. I would forgive them for unfollowing you.
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it's designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak differen
I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months. They're very different experiences, and I like them both for different reasons. But I think they are headed in different directions. They're going to continue to diverge in terms of what they offer.
Since the BridgyFed drama, there might be four more reasons for Mastodon users to want Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) out of the Fediverse. I mean, aside from their usual atrocities like their users writing well over 500 characters, using text formatting, quoting and quote-posting like it's totally normal. Because it is for them. And aside from no instance on any of the three having rules and moderator numbers on par with Mastodon.
One, they aren't based on ActivityPub. They're technically bridged to Mastodon. They're bridged one instance at the time, and the bridge is a plug-in on the instance and therefore part of the project. But still, it isn't that much different from BridgyFed connecting Bluesky to the rest of the Fediverse.
Two, since they aren't based on ActivityPub, they're aliens. Aliens of basically the same kind as Bluesky, only that they've mostly got those features that Mastodon has that Bluesky doesn't. But the BridgyFed drama isn't about Bluesky's features or lack thereof, and it isn't only about Bluesky being commercial either. It's also about Bluesky being too different in technology, functionality and culture. But let me tell you a secret: Bluesky is probably much closer to Mastodon than Hubzilla. I mean, I've already mentioned how Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) users "misbehave" from a Mastodon point of view. You won't see any of this come from Bluesky anytime soon.
Three, Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky. It's a feature that was introduced with the latest stable release.
Four, speaking of Friendica, that allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica. Only that the user who started that particular thread is on Firefish, and Fediverse News only automatically forwarded what he had posted.
@Jupiter Rowland Yes, and don't forget that Mastodon just recently migrated to ActivityPub itself - it started off with OStatus so it could federate with as many existing foreign servers as possible.
@Jupiter Rowland Hi Jupiter. I learn new stuff each time i read your posts, it seems, but here i'm quite struggling. I seem to be entirely ignorant of most of the things you've mentioned above.
"the BridgyFed drama" ... 🤷♀️
"Mastodon users to want Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) out of the Fediverse" ... they do? OMZ! Why? I mean, yes i read & understand all your points about our formatting & character limits, but i had no idea this was causing some adverse Masto user conflict 😮
"aren't based on ActivityPub" ... OMZ, i nearly fell over at this one. I thought everything in the fediverse was predicated on this, in that that was how the fediverse was even a thing. Geez i am so ignorant. 🤦♀️
"Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky" ... oh, well, this one i do dislike. Now i need to research how i can block #Bluesky; i really want nothing to do with it, nor #Threads.
"allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica" ... sigh. I simply don't understand how i am so unaware. I am active each day in my account, yet somehow remain cluelessly obliviously ignorant of nuclear wars raging around me. Sigh.
This means that the AT Protocol Servers (currently Bluesky, Friendica) can talk to ActivityPub servers (Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla, PeerTube, Pixelfed, etc., etc.).
Some people are so angry that they are flipping out and dropping F bombs.
And there are many protocols in the fediverse. ActivityPub is the most popular, but there are also Zot, Nomad, OpenWebAuth, Diaspora, and more. There is even a protocol called Scuttlebutt.
For example, Hubzilla uses the Zot protocol to talk to other Hubzilla servers, and Streams uses the Nomad protocol to talk to other Streams servers. Streams uses Zot to talk to Hubzilla. And both can use ActivityPub as well.
And far as Friendica federating with Bluesky, the administrator of the server would have to activate that. So not all Friendica servers would support AT protocol since it is an optional addon the admin would have to install.
The reality is that we have over 46,000 independently operated servers on the fediverse, and that is growing every day. Bluesky would simply be server number 46,001.
"the BridgyFed drama" is regarding this post about someone building a Bluesky / ActivityPub bridge for when Bluesky starts federating (they built their own protocol 🤮).
"Mastodon users to want Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) out of the Fediverse" I haven't seen this myself, but it wouldn't surprise me because a lot of users of Mastodon and platforms that modeled themselves off of Mastodon have this sense of entitlement and see other platforms as intruders in the space (even if that other platform was here first), it's a lesser part of why they get so upset over things like bridges to other networks or new platforms like threads joining.
"aren't based on ActivityPub" ActivityPub is pretty new in the space, the oldest in the space is Diaspora. Friendica is native ActivityPub and has a checkbox for native support of Diaspora and OStatus in the admin settings, both of which are older than AP
"Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky" Not quite true, especially as Bluesky does not yet federate. There's a plugin for Friendica which, at the moment, allows users on that server to use a puppet account on Bluesky (meaning you need a Bluesky account and the server is just copying to/from that puppet account). There are plans for that plugin to evolve into fully supporting federating with Bluesky when they do federate however. That will depend on whether your host has that plugin installed. If they do, then Bluesky servers (of which there will be multiple, not just the one that currently exists now) will appear just the same as AP servers in your feed, and likewise you can block them the same way.
"allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica" I haven't seen the claim myself, but the thread above was shared to the Fediverse News Friendica group. Since Groups are kind of a hack in AP (there's no actual group protocol feature), most Mastodon users are completely unfamiliar with them, so they think it's a regular user who's boosting/spamming all the conversation
Fediverse! I’ve been building a bridge to Bluesky, and they’re turning on federation soon, which means my bridge will be available soon too. You’ll be able to follow people on Bluesky from here in the fediverse, and vice versa.
Bluesky is a broad network with lots of worthwhile people and conversations! I hope you’ll give it a chance. Only fully public content is bridged, not followers-only or otherwise private posts or profiles. Still, if you want to opt out, I understand. Feel free to DM me at @snarfed@indieweb.social (different account than this one), email me, file a GitHub issue, or put #nobridge in your profile bio.
Hi! I’m Ryan. I’ve been building social network bridges and related tools for over 12 years, including Bridgy, which connects personal web sites and blogs to centralized social networks…
"aren't based on ActivityPub" ActivityPub is pretty new in the space, the oldest in the space is Diaspora.
The oldest one is actually OStatus, the protocol behind Laconi.ca/StatusNet/GNU social. It's from 2008. Diaspora* came out in September 2010.
Friendica is native ActivityPub and has a checkbox for native support of Diaspora and OStatus in the admin settings, both of which are older than AP
Friendica is native DFRN. It was launched in July 2010, so it's six years older than Mastodon and eight years older than the ActivityPub standard. Also, Friendica does things internally which AFAIK are still impossible with pure ActivityPub. Like on Hubzilla and (streams) to different degrees, ActivityPub is optional, but I think it's on by default for both nodes and accounts.
"Friendica is already fully federated with Bluesky" Not quite true, especially as Bluesky does not yet federate.
Not by Mastodon standards, but by Friendica standards.
In 2011, Friendica federated with Facebook. I'm not even kidding, it actually did. This federation required a Facebook account which was more or less remote-controlled from Friendica while also mirroring the Facebook friends list and the Facebook timeline into Friendica. But Friendica let this count as full federation. This ended when Facebook changed its TOS for external apps: They were no longer allowed to extract data.
Also, both Friendica and Hubzilla have a Twitter "bridge" to this day. It works the same as the Facebook connection, but it, too, counts as full federation by Friendica and Hubzilla's standards.
At least Friendica is also fully federated with Tumblr by its own standards. This wouldn't be possible without a Tumblr account either.
And the WordPress cross-poster available for both counts as federation, too.
"allegedly "hate-fuelling" Fediverse News is a public group account on Friendica" I haven't seen the claim myself, but the thread above was shared to the Fediverse News Friendica group. Since Groups are kind of a hack in AP (there's no actual group protocol feature), most Mastodon users are completely unfamiliar with them, so they think it's a regular user who's boosting/spamming all the conversation
...which led them into blocking the whole forum or even the entire Friendica node in their fuming rage.
Not by Mastodon standards, but by Friendica standards.
It's good also to have and find a common sense interpretation between two different jargons. In the end, the conversation is fragmented.
You post the same thing on , say, twitter and activitypub and bluesky and your blog.
You got feedback from the two different protocols and for you it's maybe well aggregated under your post, but people watching on twitter won't see and benefit from the feedback you got from a bluesky user. Maybe you answer to a comment from B and C can see your reply but can't fetch the message you're answering.
It's not a constructive collective conversation, you are having 3/4 different conversations.
It's not "federation" by Friendica standards either. In Friendica jargon these are called "Cross Posting Connectors". They're not federation in any sense, they require separate native accounts on those platforms and just allow you to view and post to those accounts from your Friendica home timeline. They're a user convenience feature. They don't take content from those other networks and actually put them into the Fediverse or vice versa.
@MsDropbear42 [venera] 🐨♀🌈🐧🦘 there is no actual federation with Bluesky yet, it is only an addon for now, which mostly works like the Tumblr addon for example: you have to have an active account there and use it to log in to settings>social networks>bluesky import/export. Also, some servers do not have the addon at all. So there is basically no native federation with Bluesky at all for the moment.
1. Most of the hate was directed at the developer who created the bridge and appeared as replies to his post announcing the bridge. Unless you were following him, or visited his channel on his website, you probably would have missed it anyway. The developer seemed to take it well and listened to people's feedback, but some people were inexcusably mean and hateful. Lots of F bombs directed at the developer. And there was a lot of ignorance about how the fediverse actually works (i.e. most didn't know that their posts are already federated beyond Mastodon).
2. When AT Protocol officially federates, Friendica admins will have the option of turn on AT protocol support natively, which means that Friendica would become a server on the AT protocol network, just like Bluesky. It will probably be one of the first implementations of AT protocol outside of Bluesky itself. Friendica also supports ActivityPub natively as well, so if an admin has both turned on, they are operating on both networks simultaneously. That's why they are listed on both sides.
3. Scuttlebutt is an interesting protocol. It is designed for social interactions using devices that are not always connected to the internet or not connected to the internet at all. Devices basically pass on messages to one another without the use of the internet. (At least that is my limited understanding of it.)
4. The nice thing about platforms like Friendica, Hubzilla, and Streams is that they are big on user choice and control. So even if your administrator activated it, you still have some control as a user as to whether you see posts from Bluesky.
And there was a lot of ignorance about how the fediverse actually works (i.e. most didn't know that their posts are already federated beyond Mastodon).
...much less beyond ActivityPub.
Not to mention that a lot of Mastodon users don't understand how Mastodon works. They think it must have a pool of all accounts and all posts and all that somewhere, and the BridgyFed Bluesky bridge will give Bluesky unlimited access to it all.
They also think that Bluesky will be able to post nasty stuff to everyone, even those who aren't connected to anyone on Bluesky. They think the same about Threads, because in their heads, they're still on Twitter where the secret-sauce algorithm would probably allow for that to happen.
@small patatas Based on what I read, it sounded like there is no mirroring. It simply converts from one protocol to another and passes on the request.
If you are on ActivityPub and follow someone on Bluesky, your follow request gets sent to the bridge, which converts it to the other protocol, and sends the follow request to the Bluesky server. The Bluesky server then starts sending posts to the bridge addressed to you, and the bridge reformats it and it appears in your ActivityPub app.
So you are actually following the Bluesky channel, not an ActivityPub copy of a Bluesky channel.
There is no mirror. There are no duplicate accounts on each side. You speak English and the translator app spits out Spanish. That's all the bridge does. Translates from one protocol to another.
Content warning: Personal attacks for bridging Bluesky + shrugging off Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) = hypocrisy; CW: long (almost 2,000 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Bluesky bridge meta
the irony around Bluesky is it was intended to federate (yes on their protocol, but it is an open protocol) and they still have not really federated themselves. What exactly were they expecting to happen?
@Danie van der Merwe Well, either Bluesky had the same mindset as Diaspora* back then. Be decentralised internally, but a walled garden towards the outside world. Diaspora* would still be isolated without Friendica's tedious work back in the day, and Bluesky wants to be the same. Yes, with not even only a public API, but laying the whole protocol open.
Either that, or Bluesky just wanted to draw some attention to itself in the wake of the Mastodon hype and therefore announced decentralisation, albeit with its own protocol. And with features on top which they imply having invented, but which have been around since 2011 (Zot protocol). "Bluesky is Twitter without Musk, it'll be decentralised like Mastodon, and it'll have better decentralisation than Mastodon!" Only that they've now discovered that actually going all the way in decentralisation as announced is a) difficult and b) not worth it anyway, considering Bluesky's success without decentralisation. Unless, of course, this has all been a ruse to begin with, and Bluesky has never intended to go full decentral.
Also, it's obvious that, like Threads, Bluesky doesn't know anything about the Fediverse beyond Mastodon. If they did, they would have also known: If they lay their protocol open, some third party will make use of it. And if Friendica can federate with something, it probably will, because that's part of what it stands for.
@jupiter_rowland ah yes I forgot Diaspora's stubbornness to stick only with their own protocol. Lucky my Friendica account connects as I have tons of followers from Diaspora.
Content warning: re: Personal attacks for bridging Bluesky + shrugging off Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) = hypocrisy; CW: long (almost 2,000 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Bluesky bridge meta
Huh. TIL that Friendica wasn't always ActivityPub integrated.
Content warning: Personal attacks for bridging Bluesky + shrugging off Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) = hypocrisy; CW: long (almost 2,000 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Bluesky bridge meta
although Mastodon uses the ActivtyPub protocol, so I think he's referring to that protocol. It is a W3C recommendation, and has been quite widely adopted. Hopefully it can be improved upon.
I use Nostr as it also is a comprehensive protocol and an extensible one that has been expanding.
Content warning: Personal attacks for bridging Bluesky + shrugging off Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) = hypocrisy; CW: long (almost 2,000 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Bluesky bridge meta
no sorry I was thinking it was half of the AT Protocol. Did not read AP as ActivityPub. But OK Mastodon is not the standard, ActivityPub is on Fediverse.
Nostr works pretty well for me, but I try to follow non-crypto posts as that's not what I'm there for. Interactions been very friendly.
Content warning: Personal attacks for bridging Bluesky + shrugging off Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) = hypocrisy; CW: long (almost 2,000 characters), Fediverse meta, non-Mastodon Fediverse meta, Bluesky bridge meta
Amethyst on mobile but I use Snort, Oracle and another on desktop browser for Nostr (never made my mind up yet which one to stick with)
@jupiter_rowland #Mastodon Hi Jupiter I like the framing of this "How does Mastodon work?" post as it describes 'me' or a typical user and prompts them to then think "so how if not all the account and posts somewhere?" etc etc...
I think it's a good way to educate actually, and could you reply again what you would reply typically to your own post if someone asked "ok so how is it if not that?" since I / they would be ready to hear at that point
- and then kind of rounding your words towards how it will not be true that "Bluesky bridge will give Bluesky unlimited access to it all." (or at least the commercial company access and plans to exploit things unlike existing others on the Fediverse and like never before... (not even the smaller Nazi's probably because they don't have no money or care, but Capitalism... I'm not so sure!)
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it’s designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak different protocols capable of talking to each other natively.
For the last few years, Ryan has been hard at work building a sytem that can natively speak IndieWeb, ActivityPub, atproto, and Nostr, and translate interactions back and forth in a manner as close to natural as possible.
Who is Ryan Barrett?
Ryan Barrett is a software engineer with a long track record. He co-founded Google App Engine, worked at an early cancer-detection company called Color, then as an engineer for a Climate Tech startup called NCX.
Overall, he has a deep understanding of the space, and wants to provide a tool for anyone to use. He’s also someone who has thought at length about community moderation, and wrote an excellent piece called Moderate People, Not Code.
What is Bridgy Fed?
Bridgy Fed is an effort to create a multi-protocol communication server that can translate people, content, and interactions back and forth between networks that speak different protocols.
For now, it only speaks IndieWeb and ActivityPub, but Ryan has put in a lot of effort into making it speak the AT Protocol (Bluesky) and Nostr as well. Those are due to come in the following weeks, and were a central focus in Ryan’s announcement.
How Did the Community Respond?
To be fair, a sizeable amount of people had good things to say about the new development, and many IndieWeb and Bluesky users were supportive and even excited.
Unfortunately, an extremely vocal part of Mastodon expressed a range of negative reactions, going from critiques to insults to vitriol, demanding everything from the developer deleting his project to Ryan leaving the network permanently.
Looking through the comments, most negative feedback touches on the following:
This tool violates user consent by being opt-out, rather than opt-in.
I don’t want my profile and content showing up on Jack Dosey’s corporate social network.
So, let’s take a moment to unpack this, because it’s not as cut and dry as it appears.
User Consent and the Fediverse
The main controversy people seem to have in the Fediverse boils down to the fact that users have to Opt-Out of the service, rather than Opt-In. But, there’s a few fundamental misunderstandings here:
Federation itself is Opt-Out
A lot of people responded to Ryan with statements about how Bridgy Fed’s Opt-out nature violated their consent. In some cases, it got really nasty.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
I’m still reeling from this.
Here’s the thing: everyone wants to bang on this idea that the Fediverse is based on consent, that users are the ones at the forefront of who they get to connect to, that those decisions are inherently opt-in, and users get to decide everything.
As evidenced by these geniuses.
But, that’s a myth: the very nature of how federation works in this space is “Open By Default”.
To prevent messages and interactions from flowing in and out of a place, users or admins have to activately block a server. What this fundamentally means is that the Fediverse is opt-out by design; connections flow until they don’t.
The point of the fediverse is to connect with others, with full control and safety. It’s for making connections between networks of different sizes and implementations.
We have ample tools to control who can connect with us on the fediverse — the visibility of our posts, deciding who can and can’t follow us, personal blocks, domain blocks, and filters. Extra opt-out features like a profile hashtag, searchability flags, or indexibility flags give even more control.
With any other network on the fediverse, we allow connections to get started first, and then use these control mechanisms to shape our experience as individuals and as instance communities. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do that with this bridge, too.
Evan Prodromou
That isn’t some random dude, that’s the guy who started the Fediverse, stating that the network being open by default is how things ought to be.
If any connections on the Fediverse were opt-in, people would have to opt in to federation on a case-by-case basis. This would seriously hamper the growth of Mastodon, and clashes with its own “open by default” philosophy. Bridgy’s own design values are more in line with what Mastodon does than against it.
Bridgy Fed isn’t a Crawler
A big part of the drama stems from the fact that people have assumptions about how Bridgy Fed works. Turns out, it’s not a bot that crawls the Fediverse and harvests user data! In fact, it doesn’t index anything, or offer search functionality of any kind. The dude isn’t building a data farm!
So then, what is Bridgy Fed doing, exactly?
An easy way to grasp this is to look at how interacting with remote stuff works in Mastodon. Let’s say you look up a remote user handle, or a URL to a post, using Mastodon’s search interface. Your server looks up that resource, fetches the data, and renders it locally for you to interact with.
Bridgy Fed and User Privacy
Bridgy Fed is basically doing exactly that, with just one extra step: it’s translating data on another network to something your own system can read, and it can work in two directions. That’s basically it.
There are also a couple of aspects of how Bridgy Fed works with user privacy settings and actions:
Bridgy accepts user blocks from ActivityPub, and also federates out edits and deletes. Actor blocks, reports, and domain blocks are recognized, and Bridgy respects Authorized Fetch.
Private statuses are not ingested by the bridge, because the other protocols don’t have an equivalent for private conversations.
If a user has #NoBridge on their profile or requests exclusion ahead of time, a cross-network lookup will fail for that user automatically, from every network, every time the lookup is attempted.
Bridgy and Multiprotocol Servers
Bridging across networks is something of a time-honored tradition in the decentralized social space. In more recent years, the Friendica family tree has acted as a glue between vast parts of the network, getting its hooks into OStatus, Diaspora, and ActivityPub in addition to their own native protocols.
While there has been hiccups, dissonance, and occasionally frustration, these kinds of efforts have helped expand the network while keeping it from being a total monoculture. Many projects within the early Fediverse were able to find inspiration from one another, despite taking different approaches to solving various problems.
The idea of a public post being translated into another protocol being considered a violation of consent is, frankly, unprecedented. But, this was never about converting a post schema from one JSON form to another, was it? In its basic form, who could possibly care about that?
No, this is about your post showing up on *that other network*.
Misunderstanding Bluesky
Maybe none of the above details matter to you. Maybe you’ve decided, screw this guy for connecting my posts to Jack Dorsey’s fake decentralized network!
If this is your position, I have a few notes for you!
Jack Dorsey doesn’t own Bluesky! Aside from a position as a sitting board member in an advisory role, he’s actually not involved. In fact, he deleted his Bluesky account some months ago, and spends almost all of his time hyping Nostr and Bitcoin.
Bluesky is a Public Benefit Corporation – while it’s true that they’re still a corporation, and still have some kind of profit motive, this immediately changes the dynamic from “a platform owned by some rich guy” to “a platform owned by a company”.
Federation is coming soon – the Bluesky team has been actively testing federation and building for it. A lot of people claim that Bluesky doesn’t care about federation, and isn’t going to do it…but, it’s happening soon. If a network can federate, and other people can run their own nodes and services, the network itself isn’t Jack Dorsey’s, or even one entity’s.
We have an upcoming article that’s going to dig deeper into some of the myths about Bluesky. But the main point here is, Bluesky isn’t the Anti-Christ to the Fediverse that people claim that it is. It’s a different approach, by different people. That’s it.
In Conclusion
I chose to write this as an Opinion piece, because I don’t expect my point of view to be The Only View That Matters. I think Bridgy Fed is a cool project, and that Ryan doesn’t deserve the hate for building something he’s passionate about in his spare time.
I was struck by a really remarkable thread by Marco Rogers, who sorted through his feelings on the situation and identified the “ick” factor in this whole situation.
In short, who are you yelling at? Who do you expect to "fix" things for you? Right now people are coming down on the guy who is building the bridge to bluesky. That specific guy. They're yelling at him and telling him to make different decisions to protect their personal privacy. Is that what people think they signed up for with the fediverse? Fighting with other individual humans and trying to force them to do what you want?
This is a decentralized network! Despite efforts to work together, optimize for user safety, and identify actively hostile communities, none of us are in charge. We can bring great initiatives, collaborations, tooling, you name it, but nobody is actually in charge here.
I want to be clear about my stance on user consent: I think it’s a good thing, and worth building for, even in a network where openness is the default. I think serious work needs to be done to better empower end users over privacy, access, and permissions. We can do better, in so many ways, and that future is coming.
But throwing a fit over your public data federating to some other network because someone on the other side decided to follow you from there? That’s some peak NIMBY Mastodon HOA bullshit. I would forgive them for unfollowing you.
Recently, Ryan Barrett re-announced his Bridgy Fed project to the Fediverse. As a service, it's designed wih one specific goal in mind: to make parts of the decenralized social web that speak differen
I think it's a good way to educate actually, and could you reply again what you would reply typically to your own post if someone asked "ok so how is it if not that?" since I / they would be ready to hear at that point
Let's see if I can make this halfway understandable. But it's going to be looooooooong.
First of all, Bluesky only knows what's being delivered to it. Not by BridgyFed. By Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse through BridgyFed. BridgyFed does not scrape any information itself. Neither does Bluesky, also because it can't do that through Bluesky.
No, really. No, no, really. Calm down.
No, Bluesky won't have your profile and your posts right off the bat. In fact, Bluesky won't have any of the posts you've posted until now unless someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts one of your old posts. And even only then, Bluesky will only have that one single post.
So what does Bluesky get from you then?
Well, normally, nothing. No, really.
At first, Bluesky won't even know you exist, much less where. Again, BridgyFed is not a scraper, and Bluesky doesn't have a Fediverse scraper either. And even if it had one, it wouldn't work through BridgyFed because BridgyFed doesn't support that.
And seriously: If Bluesky really wanted to scrape the Fediverse, it wouldn't do that through that tiny third-party keyhole that's BridgyFed! It'd set up search crawlers like Google that crawl Fediverse instances and send everything they find to Bluesky.
But Bluesky doesn't do that. I can reassure you that Bluesky doesn't do that.
Because Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse.
No, really, it isn't. If it were, it would have used ActivityPub right away instead of developing a wholly new and incompatible protocol. Or it could at least have included its own ActivityPub "translators" just like Hubzilla and (streams) have them and like Friendica used to have until it switched to ActivityPub.
But does Bluesky support ActivityPub in any way? No, it doesn't. Even though ActivityPub would have made a whole lot of things a whole lot easier for Bluesky itself already, it doesn't. Go figure.
Which goes to show that Bluesky isn't interested in the Fediverse. Bluesky doesn't want your data. And, again, if it did, it wouldn't rely on a third-party bridge to get them.
Okay, so again, what does Bluesky get from you?
Again, nothing. At least at first.
Now, let's suppose someone with at least one Bluesky follower mentions you in a public post. That public post also goes to that Bluesky follower, thus to Bluesky, with a link to your profile in it.
Then Bluesky has your name, and it has the URL of your profile. No different from how Mastodon works.
But it doesn't go through that link and scrape all your profile information. It isn't interested in that.
And besides, Mastodon profiles or any other Fediverse profiles are probably completely and utterly incompatible with Bluesky's profile structure anyway. So all that stuff would have to be "translated to Blueskyish". Extra effort for something that Bluesky isn't even interested in. Again, if it were, don't you think it'd use ActivityPub instead of their own AT protocol? Yeah, but it doesn't.
So from when on will Bluesky know your profile?
Normally, not at all.
Only when someone from Bluesky wants to follow you. And you've either got your profile set up so that anyone can follow you without your explicit consent. Or you actively confirm that follow request.
Then you're connected to Bluesky.
And only then will Bluesky know you. As in know your profile. Or what profile information makes it through BridgyFed in the first place. And what of it Bluesky has a way of handling. Maybe not more than your profile picture and your profile text. All stuff that's public anyway, and that Google might have scraped a gajillion times already.
But it will not have your whole backlog of posts.
I mean, if you start following another Mastodon user who has been here for four years, you won't get four years worth of their old posts piled upon your timeline either, right? Or has that ever occurred to you? I guess not.
This is not only because Bluesky doesn't do that. This is because Mastodon doesn't do that. It doesn't send any old posts to new followers, and it doesn't request old posts from new followers.
Let me show this to you from somewhere else in the Fediverse.
I'm on Hubzilla. Hubzilla supports importing old posts to a certain degree. If I follow someone on Hubzilla or (streams), I think, also on Friendica, I get their 10 latest posts into my stream. And I get them as new posts. The perk of this is that I can interact with fairly certain posts that only connections are allowed to interact with (yes, that's possible here) by connecting to the poster.
Also, if I subscribe to an RSS or Atom feed, depending on the feed, I get a certain number of old posts.
But if I connect to someone on Mastodon, I don't get even a single one of their old posts. Because Mastodon doesn't support that.
I don't get their ten latest posts, and I don't get their whole post history either or what's left of it after auto-deletion.
If Hubzilla which supports such stuff doesn't get them, then Bluesky won't get them either. Regardless of what Bluesky may or may not want, and regardless of what BridgyFed is or isn't capable of. Mastodon won't send them, full stop.
The only posts from you that Bluesky will ever get are your public posts which you send after letting someone on Bluesky follow you. And public posts from you that someone with at least one Bluesky follower boosts.
And "public" really means "public". Just because you're on Mastodon and no longer on Twitter, doesn't mean you're in a fully safe haven and fully shielded from the world outside Mastodon. Yes, that's an uncomfortable truth if you've believed otherwise up until now, but it's the truth. Deal with it. You'd have to deal with it sooner or later anyway.
Seriously, what the Fediverse desperately needs is 10-minute videos from a true Fediverse expert, done in the style of "Academic expert explains science like I'm 5 years old" videos with colourful animations, that explain the Fediverse to journalists as well as to fresh or aspiring 𝕏 converts.
And that would take someone who
really knows the whole Fediverse inside-out, all the way into its deepest nooks and crannies
still doesn't only "speak dev" or "speak admin" and can actually make things understandable to your average tech-illiterate 𝕏 user with only a phone
can make such animations
can also make these videos fully accessible, not only with a verbatim transcript, but, if necessary, with additional real-time audio descriptions that optionally tell blind or visually-impaired users what happens on-screen, even if what happens on-screen only serves as illustrations for the explanations
Content warning: Bluesky doesn't do as much as people might think / fear... [how it works / explained]
@jupiter_rowland So I'm happy with that explanation and seems like you've put yourself in with half a chance to do such a small video and even prepped it now! Even this as audio with pics... even here native... I'd listen (not sure elsewhere if I'd click).
So as side-note I'll be happy to help you produce such a thing and even invite you to send similar points by audio (your text above as script already pretty much lol) and I'll arrange it and send back to you complete!
Ok so suggestion and a offer aside, it makes sense what you say and I think I can move on! (great huh!)
If I can move on to next major point... without too many left... Here is the next thing people feel:
The whole difference between almost any Fediverse instance and then one owned by Massive Corporate Entity - call it MCE just for fun is clearer a different fish 🐟 (or shark 🦈 we don't know but any big business I guess has to do it's thing)
So the next point is trust vs. commercial entity. In the same mindset as before where you explained about people scared about "copying my data", could you also have a stab at "how can you trust capitalism" lol... I mean trust Bluesky not to exploit and use everything it can for profit or other political reasons... or not be taken over, rug-pulled etc" lol asking the world 🌐 here :)
Again that point seems prevalent as others, and as we have instances now, even if they could get data they don't care and are too small.
It's a heroic thing to read my words and answer in similar way but seems we can both handle it (other are in short text world)
What we know historically as capitalism (through no fault of Bluesky or even /Meta/Threads - but the nature of those things means it's an entirely different beast we invite... 🐻 🦈 !
As a slightly fun or typical extreme take - "what about the Nazis" is usually a serious fear too but seriously even they care less online and have more innocent fun, whereas I can imagine corporations suddenly changing the game or suddenly changing their position that could leave any believer or Jack Dorsey stunned... just very little control or too much control from top...
So some here think we are growing overall nicer smaller, more innocent hubs of cmmunity and separation of protocol made that choice easier and fairer in terms of these politics / commercialisation considerations... I think we know the politics of capitalism... POWER!
(ending only for theatrics but helps you answer if you wish how these differences are in people's minds)
Thanks and liked your last writing and not too long at all for me!
So I'm happy with that explanation and seems like you've put yourself in with half a chance to do such a small video and even prepped it now! Even this as audio with pics... even here native... I'd listen (not sure elsewhere if I'd click).
So as side-note I'll be happy to help you produce such a thing and even invite you to send similar points by audio (your text above as script already pretty much lol) and I'll arrange it and send back to you complete!
I'm not going to produce any videos. That'd be way too much of an effort, especially meeting Mastodon's accessibility standards plus my own standards.
If this sounds weird, allow me to elaborate.
This is not a general-purpose personal channel. This channel is mainly about 3-D virtual worlds. I sometimes post pictures from these virtual worlds. But whenever I do that, I add an image description that's amongst the longest and most extensive anywhere in the Fediverse. I have to put the image description into the post text itself for several reasons, one reason being that they're too long for alt-text. Not only does Mastodon only support alt-text up to 1,500 characters internally, it also cuts off any alt-text from outside that's longer. And mine are longer.
I've actually thought about making in-world videos one day and uploading them to PeerTube. I've decided against it. Accessibility would make it too much of an effort, and it'd make the videos essentially unwatchable. I'd include an audio description that describes the visuals in the videos on at least the same level of detail as my image descriptions.
Two and a half seconds of actually moving pictures.
Voiceover describes the camera movement.
A building comes into view.
Video stops.
Voiceover describes the building and explains what needs to be explained to someone who doesn't know anything about anything in the video.
Ten minutes later, the video starts moving again.
The audio description would inflate a ten-minute video to something between six and ten hours.
Okay, now, a video about the Fediverse would not be a video about a virtual world that nobody knows. But still, I expect there to be blind or visually-impaired users who come across such a video, play it and wonder, "What is being shown on the screen? What does this video and all that stuff in it look like?"
I mean, the visuals wouldn't carry any additional information. They'd be purely illustrational. They wouldn't contribute any content to the explanation, only enhance it. Content-wise, the explanation would work all the same with and without these visuals.
But not describing them feels kind of ableist, kind of like not letting non-sighted people experience the video in the exact same way as sighted people. And I always expect there to be non-sighted people who want to have all visuals in a video described in audio.
So I might spend weeks making one 10-minute video which would then be inflated to 30 minutes or an hour by the audio description.
Helps you understand and create description of visual information (called audio description, video description, or described video) for video accessibility.
Content warning: Teaching others about yourself, helps others enjoy with you and smoth over any gaps...
@jupiter_rowland Ok great to learn more about you - most skip this part or take offence too quick so I can work *with* how you are already like or what you like more than not... Kudos I wanted to say before anything
So even not doing much now I'd agree and say video not for now or not yet. Even for me video is so much bloat (unless really impactful or people loving per second)... but I can see some solutions to what you might see as a problem currently just for warming up to idea of 'something'
It might be a deal breaker now but really seems these things below might not be or can be simplified..
So for the video there are techniques that solve these problems:
█ about talking more than the video and needing it to stop to explain ● answer: that's what B-roll is for BUT yes I'd also think b-roll is unneeded and even bullshit for this long but it is done currently or does need drastic reduction in time talking (unless your B-roll is really good)
- good example of above is how many times have we 'watched' a user in operating system play with his mouse on screen, kind not doing much or waiting for next part to click! (we have watch a lot all of us!) So I mean it's enough for you to be inside app or on screen with what you talk about (your Mastodon interface for example) and that would be watchable and 'kill' time (even though I'm a audio person for ecological reasons and for more-pure education)... ●but yeah I'll help with that even I can screen record or suggest enough... I think for key things like setting up a wallet or scary stuff it really helps and people care for higher things than eye-candy ●ALTERNATIVE you can also do audio parts with pictures in between (like a blog post) so to modularise your presentation and even use it in different order in other presentations (you need to cut things anyway for naming it all individual parts so this can help by default to move things like you would in a playlist and even put it into next video by putting in video joiner, sorting the order and clicking "join videos" )
Anyway basically we can test our smaller parts of the idea quite quickly like this and call it workable or failure... but yeah you might have to roll with me and believe a bit :)
==================
█I hear you coming from 3-D world so appreciate you looking here :) I would like to know what your goal is or even why... to enjoy that with you as mostly we are coming from these types of 'normal' video or ideas as a world but happy to see or hear more...
█Not sure what to say about catering for visually-impaired users but
● I'd solve that with audio commentary track or alternate video version describing what's on screen or background I do assume some of that is not even important to visually-impaired users like it isn't to anyone else as videos have LOTS of unneeded filler stuff... so mostly it's * if * it's worth it for people either visually or for the audio... ● even better would be if author summarised or explained it all... audibly... less-impaired would also like that...
I appreciate you care about those things, and hope it's ok it's unusual or uncommon for me to see but I think we can change that with whatever we like!!
█The way I do things or the way I enable others is always this kind of "let's do this test" way and calling fails out so happy to have done or do most of the work to see what can work -
Overall I think if you can lower yourself to audio then it is possible and then from there even could prep that for video (by me or others) (creative commons release hopefully would help that)
I would like to know what your goal is or even why... to enjoy that with you as mostly we are coming from these types of 'normal' video or ideas as a world but happy to see or hear more...
I had a number of ideas, but nothing with a script behind it. Present places by walking around in them and talking about them, about what I come by. Another idea was to review houses that you can pick up for your own use; I would have done that the same style, often even without knowing the building beforehand.
All of this would have been rather spontaneous with lots of on-screen movement, constant unscripted and largely unprepared talking, pretty much like a Let's Play.
@FreeSchool=Learn Respect Love Unfortunately, there are no videos that are even remotely like what I wanted to do. Especially not from the kinds of worlds I visit.
Watching people freak out over someone making a bridge to another fedi platform...
Do people even know how the fediverse works? Interoperability?
Boggles my mind how much impact people think a shittily moderated instance will impact the broader system.
People flip over the idea of connecting to Bluesky or Threads... how many of you know about the trainwreck of Nostr and it's AP bridge? That's the worst network of them all and you still don't hear about it, which tells you everything you need to know.
I can get worrying about making moderation harder, especially if a trillion different bridges pop up and it becomes a game of wack a mole trying to defederate with those relays; but I've mainly seen people worrying about privacy and not wanting bluesky users to see their posts. Which, imo is kinda dumb since fedi is VERY open. If a company like meta wanted to, they could data harvest most of fedi. Nothing is stopping bluesky users from going to your instance's profile and reading your posts. protocols to encrypt/require authorization to get data are currently jank and seldom used. I'm guessing it's maybe a discovery issue? But that seems less of an issue with bluesky and more an issue with the fediverse growing. As well, it's not like we don't have the tools to deal with this 🤷♂️ instance owners who want to federate with the relay can, and those who don't can moderate it to whichever degree they like. Though Ultimately I think cross federation tools should be built into instances instead of relays, since being able to pick and choose which posts federate where would be a nice feature, and far more clean.
@Linus I'm all for relays just because they reduce the programming load... programming one system vs every different platform having to program a separate support. Notably few platforms do this anyways for other protocols (you don't see any mastodon instances supporting the diaspora protocol for instance). Let alone relays are better for interoperability, if I boost/reshare a post from a different network on Friendica it's basically going to disconnect it from the source... even other friendica instances won't see it connected like they would from a relay (let alone the fact that this bypasses moderation tools).
I definitely think it's the usual of people imagining a threat rather than actually perceiving one. We can readily block relays if necessary, and there's just as much risk of a new relay popping up as a blocked instance moving around, so it makes no difference in blocking.
And of course people freak out about privacy all the time. It annoys me to no end how little people care to learn about their privacy while still freaking out over things that have little impact on their privacy. They're posting publicly and getting upset that strangers can see it...
I concur. This might be a bit of a controversial take right now, since a lot of people are still riled up; but I feel the opt in/out consent issue also boils down to it being similar (or maybe technically identical, I need to look more into how the relay would work) to a new instance joining fedi. I understand people not wanting their posts on bluesky. but at the same time, the way fedi works, you don't need to get everyone's consent to spin up a new instance, that would be ridiculous. If bluesky decided to support AP or even spin up a dedicated AP instance (people would likely treat them similar to threads, moderating them to whichever degree they'd like), there likely wouldn't be a discussion about opting in or out of threads seeing your posts. It's just how fedi works X3. I also understand that there could be cultural differences between fedi and bluesky users, but once again that's a moderation issue that we have the tools to manage. If you don't want to interact with bluesky users, much like users of any other instance, you don't have to.
Also the relay being in the instance is totally just a convenience thing X3 you make a good point about the extra effort to implement and maintain an entire separate system, let alone getting them to work together. I'm gonna keep dreaming though!
Thanks for this. I've been following this with interest but as someone who knows next to nothing about the technical aspects of AP, BSky and most of the other stuff I was unsure how much of the freakout was justified.
@Kevin Karhan Bluesky is, once it's federated. A lot of people think the fediverse is only ActivityPub or even worse only Mastodon, so they think this is some huge thing as opposed to something that's already happened hundreds of times already
@Kevin Karhan And that's entirely fair, the issue is people who are spewing obscenities at a developer making an AP/AT bridge. Especially since not all AT will be Bluesky before long.
When your code violates the social norms of a community, you could learn that code comes *after* people. Or you could insist that just because you CAN you don’t need to care about that part at all and just use technical blah to justify your actions. Simple. #bridgy
#TLDR: Fedi never asked for this and it's considered a as much as an asshole move as violating the #robotstxt and literally DDoS'ing a site with a Crawler like #ByteDance does regularly using #ByteSpider...
and i thought charli d'amelio was the worst thing bytedance had done to me▶SUPPORT on Patreon and watch videos like this early and ad-free: https://patreon.c...
@Kevin Karhan @Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: this honestly doesn't violate the social norms of the community at large, just a very angry small subset who feel entitled to dictate the norms for a community that predates them and includes many many other groups who feel differently.
It's very telling to me that as usual the loudest voices are all on the least compliant platform of the fediverse...
@jwildeboer Hey, I'm just complying with the robots.txt and I think #BlueSky is just valueRemoving to the point that I in fact block their domain and bridges on my account...
@kkarhan Kevin, you are misinformed. Bluesky is based on AT protocol and all developer documentation clearly states that it is a federated network and in their sandbox people are already running personal servers in that federated network. They do a gradual rollout of features. It is not a "website" like X/Twitter or Facebook, etc. You can even bring your own DNS domain to make your username handle independent from their servers.
@jwildeboer And that's precisely what's different in Bridgy Fed - it will be bidirectional and allow true follow/response relationship over the networks - because both networks enable federated read/write/follow. That is qualitatively different functionality vs bridges to networks that allow read-only. It also means that a follow request implies opt-in as core feature.
A better comparison is Matrix's bridges to XMPP, Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, etc. @shiri @kkarhan
Maybe the idea of using i.e. [self-hosted] #Zulip or #XMPP is precisely not to have to deal with the #Enshittification of #WhatsApp and the inacceptable #ToS of it and it's competitiors...
If I want to use some proprietary & centralized garbage I would've made that choice, regardless if #Signal, WhatsApp, #Telegram, #Discord, #Line or whatever...
@kkarhan No one is forcing you to interact with networks you don't want to. For people who value people over technology, bridges enable freedom from walled gardens, and denying the use of bridges by others is freedom-limiting. Your freedom to not use bridges is not more valuable than other people's freedom to choose them. @jwildeboer @shiri
@osma @jwildeboer Again: You have the choice to #SelfHost and not limit yourself to anything whatsoever...
But one should also have the freedom to not deal with such spambots to begin with.
Whether that decision should be made individually, by vote.from the users of an instance of sole.discretion of the moderators is a discussion I'll not waste my time with, so I'll move on!
Just FYI, I've got zero interest in people bringing their whiny bullshit to my posts on the topic. So I'm just blocking strangers who bring the fight here.
I've had my fill of self-centered assholes who want everyone to bend over for their bullshit unrealistic vision of federation.
Your ideal version will never exist and your rage at finding out it doesn't can go fuck itself.
"better deal" and "lower price" are absolutely not fucking synonymous and the idea that they are is responsible for damn near everything that is wrong with our world today.
Yeah, my experience is I have to search a number of different ways every time I need something from Amazon. The top results often aren't the best in terms of price or quality.
looks like an absurd lawsuit, since the customers were never forced to buy the products from the suggestion widget and instead bought the products willingly and knowing the offered price
CEO: I want a promotional pic that would make every Kerbal player go "lol, actually, you're just going to fall back down." Graphics dept: how's this? CEO: Perfect.
Call for help for emergency vet bills, thankfully my fur-nibling is safe now but my sibling Dandelion is under a lot of strain from this.
Hey friends: my dog got into something he shouldn't and I've been left with a $700 emergency vet bill. Doggo is okay now, thankfully, but I could use some assistance if anyone has anything to give. Venmo: @ronanjoem
Let us have a little chat about the person who accused @brysonbort of gaming RSA talk submissions by submitting a talk with me by "playing the diversity card" to get accepted. And all the people thinking it and simmering.
Thank you kindly for completely devaluing my expertise in my field, which I have worked in daily for over a decade and a half, served as a senior NCO in the military doing, teach, and speak on globally. Whether you consciously intended it or not, you implied I am a diversity token and not an expert in cybersecurity incident response.
It's actually good to purposefully share the stage with underrepresented voices in technology, because we still routinely have entire tech conferences that are 100% white and male speakers because of bad CFP boards and management. That was RSA keynotes, within my professional lifetime. It cost me and my colleagues a lot of goodwill calling them out at the time.
When I am "handed" a speaking slot explicitly because I am not a straight white man, it's usually on a droll topic I am totally unqualified to speak on, like "TeLL uS abOUT beINg a WomAN in TEch" that also devalues my expertise. Side note - this has turned out to be a huge red flag. Often done by people who go on to do Bad Stuff to women.
You, yes you are a prime reason women and nonbinary people don't want to submit to conferences.
I lurk on a number of subreddits and forums related to the industry to help keep tabs with what's going on.
The amount of bigotry that's out in the open in some of them is really depressing.
I am very, very unclear how any straight white man can ever attempt to play the victim card here, especially given cyber and wider tech's poor track record over the years.
For the record - If I had the option, I would go to any talk/keynote/presentation that you were in - hands down, over any of the 'techbros' (unfortunately, budget being what it is... I'm lucky to go to one small conference a year)
unconscious bias is a very real thing, and regrettably also it ends up becoming institutionalized
it sucks, and whoever was giving @brysonbort a hard time needs to go take a very long hard look in the mirror
Oh what the fucking fuck is THAT bullshit. Sorry you're running into this level of infuriating stupidity. (Ya know, I really do have to get around to writing an RFC for the "Remote Dope-Slap Protocol" for situations like this.)
Wow. That's both sad, and has me simmering with anger about men making such accusations.
For the other part: There are people who even like to be handed slots to talk about diversity and discrimination in tech. Because that's their field of research. You usually find them in a social sciences department.
I've been in the audience for both kinds of "diversity talks", and the one where someone in the field is enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge is a lot more rewarding to listen to as well.
An observation: your posts do an excellent job of showing the challenges and hard work that goes into these speaking events. It's work: difficult but rewarding and hopefully worth it.
By contrast, it feels like the people who complain about others being included seem to be viewing these events as more of a party or vacation or social event.
I don't mean to devaluate your expertise and would actually be happy to have half of your skills. Even if it was for the "diversity card" (which I'm pretty sure is not the case) that's actually a very good thing. In cybersec we lack too much of diversity, we are in a "between us" social env. In my country, this "white men" culture tends to make toxic workplaces, where we are required to change ourself for fiting management idea of what should be a tech worker. That's the best way to become in few years one of this pissed off worker who don't want to talk to anyone and hast his job but don't want to change because they don't want to learn new stuff.
1) OH HELL NO 2) I wouldn’t say I know Bryson well, but I get the sense he’s not someone who will attach his name to anything/one that doesn’t know their shit.
Puh… The average white man in our industry really never stops to think how those keynote slots are handed to him over more qualified candidates simply because he is a white man.
No, men are not ok. Men are so used to privileges that slightly leveling the field feels like being unfairly disadvantaged to them.
This is not the society I want to live in. This is not the industry I want to be part of. This needs to change.
no insult intended Bryson, but did this seriously happen Lesley?? People should be ashamed of themselves. On top of it being a nasty and stupid thing to do, it’s kind of like that article about Kelce and his 80k bonus 🤗 isn’t it folks :)?
"You, yes you are a prime reason women and nonbinary people don't want to submit to conferences."
Yeah... I once got accused of transitioning so I'd actually get accepted for conference talks because I wasn't good enough otherwise. Thankfully not someone in my professional community, but it was still someone I once respected who decided to be a complete dipshit in a linkedin DM.
I have to painfully admit that it really dampened my spirits to actually try to present things I work on.
@Stormgren hollllyyy shit, and can you imagine anyone going through the years of transition care and it’s hurdles plus like, rampant hate and violence and anti trans legislation, just to get accepted to somebody’s stupid tech conference that doesn’t even pay? It’s like them accusing trans people of doing it to go into another bathroom or play amateur sports. I’m SCREAMING.
The truth? If you’re not accepted to RSAC, it’s because your submission just wasn’t as good as the ones that got accepted. Really. I’ve been on the program committee for years, and we always look at the content WAY before we even consider who submitted it. By the time we try to guess at gender, we’ve already pretty much got the top ones ranked. Lesley and Bryson are tops in their field. And I’m sure their submission was top notch.
It's exactly the same thing. My career has had to take a massive restructuring and I've probably screwed myself over professionally by doing this, but it's better than dying early, but guys like that never understand that sort of thing, they just falsely see special privs being accorded to someone, rather than their mediocrity being the thing that held them back.
If I'm succeeding now, it's in part because I have extra capacity to excel due to not having to fight brain weasels every day.
@Stormgren the first Dazzle represents my confused eyes while reading. The second Dazzle represents my baffled face while reading this. The last Dazzle represents my brain screaming WHAT!?!
@Stormgren very much indeed! Light reflects off her fur most excellently, making it so much easier to capture how I see her. Plus, the primary basis between this kitty cat-human boy relationship is playtime. The second she see me every day she is visibly attempting to determine how long she has to wait until our bath time playtime. On days I am delayed, you can hear her prepping craziness while waiting.
Anyone who knows about you and spends a even a little time looking into what you do, know that you absolutely deserve to keynote. I have had the joy of watching you do a keynote and it was brilliant. Full of valuable insights you gained from your years of experience.
@specked yes, but a lot of times bias keeps us from getting slots based on merit, which is why sharing the stage and making purposeful outreach efforts for diverse speakers is so important.
I see it differently. Seems like it's fighting bias with more bias. After all, this very same methodology is why we have Clearance Thomas. Just to be clear, I'm not calling you CT and I would go to any talk you speak at.
@specked you understand that there were no technical women keynotes (they have a lot) at all at RSA until we recruited Monica Lewinsky to publicly make a statement and call them out. Even though around 20% of practitioners at the time were women.
@specked I also think the issue needs to be addressed but not in this approach.
When you add quotas etc, there will always be the feeling that you were "playing the diversity card".
Here, the government will give grants to tech companies that hire people from my demographic. It is a real problem, there is very open discrimination. But, If I knew a company took money to hire me, or hired me to fill some quota, I would always feel like I wasn't hired cause of my skills.
@yisraeldov @specked quotas are an ugly kludge to skip addressing statistical issues generated by bias, poor advertising, toxic culture, and lack of mentorship. People could do a lot better, but it's the easiest thing to legislate.
@specked I think that the only way to fix basis is to prove people wrong. It requires working 2x as hard, or accepting less money.
But we also have to be willing to accept reality some times. I know I am something of an anomaly, because most people in my demographic wouldn't want to work in tech, and that is OK.
I doubt there is anyone, in FANG companies, and I don't think we would want to be, I know I wouldn't.
You typically fight malicious or subconscious bias with a conscious bias.
You can't just look at a problem of bias, wag your finger, and tell people to stop being biased. They either aren't going to care, or aren't going to think it applies to them because they're not consciously biasing their decisions. And it's rare that you have a situation where you can just fully eliminate the information causing the bias (especially as doing so requires going to ridiculous lengths because subconscious biases can pick up on the tiniest shit).
So... what you do is you put in a counter bias that specifically exists to limit the impact of the original bias. Usually one that's less strong of a bias so it doesn't entirely eliminate the bias it's fighting.
"Diversity hires" is a derogatory reference to one of the most well known instances. If a company hires 100+ people and every-single-one-of-them is a cishet white guy... there's bias in place, either in the person doing the hiring or in people interested in the job.
There isn't any law that says "X minority must make up Y percentage of your workforce". When you get a true "diversity hire", ie. hiring someone unqualified just to be able to say you not being bigoted... well that makes it very clear that they're bigots who've been explicitly excluding people based on their minority status. They're hiring someone because they know they're discriminating but are just trying to do the bare minimum to avoid trouble for it.
And we can't just run to "impartial systems" because those systems have bias baked into them. Companies have tried so many times to use software to combat bias... only to eventually find out that the software was more biased because it picked up on the implicit original biases.
This seems to be an extensive opinion. For a more in-depth engagement with this topic, delving into a thorough study of history is recommended. Bias and societal challenges are not novel; a good starting point could be examining the post-World War II reconstruction. Working backward from there might provide valuable insights.
I’ve known @hacks4pancakes ’s career for more than 7 years, since they were only a level 12 rogue. They’re the real deal, very knowledgeable, friendly, approachable and happy to teach others.
Thank you Lesley. Thank you for your work on encouraging conferences to have more than the usual 5 white men keynoting. I appreciate your work and how it’s helped me.
Can’t believe I’ve had to exit my concrete bunker to find a wifi signal for this.
@acyberexpert thank you for leaving your bunker. I will print this and hang it on my refrigerator. I’m not sure what prompted it, but it’s deeply appreciated.
If we need voters, then post your states registration information. Aid by that and other acts like testimonials and voter drives. Knock doors; table at events; above all, word of mouth.
Statistics say that we are maybe 10%, let's say that in some hypothtical future when we are free to be ourselves always, that number turns out to really be 25%
We will never be anywhere near 50%, so fewer of them means that once the old Republican voters die out, neither will they.
To quote Professor Henry Jones Junior: This (party) belongs in a museum.
I hate to burst your bubbles, but the younger generation doesn’t believe that politics works at all. They believe the system is inherently corrupt. They don’t vote. That’s why they’re not identifying as Republicans. They don’t identify as citizens who vote.
@KAOS Nah, as another person pointed out, individuals don't lean right as they age, it's just that left-leaning people have a worse life expectancy for a variety of reasons (existing while black, poor minority healthcare, systemic poverty, etc...). So the political make-up by age shifts right as more privileged people who were already right-leaning when they were young make it to older age than minority people.
@KAOS I'm sorry, I've seen this hope that future generations would be less conservative expressed throughout the past couple decades without it ever becoming a reality, and I thought that's what you were implying as well.
Some days it feels like LGBTQIA+ is simply code for anyone who is not outspoken Republican. Not speaking about those who self identify; instead for those in addition who republicans wish to exclude from their ruling class
Look, maybe it's because they're young now, insecure, not knowing how their family will react. But some day, many of these brave young kids will come out as republican. And let's all support them when they do. It's hard enough for them out there. Fascists often get a bad rep, but some of them are lovely people.
Excellent! Soon every day will be Pride and Republicans will only be found in the dementia wards in Nursing homes! Gene Roddenberry's glorious vision of the future is slowly becoming a reality!
Did you know that overwhelming majorities of Deaf, Blind, Autistic, and Disabled people prefer Identity-First Language and resent the term “special needs”?
Words have the power to change attitudes toward autistic people. Keating et al., 2022 You have probably been taught to use Person-First Language (PFL) despite the overwhelming preference for Identity-First Language (IFL) among Blind, Deaf, Autistic, …
"---and by splitting up my personality across at least three social networks, that means I'm making it harder for the AGI to reinstantiate my consciousness," he yelled at her, over the club's music.
open the profile of anyone on discord who has a twitter account linked (or expand the user profile sidebar in dms), scroll down to their twitter account, and hold shift
having 1-2 meltdowns per week from verbal overstimulating. I love people and I like sharing space with them - intentional sharing space, where talk is optional and reduced, like sharing space only, or doing things together, e. g. using words only for negotiating consent - but verbal can't be the only thing. I am at some breaking point. an no, spending time alone is not the thing, it is different needs. I can't be alone all the time to acomodar verbal overflow.
I enjoy talking, I enjoy verbalization. I thrive on well constructed argumentation, and emotions conveyed through words. poetry. I just get immensely tired. be it talking, listening, also to a yoga tutorial or conversations.
when I got my dx my therapist encouraged me to "find ppl like me". I don't find a lot of people with such needs, not among alistic, not among most autistics. I would like to know and exchange more on the topic of verbal overflow. I don't know anybody like this.
I certainly enjoy spending quiet time with other people, for example, being in the same room and reading books, but not really talking.
Unfortunately it seems so many of the allistic people I know have a hard time being quiet for that long. I did have one good autistic friend and it was a joy to just be in the same room with him and be separately doing things but not talking much
Sometimes, when I just want to be with people, I like to go to fairly busy public places where I can be for a while (I live on a Scottish island so busy is relative I guess). As long as there’s no need or expectation for me to directly engage in conversation, this allows me to enjoy being with and a part of the people around me. I really like the swimming pool for this as we’re all doing a shared activity without needing to chat.
I can enjoy quite audio visually busy spaces as long as I don’t have to converse. Actively talking and listening (I mainly only ever do the listening) is exhausting.
totally can relate. I was [phases/time stretches, not ALL the time] doing lots of swims + generally LOVE to hang on a beach or at open air swimming + read, where everybody is busy + preferably talking in languages I don't understand [so my brain wouldn't get distracted!]. Another favorite of mine are public libraries. ❤ - My parents are super talkative - today I understand how I was anywhere near coping then: lots of alone reading, too as a single child
also for me direct verbal input is not equally easy/fast/natural to process as is text, and that even is the case with audio books [even though I am AuDHD!]. I am thriving more on the style of "scientific" communication, so reasoning and/or discussion on a certain topic [I would like to suggest one of my many special interests ;)!], or watching/pausing videos, talking through remarks/statements from their participants with the other [only one, please!] mutual watcher
Yep, I’m blessed with a constantly chatting mum (far away now so only on a phone mainly but properly draining nevertheless) I’m like a rabbit in headlights when someone talks at me. Less talk, more being together and I’m happy. Shared activity definitely helps. Connection and communication beyond chat.
I can understand how frustrating it is - I hope you will find people who can share your preferred mode of coexisting rather than talking all the time. I know I am similar - now and then it's nice to have an actual conversation, talk about things that matter, but for the most part I'm good. Would virtual 'togetherness' work for you? There are people out there who feel the way you do, and as long as there's internet -
Ugh... I am sick of finances right now... my cat had an emergency followed by my sibling/roommate having emergencies and I have been running in poverty mode for weeks now with at least a whole month to go...
Latest issue: gotta pay rent and my phone bill on the 5th, but only enough money to cover on... Need to scrounge up $150 or so before Tuesday ($10-$20 more if after Friday because some other things are hitting) or they're going to put restrictions on our phones (yes it's alot, it's 3 phone lines + 4 device payments). And it's not that I don't really have the money... I just have the money 3 days later...
The Mouse that has become public is not the Mouse we have all seen in our childhoods... instead it is the original Mouse from the late 20's. My family has a Mickey Mouse from this time period set in ceramic.
Differences... his pants are yellow, not red. His face is not as rounded but has more of a pointed (mousey shape). Pacman eyes! Most of the cartoons and drawings from this period were in B/W... not color.
Sadly my sis has the ceramic Mickey so I do not have a pic of him tonight.
@R. Nicole interestingly enough it's nowhere near as precise as that.
The remaining depictions of Mickey under copyright only hold copyright on significant changes.
In all honesty most of what defines Mickey is available for use, outside of outfits (ie. Fantasia Mickey is a very distinct look) and specific performances there hasn't been significant change in the character model (though be mindful that with broken legal systems, especially in the US, you don't actually have to do anything wrong for Disney to sue you and once they do you probably can't afford to prove your case...)
Hence why as a crochet amiguri artist I will likely never use a "Mickey" anything. lol
I figured it was solely the 1920xs version... odd they are only using his specific costumes and depictions in certain shows instead of just allowing the early mouse version. I figured they would hold onto that far more closely.
Interesting. I still am not gonna try it, I have no money for that kind of lawsuit! lol Be well.
I think I feel confident enough that people may actually read this now:
First of all is to throw out just about everything you've seen. Extremely few things are even mostly accurate, and the few I've seen of those bury the facts deep under fearmongering...
Public domain means you can use that version however you like... so long as you're not violating some other law (such as trademark) in the process. Copyright no longer applies and it's much the same as the works of Shakespeare, or the Brothers Grimm (which notably Disney used to build much of it's empire...)
Since Public Domain is as simple as it can get, that part is fairly clean and hard to distort... Trademark on the other hand goes way over many peoples' heads.
First, basic idea of trademark: it's specifically narrow in scope, does not prohibit others from using the trademarked property in general, only prohibits it's use in ways that would confuse people or would dilute the trademark.
Simply put, if a reasonable person would get confused looking at that usage of Mickey and could think it was something official from Disney... then it's a violation of their trademark.
Notably the trademark they have applies to the name Mickey Mouse (and names have no copyright) as well as the depiction of Mickey Mouse (in all versions, both copyrighted and public domain).
The reality is there's only really two things you can't do: * Use Mickey in any way that's not clearly separate from Disney (and including things like a big bold "Unofficial" or "Not Licensed By Disney" or similar does cover that, just so long as they're not hidden). * Use Mickey or a mouse reasonably confused for Mickey in your branding (this constitutes dilution, which means while people may not be confused it does make it so Mickey stops being associated with Disney)
Notable odd details not usually covered: * If you make a significantly different version based on this version. (For instance if you were to re-animate Steamboat Willie with entirely new art.) You own the copyright on that version, though your copyright only extends so far as the significant contributions you've made or the exact depiction (ie. if someone tries to sell your rendition of Mickey without significant changes to it... ie. you can't grab someone's fan art and sell it, but you can make your own similar fan art and sell that) * This actually applies to Disney's own copyright on Mickey as well, all later versions retain only the copyright on their significant contributions. For instance depicting Mickey in color is a grey area (pun intended), but precident says it is allowable as "adding color" is not considered to be a meaningful contribution to the work. (The Fantasia Mickey of course is a prime example of a meaningful contribution as that depiction is very distinctive).
I think I feel confident enough that people may actually read this now:
First of all is to throw out just about everything you've seen. Extremely few things are even mostly accurate, and the few I've seen of those bury the facts deep under fearmongering...
Public domain means you can use that version however you like... so long as you're not violating some other law (such as trademark) in the process. Copyright no longer applies and it's much the same as the works of Shakespeare, or the Brothers Grimm (which notably Disney used to build much of it's empire...)
Since Public Domain is as simple as it can get, that part is fairly clean and hard to distort... Trademark on the other hand goes way over many peoples' heads.
First, basic idea of trademark: it's specifically narrow in scope, does not prohibit others from using the trademarked property in general, only prohibits it's use in ways that would confuse people or would dilute the trademark.
Simply put, if a reasonable person would get confused looking at that usage of Mickey and could think it was something official from Disney... then it's a violation of their trademark.
Notably the trademark they have applies to the name Mickey Mouse (and names have no copyright) as well as the depiction of Mickey Mouse (in all versions, both copyrighted and public domain).
The reality is there's only really two things you can't do: * Use Mickey in any way that's not clearly separate from Disney (and including things like a big bold "Unofficial" or "Not Licensed By Disney" or similar does cover that, just so long as they're not hidden). * Use Mickey or a mouse reasonably confused for Mickey in your branding (this constitutes dilution, which means while people may not be confused it does make it so Mickey stops being associated with Disney)
Notable odd details not usually covered: * If you make a significantly different version based on this version. (For instance if you were to re-animate Steamboat Willie with entirely new art.) You own the copyright on that version, though your copyright only extends so far as the significant contributions you've made or the exact depiction (ie. if someone tries to sell your rendition of Mickey without significant changes to it... ie. you can't grab someone's fan art and sell it, but you can make your own similar fan art and sell that) * This actually applies to Disney's own copyright on Mickey as well, all later versions retain only the copyright on their significant contributions. For instance depicting Mickey in color is a grey area (pun intended), but precident says it is allowable as "adding color" is not considered to be a meaningful contribution to the work. (The Fantasia Mickey of course is a prime example of a meaningful contribution as that depiction is very distinctive).
Ugh... I feel the dire urge to rant on topics that sadly I'd be lucky if 5 people even would read them, and I'm fighting emotional and physical exhaustion before I even start...
I'm so tired of people gaslighting left and right online... not remotely willing to learn basic details and instead repeating something that's already spent 12 rounds in a game of telephone... and that non-sense spreading like wildfire while basic fucking facts get ignored...
the year is 2024. A bunch of music has fallen out of copyright, but you can’t actually use it because none of the automated enforcement systems know that
In Proclamation 10467 of October 6, 2022 (Granting Pardon for the Offense of Simple Possession of Marijuana), I exercised my authority under the Constitution to pardon individuals who committed or were convicted of the offense of simple possessi…
I’m still reeling from this.
As evidenced by these geniuses.
Stephan Schwab
Unknown parent • • •@m @readbeanicecream That is very nice to know and should be made public knowledge. Actually a LOT more education about the visibility settings should happen.
Far too many people "join an app" because they don't understand much.
readbeanicecream
in reply to Stephan Schwab • • •