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

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

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

With respect to your thoughts: just because the (corporate) internet works this way now, doesn’t mean it should. I don’t want people scraping my posts. I find it creepy. The fediverse (some parts of it, at least) was, for many people and for a long time, a place they could go to connect with people without needing to argue about the legal definition of consent. The fact that people can technically get away with scraping my posts isn’t permission to do so. And, obviously, just turning off your computer isn’t an option, because, at least in the global north-west, you need to have an online presence to be involved in society.

Nobody is claiming that the web is a place for healthy relationships with corporations. It isn’t. The web is a place corporations constructed to make more money. This is about working together to build something better.

I’m happy that you’re comfortable with this model, but I don’t want people who operate like this to intrude on the spaces we’re building to get away from it. It’s just like, a courtesy thing. Will there need to be protocol changes to technologically force people not to do this? Probably. Should there have to be? I really wish I could say there didn’t need to be.

It physically hurts to know that consent it such a controversial topic in tech circles, and it breaks my heart to hear people argue we give consent to invasive data practices just by existing on the internet. I’ve spent my entire life being taught by technology educators that I should expect everything I post online to be publicly accessible forever, and nobody every stopped to ask why.

There’s at least one not cloudflare company doing this, though I think I forget their name. It might be yunohost.org, they definitely do provide mastodon hosting, but there might have been one that focused more specifically on hosting fediverse instances. I’ve heard testimonials for them saying they take the sysadmin work out of running instances, but I suspect most of these people already have some technical background so it’s hard to say how helpful it really is.

I don’t think it’s really that important to have a highly streamlined deployment process, mostly because I don’t really see the value in single-user or micro instances, but that’s a matter of preference

Why would you ban yourself from interacting with someone who voluntarily chooses provider X or Y or Z for anything?

Because I’m petty

Half the fediverse already runs on servers provided by only 3 companies

I also don’t know those three companies off the top of my head, and while I definitely believe you, I can’t imagine they are anywhere near as big as Cloudflare. If you’re talking about cloud service providers, I’d also consider running an instance that ignores say, AWS instances, but I think that’s a bit different since they don’t specifically provide “activitypub” services afaik. With Cloudflare, it’s much more explicit

I’m not a fediverse admin, but I like to think that if I was I would find a way to automatically defederate with these cloudflare instances. Open source code doesn’t mean anything if it can only run on proprietary infrastructure.

More abstractly, I don’t feel like there’s inherently anything wrong with the sort of thing, but the fact that Cloudflare Corporation in particular is doing this rubs me the wrong way

I genuinely never thought I’d see the day that Google (at least, some facet of it?) would find itself in the fediverse.

I remember reading a few days ago about how some instances were defederating with others who were hosting car companies. I wonder how long it’ll take people to do that with tech companies as well. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about it but I definitely don’t think I’d want to share an instance with Google. If we were to imagine a world in which Google decided to go all in and set up a bigger social operation on Mastodon.social, how long would it take them to start influencing the instance’s politics? What would the ramifications of that be for my instance that federates with Mastodon.social, if any?

It’s remarkable too, considering that these people could easily, say, link to their profile from whatever website they get published on and immediately establish trust that way. Most people don’t have that influence. Instead, they’re creating a new, larger, more centralized system on top of it to do, what exactly?

It’s the fediverse after all so they can do whatever they want, but it feels like a waste of effort

Yeah, it’s entirely a philosophical problem, and one that I’m mostly at peace with, so long as the fediverse remains somewhat decentralized. The cynic in me wonders if it’s only a matter of time before the larger instances make a substantial break in federation and mostly go off on their own, but I suppose that wouldn’t affect the rest of the fediverse. It’d just affect our larger goal of getting more people into a decentralized network.

What do you think of @[email protected] 's idea of allowing user-configurable algorithms? It sounds like it might be difficult to implement well but that could be a more individual approach, and it’d help to deal with people exploiting the algorithm. The biggest issue I see with it is that it could just end up streamlining the existing problem of algorithmically generated echo chambers. I can’t imagine a single algorithm that generates timelines for all user that wouldn’t be exploitable, though maybe democratic control of how it works would compensate for that.