It’s legal to scrape websites and this is doing it in a way that activity pub is designed to support. You can’t be mad another instance is reading your data, that’s what the fediverse is.

I think people will end up finding bridgy annoying frankly, but it seems like a useful tool that takes federated content and lets websites build things that used to be only available by adding Facebook pixel and Twitter links to your site.

[–] nonphotoblue@sh.itjust.works 9 points 9 months ago (13 children)

The other thing, that I see even more people upset about, is that the bridge requires you to Opt-Out, rather than Opt-In for being included.

It’s totally fine if you want to be included, especially if you have friends on BlueSky. But, it’s just a shitty practice that is all too prevalent in new tech. AI companies are doing the same thing - if you’re an artist, you’re supposed to magically know all of these new, obscure AI startups and somehow find how to opt-out of being included in their training data set. It’s ridiculous.

Same concept here, I would have had no idea this was a thing, if not for people speaking up about it. Some people make a conscious choice to join Fediverse communities because they want nothing to do with big tech and want more control of their data and privacy and who has access to it. Why is such a big deal to respect that?

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The bridge is nothing more than another Activitypub instance. You can block it in the same ways that you can block existing Mastodon or Lemmy instances. If users want to opt in to federate with it, they should also have to opt in manually to federate with every single Lemmy instance.

[–] nonphotoblue@sh.itjust.works -3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Saying that the bridge is nothing more than another ActivityPub instance is very disingenuous.

While it may be built upon the ActivityPub protocol, but its main purpose is to act as a bridge to non-federated platforms, which is unique to that instance. When signing up for a fediverse instance, it should be known to the user that their data will be shared within the fediverse network. But, no permission is given to share on any platforms outside the fediverse network, using non-ActivityPub protocols.

So, no, opt-in should not be necessary for all instances, but in the case of the bridge, it is, because it’s enabling a feature that users haven’t explicitly agreed too and isn’t a core part of the ActivityPub protocol. And since the bridge is being made open-source, should users also be expected to track down any other instances that pick up and use it and manually block and opt-out of those?

[–] dameoutlaw@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago

This asks zero sense as there’s n disclosure on hardly any instance. Also, there’s several non ActivityPub protocols and bridges that have long since been used and peoples content shared

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