cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17686207
It’s a very long post, but a lot of it is a detailed discussion of terminology in the appendix – no need to read that unless you’re into definitional struggles.
Agreed that Bridgy Fed is opt-in … I see consent as a good thing, but not everybody agrees.
And yeah, Bluesky’s just ike any other instance, you have to trust them with privacy. I think the argument that Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, and Wordress.com-hosted blogs shouldn’t be considered part of the Fediverse is intellectually consistent, I just don’t see a lot of people making that argument. But, “the Fedivese” means different things to different people, the followup post Is Bluesky part of today’s Fediverse? goes into a huge amount of detail on that …
I was referring to Bridgy, not Bluesky, regarding privacy. It acts like a middleman between whatever you’re using and Bluesky. And it isn’t really opt-in in that sense, because the majority of users would not even be aware of this even existing. An opt-in feature would be directly implemented into a platform, like a toggle you could switch within your account settings. Whether that is opt-in or opt-out is personal preference I guess, but with that logic it should be ideally the same for all native instances as well.
Ah okay, I agree that you need to trust Bridgy Fed from a privacy and security perpective. Also agreed that most people don’t know Bridgy Fed exists, and that’s a problem. And yes, it would be better for the platforms to have more support for opt-in federation, but alas Mastodon’s documentation describes allow-list federation as opposed to their mission … I asked Renaud a while ago whether that was likely to change and he said no. So, yeah, it’s certainly far from a perfect solution.
