Comment on Is the Fediverse stalling?
Skavau@piefed.social 1 month agoWell currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.
For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?
I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.
rglullis@communick.news 1 month ago
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.
Skavau@piefed.social 1 month ago
I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.
But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.
If did posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.
rglullis@communick.news 1 month ago
You see, this is why it’s important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of “Reddit, but federated”.
In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that “retweets” a message. You may not even have realized, but it’s quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.
What I just described to you is this “communities following communities” idea. It’s not about “giving the impression” of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.
Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It’s Piefed’s implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a “reposting actor”. Just like the “private voting” feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it’s bad for the overall Fediverse.