A libre networking project that's designed to bridge protocol spaces together announced its progress and intentions, and Mastodon users freaked out.

Bridgy Fed made a splash earlier this week by announcing its latest progress in connecting the Fediverse to Bluesky and Nostr. Sadly, not everyone was welcoming.

  • Corvid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    5 months ago

    Bridgy doesn’t scrape anything. It works the same as any other ActivityPub instance, the only difference is that it converts some JSON from one format to another.

    It also converts edit and deletion events, so in your scenario it would relay that you want your poem or photo deleted.

    This isn’t a web scrapper that reposts content like all the bots reposting Reddit threads to Lemmy. This is a protocol translator between federated networks that speak different languages.

    • Hominine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      Crickets

      Small wonder. A tangent, but I’m also of the opinion that someone shouldn’t put their child’s photo (or any information) on the internet if they don’t want to distribute it in the first place.

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      I found the bridgy website a bit confusing, but people who areupset should read through to get a better idea of what it actually does.

      Initially I thought it was just scraping and reposting too, but I find what the dev is working towards is very much in the spirit of the fediverse.

      • Corvid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Not entirely sure what you mean by that. It deletes posts in the same way that any other ActivityPub server does, by federating the deletion request.

        It’s up to the receiving servers to handle that request and delete the post. You can easily have an ActivityPub native server that doesn’t honor those requests.

      • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
        5·
        5 months ago

        It doesn’t scrape or facilitates scrapping. Your server sends your posts to the bridge and it federates it to other servers. That’s how federation works. If you define that as facilitating scraping, then every instance on the fediverse facilitates scraping.

      • cosmic_slate@dmv.socialEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        You know that it is comically easy to scrape stuff off of the fediverse, right?

        I’d wager the vast majority of instances aren’t utilizing any meaningful rate limits, and even if there are rate limits, just distribute your scraping across several instances.

        Or just set up your own new instance and subscribe to literally everything you can find. You don’t even have to scrape, it gets pushed to you!

        If you are worried about scraping, use Facebook. Facebook has teams of people who combat bot/scraper activity.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          6·
          5 months ago

          The largest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) has 360k MAU. This means that one can crawl all of its activities with less than 5 requests per second, every day.

          Even with rate limits, the Fediverse is still so small that I could crawl the top 10 mastodon instances in less than a day.

          From my desktop PC.

          On my shitty DSL.

          Anyone thinking that bullying one developer into a well-meaning project will be enough to keep their “secret clubs” away from malicious actors are in for a sad realization.