How to be a good fediverse citizen

Yesterday, the fediverse celebrated a victory against a head technology executive working on an “AI-powered social network” who decided to “ingested about 1,120,000 posts from Mastodon”.

Sean Tilley of We Distribute covered the full story, but the gist of it is that a company with an alternative take on social media without likes and followers that just raised $2 millions wanted to join the fediverse by, in the technical terms, adding official ActivityPub support, much like Meta is doing with Threads.

Now, typically when you create a new fediverse server, the posts start to slowly roll in as it connects to other servers in the network. The folks at the company wanted to get a bit of a head start and pull in posts that have been published in the past via Mastodon’s public API. That goes against the norms and expectations of how fediverse servers behave. Worse, the way the posts and profiles were imported made them hard to distinguish from original content on the site.

So people of the fediverse spoke up, the posts and profiles were removed, apologies were made, all is good now. That is, until this happens again.

You see, we have a bit of a history in the fediverse of fighting against tech folks who look at fediverse as some sort of an “untapped natural resource”. @noracodes sums this up wonderfully.

In this case, it’s pretty easy to see the difference between setting up a regular fediverse server, and wait for it to fill up with posts over time, and trying to “ingest content” to make your own social media site feel more alive and active.

But what about a recent case of a developer who built a “bridge” that allows two disparate social media platforms, Bluesky and the fediverse, to communicate, and that “sparked a debate”?

This is clearly different from the previous scenario, here the so-called bridge acts more passively as it lets people from one network discover accounts and posts from the other. So what was the problem there?

To understand that, you’d need to know a bit about the history of how the fediverse was started, as an alternative to corporate social media, where those who faced the most attacks and harassment found a safe space.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see how a social media site that’s so closely associated with Twitter through the involvement of that company’s CEO, and that people have deliberately avoided to join, suddenly has direct access to you through a tool that while may be useful to some, ultimately benefits a company that refused to spend their own time and resources on joining the fediverse themselves.

And yes, there is the aforementioned Threads, which on a quick glance is trying to do things the right way. They are implementing ActivityPub, and they are asking their users to opt-in to have their account interact with the fediverse. So what’s up with this “anti-meta fedipact”? Erin Kissane has an incredibly well-written, in-depth article that will help you untangle this, but in short, the problem is Meta (or formerly Facebook) itself.

And if you’re coming to a conclusion that fediverse is just too antagonistic to any corporate presence, well, have a look at the results of these two polls.

Maybe you argue that if something is public, it’s there to be taken. Consider, however, that if you run a website that’s publicly accessible on the internet, you still have tools available to you, such as robots.txt, which many use to opt out of their content being used for training AI, or banning or allowing specific IP addresses to access your site. You don’t have such options for your social media profile. Also, there is no way to opt out of the public RSS feeds that Mastodon generates.

So what do you make of all this? What are the lessons learned, what are the rules you should follow as a developer or tech executive interested in connecting your work or your product to the fediverse?

There are millions of people in the fediverse, across a few tens of thousands of servers, each hosting a different community, with different rules, different attitudes towards the corporate world, privacy, and understanding of what the fediverse actually is. Some of us think more in terms of the technical implementation, some go more by a vibe.

Yes, the fediverse is certainly more left-leaning, privacy-conscious, and consent-oriented, but we are also very diverse, and certainly contain multitudes.

So if you truly want to be a good fediverse citizen, and are looking for a simple set of rules, best place to start is to join the fediverse and get to know us.

Also, consent. Definitely ask for consent.

Image credit: opendoodles.com