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Letting you connect to other people you care about is not unethical or immoral.
You have a lot of options for whether you want to participate in the BS bridge -- either by managing your follows directly, by blocking users from that domain, or by blocking the whole domain.
This is how federation works. You have absolute control over who you interact with.
This is how Federation worksTalking like this is some kind of blinding revelation is kinda ignoring the actual issues here? They're around Consent, which he's Opted to ignore (Direct statement from him "but no-one will use it if they have to Opt-in"),
Also around the fact this is backdoor data scraping. He's using the Google Cloud api for it, which is an enormous red flag by itself. but worse, Ryan himself is from a background of Selling data professionally which, if it doesn't provide a direct explanation for his actions here certainly is suggestive as to his approach. Have you seen how to Opt-out? Message him directly or raise a ticket on his Github? I mean...WTF.
Federation is great. But it must be approached and handled maturely and responsibly. Switching on an opt-out fire-hose to a service, owned by another billionaire, that hasn't even proven how it will moderate itself in an invite-less world is neither of those things, and is just inviting harm to users that could be avoided simply by taking the precaution of saying "No, do better".
Bridges simply connect two disjoint land masses; it's up to people to decide if they want to cross.
The existence of bridges don't refute the control that people already have.
@evan @ben One consideration is that maybe if the Bluesky bridge were opt-in, some servers currently moving to block it would instead leave it be, and that would make it more available / useful to their users.
That said, people may have been unnecessarily nasty about it without fully understanding the situation. I personally found the bridge less objectionable after research, even though I have very negative feelings about Bluesky. Ryan seems thoughtful: https://snarfed.org/2024-02-13_52223
@skyfaller @ben I think you might be overestimating how much I'd like to discuss the Bluesky bridge.
@evan Gotta admit, Galactic Man's ( @R0B0_G0D) response gave me pause. I didn't realize he was using the Google Cloud API.
In principle, I agree with you. But then, I left friends on Meta platforms, etc. If they're convenience compromises my unwillingness to be scraped...
It's not as if the bridge is intuitive anyway. I tried it.