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It's not completely clear to me how various zones of the Fediverse distinguish "scraping" from "non-Mastodon ActivityPub services functioning according to spec in ways I didn't expect."
Given how frequently protocol behaviors act as ethical markers ("if you *can* do it, it's fine") this seems like a fruitful territory to try to map…
(I say this as someone who has myself been surprised more than once by AP implementations that put Fedi posts into unfamiliar-to-me contexts, don't eat me.)
@kissane Given that the entire protocol copies things from server to server on purpose, the periodic freakouts about new services doing exactly that while others are applauded for "implementing the protocol" (which copies things by default) is so mystifying to me.
@kissane (I know, humans are complicated and trust is hard in distributed systems, etc.)
@fraying I think whenever I get confused by this stuff I get *really interested* because it's usually a sign that there are cultural norms being obscured by technical capacities. And of course I love that shit.
@kissane it definitely all means … something.
@fraying @kissane Something I brought up a few times today is this idea of having a robots.txt file for each of our social media profiles.
Much like a website that gets to decide who can access its publicly available content, some people would also like to exercise this level of control.
EDIT: "gets to decide"
Yes, well, robots.txt isn't binding, but I hope I made my point.
@fraying I'd say the subtle distinction here is that the protocol delivers things from server to server on purpose. The push-based delivery is an intentional act, one server POSTing messages to the inbox of another. That's the heart of the protocol that differentiates it from something like RSS.
There is of course an outbox in the AP spec, and servers like Mastodon also provide RSS representations. I don't think those are generally intended by server admins as ingest sources for third-party indexing & republishing, though.
Like, sure, you can technically do it because most Mastodon instances don't have authorized fetch enabled, but it's often regarded as impolite to say the least
I think one big difference is that the intrinsic permission in AP is that I want people who follow me to be able to read and react to what I make. That's the bargain I make when I post on an AP-enabled service; it works like a social network.
We all make concessions for bulk redistribution with tools like relays because they help connect people together. They extend sociality.
If that data is bulk extracted without providing value, that's a problem.
I've also been wondering about how cultural norms around RSS interact with support for RSS on various Fedi platforms. Normally RSS is for public blogs, so no big deal, right? But I know I used to use a desktop RSS client to view locked Livejournal posts so where does it leave us if someone takes an RSS feed from a nominally non-federated platform, perhaps with authentication, and views it on a Fedi server?