Somebody put up a site saying
It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.
There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content “without consent”. Trouble is, there’s no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.
If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I…
- Put it on a website visible to the public?
- Send it to other peoples’ computers to do the same with?
- Search for it later?
- Display it next to advertisements?
- Display it on a service I charge people a fee to use?
- Keep it after your computer asks mine to delete it?
Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn’t transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren’t even aware of Mastodon’s new opt-in/out search features?
Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.
