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.

[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 38 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I remember some of these discussions around the time of the Twitter and Reddit exodii and the mindset of many of these folks was essentially that they'd used this social media protocol to create a nice, quiet safe space for like-minded tech-savvy queer leftists, and felt that the explosion in interest threatened to expose their posts to people outside of the community that they had come to know and trust -- which is a point of view I can understand, but as a counterargument, you're on a public social media platform, and specifically one that is designed to spread content broadly and indiscriminately to servers outside of your control. If you wanted to keep things out of the view of the larger Internet there were other, better solutions for a community platform that you probably should have picked instead.

[–] dameoutlaw@lemmy.ml 3 points 8 months ago

That’s where my frustrations with “consent fedi” come into play. They want to force people to comply with their views. They could go into allow list federation and connect with those that views thing similarly yet they don’t.

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