I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the “Mah privacy” crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.
I hated the backlash the bridgy dev received. His project was genuinely useful, helped to solve one of people’s most common criticisms of the fediverse. And after he was browbeat into giving it up, everything still got hoovered up by bots and fed into AI models anyway.
The Bridgy Fed dev didn’t get browbeaten into anything, he thinks the opt-in approach is better (and I agree). And he’s also said the backlash was probably deserved.
Yeah, the pitchfork crowd manages to shut down everyone who tries to do something genuinely good for the community, while leaving all the bad actors running wild in the background.
I mean, we always knew loud voices in the open source community were toxic as fuck - that’s obvious enough from the Linux mailing list. Giving these people their own social network to ruin was wildly optimistic from the beginning. It’s a wonder it hasn’t gone worse.
It’s amazing how computer nerds posting on the fucking fediverse can be so sceptical of seeing their content leave the platform they’re currently on. Like that’s not the whole goddamn point of posting here in the first place.
Also, Bridgy.fed rules. Anyone out there on Mastodon or Bluesky: Please opt in! :)
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