mccJun 19

🧵 So to recap something that happened yesterday, as I see it:

Yesterday Mastodon gGmbH sent out an email to mastodon.social and .online users announcing a new TOS. The TOS would take effect July 1, and would ship in the next version of the Mastodon server software as a suggested "template" TOS instances could adopt.

This TOS had multiple problems, and several people said so loudly. This morning, Mastodon announced they're backing off and taking additional legal advice:

https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821

Show threadmccJun 19

The problems I saw raised were:

Raised by me: The new intellectual property clause was permanent/irrevokable; Mastodon retained rights to your posts even after they were deleted.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

Raised by Cory Doctorow: The new TOS forced users to give up the right to sue in court, & forced use of arbitration instead. 😬
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114706885462760813

Raised by Sarah Jamie Lewis and others: It was ambiguous if *other federated servers* counted as "users" under the TOS.
https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114699476927561899

New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content · Issue #35086 · mastodon/mastodon

Summary Since it first opened, mastodon.social has operated without any sort of explicit IP grant from the users to the service, which is unusual for a social networking service. Today Mastodon ann...

GitHub
Show threadmccJun 19
When they announced this, Mastodon didn't seem to realize their new terms would be controversial. They also seemed to believe there had been adequate community review time because a version of the TOS had been posted in their git repo for a year. I raise my eyebrow at both these things (didn't think arbitration would be controversial, really?)… but Mastodon *is* a nonprofit that was working with a pro-bono lawyer, and their rapid backoff once the community started engaging shows good faith.
Show threadmccJun 19

This is not over. Mastodon is, I hope? getting better legal advice now— I know Doctorow reached out offering to get the EFF to help— and that will probably by itself fix the ambiguity about who is a "user", and the ambiguity some people complained about whether German or US law was controlling.

However, the new TOS is still coming, and TOSes by nature balance the admins' and the user's interests, so that balance will need to be negotiated. Arbitration, for example, very well might come back.

Show threadmccJun 19
The big problem, as I see it, is that Mastodon is now opening the pandora's box of making the content licensing situation of the Fediverse explicit, which in a federated environment will be *very* hard to do without crushing someone's toes, somewhere. (Personally, I really *liked* that all this time the licensing situation of Mastodon has been implicit; I was happy just letting laches and deletion notices do all the work. But I understand if Mastodon gGmbH doesn't feel they can do that forever.)
Show threadmccJun 19
What we need, for this to work out better next time, is actual community engagement in the TOS process. (This is especially the case if Mastodon gGmbH intends the TOS to be used not just by them but by all the downstream users of their software!) We need more than two weeks notice (or rather, notices posted somewhere the user community will see it). Again, I think Mastodon gGmbH is showing good faith in how they're engaging with the community now, so we'll see what happens.
Show threadmccJun 19
Postscript: Cripes, the 500 character limit really starts to chafe for this kind of writing. Maybe I'll stand up that GtS server after all lol
Show threadMark PriorJun 20
@mcc I wish there was a platform that didn't think that implementing a feature to randomise nodeinfo usage stats was a good idea.
Show threadmccJun 20
@markrprior What does this mean?
Show threadMark PriorJun 20
@mcc if you use the nodeinfo api to query a gotosocial instance for information you might get random users and posts counts because there is a configuration option called "fiddle" that rather than return valid numbers, 0 or null will generate some garbage. It's claimed this is a reaction to bots that don't obey their robots file (which defaults to disallow) but they don't check that the user hasn't changed the robots file.
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 20
@markrprior @mcc more specifically, it was in reaction to a specific database that, for ideological reasons, openly sought to gather aggregate user data across the fediverse, including from sites that attempted to prevent such use
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 20
@markrprior @mcc note that the fiddle option is fully under the control of the instance admin
Show threadIrenes (many)
@markrprior @mcc the guy running the database responded by being, essentially, fine then we just won't count GTS data, but he tried pretty hard to make that sound as if it was punishing GTS in some way instead of exactly what everyone asked him to do in the first place
Jun 20 at 4:07amWeb
Show threadMark PriorJun 20
@ireneista @mcc really depends on whether you want the instance to be discoverable or not which I assume was their original motivation.