Breve

I know someone who works in emergency services who said that people in those professions are actually afraid of seeking any type of mental health support because if their employers were to find out, they could be put on administrative duties, unpaid leave, or outright fired for being mentally unfit. The problem is systemic.

Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.

For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.

How is reposting content to another social media platform with over a million users "personal consumption"?

Okay, well try this one:

Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your "publicly available" argument, right?

Allowing public broadcast once doesn't void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.

Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷

So if Spiderman got his powers from being bit by a radioactive spider... 🤔

Fair, though this is also where the double-edge sword of discoverability steps in too. Many people complain about the lack of it on decentralized systems, but centralized systems have a nice catalog of users for bots to message with little effort.

I'll admit that lack of discoverability isn't a perfect solution since there are other ways for spammers to discover users. E-mail is a great example of a large, long running, decentralized system that has increasingly suffered from spam since its inception due to mass data collection of addresses. However if you're really careful about who you share your address with, it's possible to still avoid most of it. I give out unique e-mail address to companies and spam tends to only come in on a few, often because they were breached or are otherwise "leaky" about their user's data. Dropbox is by far the worst offender.

I've seen pictures of rooms with walls full of Android cell phones on shelves all hooked up by USB for power and remote control. They can load apps, register accounts, and interact with content inside the app while appearing as legitimate mobile users. That's why moves like Reddit restricting API access only hurt legitimate users and lazy bot farms, cause the hardcore bot farms have been using the official app on real phones all along.

I've been using Mastodon and it's a pleasant change of pace. I've heard of some spam happening there but I think responsive admins and the lack of algorithmic feeds really reduces their reach.

Oh actually it's worse than that. There are online companies that offer online SMS services that can receive messages from real phone numbers by essentially telling your carrier you want text messages forwarded to them. Obviously they usually make you prove that you own the number before requesting forwarding, but there's ways around that. I've known several people who've had their online accounts broken in to because someone hijacked their phone number's SMS in order to perform password resets or bypass 2FA.

While some may see this as good for Bluesky, I bet this is the floodgates opening to bots and algorithmically boosted harmful content. Good luck everyone on there!