Hey Rabble, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

So, yeah, you hit the nail on the head: the primary problem, first and foremost, was a general lack of communication. A criticism that I myself hold is that we still rely on unspoken knowledge that lives in the heads of a few people. As I stated in some of my other articles, a big problem is the disconnect between community principles and expectations, and technical specifications. I’ll readily admit that people crossing their arms and saying “well, you should have known!” about some elusive subject is an objectively bad experience. An idea that I keep coming back to involves the possibility of launching a portal for prospective Fediverse developers to not only find the ActivityPub protocol and example code, but also explain some of the norms and expectations within the Fediverse, and some of the protocol extensions to ActivityPub that exist today.

The main problem with this situation, in my opinion, is that Maven neglected to reach out to the community first, and study how the network operated, what the norms were, and how good stewards did things. This is not to say that they had to bend over backwards or anything, but: if you’re going to do something like ingest a million posts…maybe make yourself known beforehand, and explain what it is you’re doing. I can’t guarantee that there won’t be pushback, but it would’ve cemented at least a little bit of goodwill.

Maven’s ActivityPub implementation was super janky, and the appearance of remote content that did not look or act like remote content led to a lot of confusion. The key concern about Maven isn’t just that they did all of this, ran a huge amount of data into their own platform, analyzed AI, and added metadata to posts that look like they came from Maven. The bigger concern is that, in addition to doing it without asking if anybody was cool with it, there’s a non-zero possibility that some of whatever was imported ended up in the training data that the AI uses for its algorithms. In practice, this isn’t a huge issue…but, when it comes to consent and varying perspectives on copyright, it’s kind of fucked up.

As for Mastodon’s private messaging system: yeah, I hear you loud and clear. It sucks. I look forward to the day that something better comes along, and I’m hopeful about Evan Prodromou’s work with bringing E2EE to ActivityPub DMs. Sometimes, it’s situations like this that are necessary for us to realize how crappy some of our tech is, and that now is the time to iterate on something better.

I’ll conclude by stating that I agree with you on all points about the underlying problems, and I think surfacing knowledge resources that are easy to access, and easy to understand, are vital. I do think that the Fediverse’s negative reaction is largely valid in this situation, but it may have more to do with the alignment of user consent and community biases against AI and Silicon Valley than almost anything else. Regardless, this is a situation where we actually have to put our money where our mouth is, and do something, rather than have a cycle that repeats over and over again.