🚨 OK, social.lol folks: this is important. I need your input.
Micro.blog’s strange ActivityPub implementation has an unfortunate and creepy side-effect. They ingest federated posts from across the social web, but their users are then able to reply to those posts in such a way that those replies are not federated back at all. The original author has no idea that there even was a reply. But those replies are fully present within the Micro.blog ecosystem, where they can be read and even spark additional discussion—though entirely excluding the people who were meant to see them. The replies even include the tagged author, and anyone looking at them would think the author could see the reply and was maybe even notified about it.
The end result is creepy in all kinds of ways. Whether this happens with any given reply ultimately comes down to the specific federation preferences of individual Micro.blog users, and there is no way to tell if any given reply to a federated post is itself federated or not. It’ll either be visible outside of Micro.blog or it won’t. It’s equally opaque to Micro.blog users, who can see a reply and assume that the person is ignoring it, when in fact they could never see it in the first place.
One of our members pointed out that there is a very real and serious issue of consent with this approach. We post things to the fediverse to engage socially, but many of us would not consent to another fediverse instance consuming our content in a way that allows people to *literally reply to us* without us ever seeing the replies or ensuing discussions. That Manton would even allow this kind of setup is baffling, given his stance on quote-tweets. This is far worse than quote-tweeting, though, because these are downright deceptive replies. They look real but simply aren’t.
I'm not aware of any other ActivityPub implementations that have this issue, or that knowingly enable users to have one-sided conversations like this. And I think it makes sense that no responsible implementation would allow this, because it’s a terrible idea and totally against the spirit of federation.
So, the question for social.lol users is: is anyone interested in having a discussion related to defederating from Micro.blog? To be clear, everyone can already individually block Micro.blog at the domain level and prevent them from ingesting your content. From a technical standpoint, everyone can protect themselves against this bad behavior pretty easily. The broader point is that no one should have to do that; responsible fediverse implementations should respect the fundamental idea that replying and tagging should always behave as expected.
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