Fediverse

Mastodon comms person here. We're discussing how we go forward. The questions being asked are all absolutely reasonable, and we want to do what we can to improve the terms (that we do need to have in place) taking into account the feedback and offers of support.

Thank you very much for the context, that makes a lot of sense and I'm glad this info can be part of the discussion here :)

Thanks for this extra context.

EFF's lawyers don't have the legal expertise to help a company based in Germany.

I'm guessing lawyers drew it up as a standard tos and they threw it over the fence tbh

And does this just mean youn’t sue them?

First, they make the proceedings private: there’s no public record of the proceedings or verdict, and even if you win there’s no precedent that others can use. The for-profit nature of the arbitrator (much or even most of whose business comes from corporate clients) represents a conflict of interest.

Second, they isolate the plaintiff: you can’t sue as part of a class action, so no lawyer can represent a group of similarly wronged people in exchange for a percentage of any verdict. This means you have to pay for your own lawyer, which many people can’t afford to do and even if you can it may not be worth it if the damage is small enough.

Together, these issues massively favor business and employers that include these clauses in contracts, as reflected in both win rates for corporations as well the number of cases brought against them versus in open court.

But they can stack the deck heavily in their favor, and you don't have the same legal protections anymore. Who arbitrates Where? When?

No. In fact, ActivityPub has no general mechanism for even knowing where content has been distributed to. So when you ask your instance to delete something, it can't actually know what other instances to ask to delete the mirrored content.

Mastodon tries its best by sending deletion requests to all known instances, in the hope that that will reach all instances that have fetched the content. But in fact, instances that are unknown to your own instance could have the content as well, though this is probably a very rare occurrence.

Bottom line: Don't write anything on the internet that you don't want publicly displayed. Anyone can save it and then you can't force them to delete it. That applies to the entire internet. It also applies to the fediverse.

There is no legal precedent, but most likely you would only have to prove deletion on your own server.

And/or (i suspect this is more likely) it will threaten to do so, and mastodon.social/.online will update their TOS to fix the problem identified in the bug report. Either way it's a win for federation, in that migration is relatively painless for the user..

I'm also really appreciating the speed and depth of the response to this from the community (e.g. all the comments on the bug report). It's cool to see!

edit: Also, Eugene's response is reasonable and levelheaded - seems like there will be some TOS improvements eventually.

Yeah, I don't like when corporations put stuff like that into their ToS, but at the same time, I 100% understand why every open-source license under the sun has it. You're giving it away for free, so you don't want people to sue for more than you're providing for free.

Mastodon.social is currently very much in the latter camp of giving things away for free. I also understand that a service is yet another beast than a piece of software, since they hold your personal data and may leak/sell it. But yeah, at this point in time, I wouldn't want someone to be able to sue Mastodon.social out of existence. I guess, it depends a lot on how it's formulated in the end...