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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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Looks like I’m joining Mastodon officially.
It's honestly not bad, definitely the most mature fediverse service
It is better than nothing even if it is hard to enforce.
Wait, they changed the TOS on a site to say that you can't scrape it, when the entirety of the site is available without agreeing to the TOS?
Well done Mastodon.social.
Even if it may do much, it's still better than not doing it.
Mastodon dot SOCIAL did, the big public instance. Mastodon the software doesn't have these restrictions.
It wouldn't even make sense for the Mastodon software to have such a restriction... The article title is misleading.
That's a really misleading headline; a Mastodon instance has done this, Mastodon as a whole can't do this because it's free software, it can be used for any purpose.
I'm wondering, is it possible to include that restriction in public license for the software mastodon?
It wouldn't be a free software licence by the FSF definition (rule zero). Of interest the FSF rejects the original JSON licence because it contains the clause “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” Since Mastodon uses AGPL, it wouldn't be compatible.
This is why I hope to see rule zero get shit-canned. It's a naive vestige from a time long before we hit late-stage capitalism. Corporate interests have slithered their way into every facet of our lives and we should be working to make software that we write hostile to their practices as much as we can.
If that means that the organizations that have a stranglehold on Open Source™️ don't like it, so be it. We can follow in the spirit of open source without the naivety or captured interests of organizations that define the arbitrary terms by which we categorize software licenses.
It just means that the decision comes down to the instance owner not the software developer, which I think is right. Everyone should be able to decide what their computer does, that's important to hold on to.
this reminds me of the Hippocratic License, which comes with a bunch of modules restricting the use of software based on ethical considerations (for example, there’s a module forbidding the use by police, and another one forbidding the use by any institution on the BDS list)
i think the FSF, in their eternal and unchallengeable wisdom (/s), also declared that it wasn’t foss
I mean, they're right that it's not FOSS - the F is free as in available to anybody who may wish to use it, which is incompatible with defining who is allowed
This is interesting! I've been exploring this and it seems like a neat little license.
I'm not a lawyer, but one funny edge case I noticed is that the Extractive Industries module seems like it makes it a breach of license for crystal shops to use your software since you're involved in the sale of minerals.
I would tend to agree with FSF that it's not FOSS, though. There are so many restrictions on this license and who can use it, based on fairly arbitrary things like "if CBP claims you're doing forced labor" or "you do business in this specific region". It might be more moral, but it's a different approach than FOSS, which is less restrictive than more and prioritizes "Freedom" above everything else. Maybe it's time for a different approach, though?
cool, didnt know about this nuance. based JSON license by the way.
Just like when mastodon.social condemned Meta for their horrible moderation decisions and inability to act properly in the interest of its users, and said that the instance would be cutting ties/not federating with Threads, they kept on federating like nothing happened.
I don't believe anything coming out of mastodon.social unless I can see action being taken with my own two eyes.
Also, blocking scrapers is very easy, and it has nothing to do with a robots.txt (which they ignore).
and said that the instance would be cutting ties/not federating with Threads,
Can you please show exactly there this was said?
blocking scrapers is very easy
The entirety of the internet disagrees.
How is blocking scrapers easy?
This instance receives 500+ IPs with differing user agents all connecting at once but keeping within rate limits by distribution of bots.
The only way I know it's a scraper is if they do something dumb like using "google.com" as the referrer for every request or by eyeballing the logs and noticing multiple entries from the same /12.
Exactly this, you can only stop scrapers that play by the rules.
Each one of those books powering GPT had like protection on them already.
Yeah this will do absolutely nothing.
I agree, but I'm glad they did it anyway.
Fair, there is no reason not to.
Gives them legal standing against scraping for if it is needed in the future.
It potentially gives them grounds for a lawsuit. Probably not but potentially. There's no reason not to explicitly deny permission. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Why?
I wonder how does that work with federation.
If a second instance does not have that restriction, is there any "legal" effect on the federated content?
This was one of the few ToS updates I was actually glad to read. ToS changes usually mean a company is slowly rephrasing them to fuck us over.
I will create a masto instance where this is mandatory to counter balance
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