I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.
I’m inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it’s impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.
So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.
TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.
Mathematically right, the best kind of right.
Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.
Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.
I assume most licenses out there are irrevocable? They’re certainly a feature of copyleft licenses.
If someone posts copyrighted material they were not allowed to share then 3rd party servers still need to deal with DMCA takedown requests and false reports, regardless of TOS. An explicit license might help but by how much? It may also push some users away.
They’ve already delayed its deployment to reconsider the feedback. - https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821
Cool! Didn’t know that. Thank you for the info
This only affects mastodon.social IIRC
I think I read somewhere that this would be the default for new instances if they don’t have one of their own. On an existing instance, the server admin would have to remove the existing license which would then load this license. So this could affect more than just mastodon.social.
That being said, since this was brought up, it has been put on pause while it is reevaluated
bit late m8
I know, I saw this post. Just decided to post in this community too.
