Fediverse

This may be a dumb question.

Why are we wasting time and money fighting over a legal clause in a piece of free and open source software? Can someone explain why someone would need to sue mastodon? I dont understand what rights people feel they need to demand from mastodon because you always have the option to use it how you choose.

Its expensive to draft and consult lawyers even when its pro bono. It expends time from mastodon project and the lawyers and there is only a finite amount of pro bono work the lawyers are willing to give.

Could someone explain why binding arbitration clauses are horrible? My understanding is that it keeps costs low on both sides as taking things to actual court can get expensive.

Best part about the federation is that you can leave

Update: it seems, they're taking the feedback seriously.

[email protected] - We've heard your feedback on the Terms of Service updates for mastodon.social and mastodon.online,  and we're pausing the implementation date (previously announced to users via email as 1st July 2025) so we can take further advice and make improvements.

It may take us a moment to consult with the right people, so please bear with us while we do so. As always, we appreciate your patience and support.

https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821

I know that avatar cause that user works on Analogue Pocket FPGA cores.

Very resonable (imo) response from Gargron (lead developer of Mastodon):

I’ve forwarded your question to our legal help and will provide an answer as soon as they give it to me. What you must understand is that our lawyers don’t have experience with federated platforms, and we don’t have experience with law, so we meet somewhere in the middle. Meta presumably has an in-house legal team that can really embed themselves in the problem area; our lawyers are external and pro-bono and rely on us to correctly explain the requirements and community feedback. The draft has been around for something like a year and none of the community members pointed out this issue until now. I’ll add one thing:

"My assumption, {.. shortened for brevity ..} is that when you post content it gets mirrored elsewhere, and this continues until a deletion notice is federated. So I'd assume if an instance somewhere mirrors my content they can't get in trouble for it, and I'd also assume that if there is a deletion or maybe a block and a reasonable interpretation of the protocol would say that the content should be removed, I could send them a takedown and at that point they'd have to honor it."

The goal of the terms is to make assumptions like this explicit, because assumptions are risky both sides. Just because luckily there were no frivolous lawsuits around this so far doesn’t mean there isn’t a risk of one.

Cory has had a much more calm response on a fediverse post, offering to reach out to the EFF's lawyers for assistance in drafting a better ToS for Mastodon, and other experienced lawyers have offered help also. Amongst the usual negativity from some users.

I'll be keeping my eye on the outcome but so far it looks positive.

I kinda see that they want to cover their asses a bit, but arbitration waivers as a whole should never be legal to begin with.

One should always be able to exercise their legal rights.

This binding arbitration bullshit is unenforceable in Germany anyways for end users

I'm wondering if they used ChatGPT to crank this bullshit out